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No. 1.]

CHRISTIAN JOURNAL,

AND

LITERARY REGISTER.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22, 1817.

THE

CHRISTIAN JOURNAL,

AND

LITERARY REGISTER.

To appear in Numbers, one Number every two Weeks, at one Dollar a Year.

TH

HIS publication will be issued by T. & J. Swords, New-York, under the inspection of the Right Rev. Bishop Hobart.

It shall be devoted to theological and miscel laneous subjects, and particularly to interesting religious and literary intelligence, and biographical and obituary notices.

Besides occasional original matter, it shall contain selections from the various British peviodical works, literary and religions. Arrange. ments have been made with agents in England, to transmit these works regularly to us as they issue from the press. The readers of the Christian Journal will thus be furnished, in the speediest mode, with valuable and interesting selections from the latest British periodical publications.

While it shall be the object of the Journal to record important religious events in general, particular regard will be paid to those which relate to the Protestant Episcopal Church.

Lists of new publications in England and in this country will be inserted, with occasional notices of their character and merits, and, particularly, with extracts from judicious reviews of them, and often the reviews entire.

It shall thus be the object of the Christian Journal to present a summary of the interesting opinions, elucidations, and reasonings on theological subjects, which are contained in the publications of the present day; and it shall be, accasionally, enriched with the sentiments of those masters of theology who were the glory of the days that are past, and whose writings exhibit the soundest views of Christian doctrine and order, and the highest fervours of pious feeling.

Whatever can advance the interests of religious truth; the purity, the unity, and the prosperity of the kingdom of the Redeemer; and the faith, holiness, and consolation of the Christian; shall, as far as practicable, find a place in

this Journal.

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[VOL. I.

It shall be printed in a large octavo size, and regularly paged; and at the close of a volume a neat title-page will be given.

Two numbers will be published in a month. The work being issued solely from an earnest desire to promote the interests of religion, with the view to its general circulation, it will be * furnished at the low rate of one dollar a year, payable in advance.

Agents shall have a commission of 20 per cent, on the amount of subscriptions for which they become responsible.

Subscriptions received by T & J. Swords, 160 Pearl-street, to whom communications may be addressed, and persons at a distance may transmit their names, with directions by what conveyance the Journal shall be sent to them. But all communications and applications for this paper must come free of postage. January, 1817.

THE CHARACTER OF LUTHER; With Remarks on the Principles of the Reformation.

(Abridged from the British Review.)

In estimating the character of Luther and the Reformers, it is requisite to ascertain the existence and extent of the evils for which they professed to provide a remedy. Institutions boasting prescription and usage nearly immemorial, sanctioned, as was the case with Popery, by the consent of almost the whole European world, and identified with whatever was great and good, possessed no ordinary presumptive claims to submission and respect. A few slight blemishes would have furnished but an inadequate apology for overturning a system interwoven in the opinions of men with every institution human and divine. To have plunged the amputating blade into the quivering vitals, when the whole evil might have been remedied by the puncture of a lancet, or the application of an escharotic, would have been no enviable mark either of wisdom or inte grity. We have, therefore, always considered it a most favourable circumstance

for justifying the Reformation, that the errors and crimes of Popery were so glaring and decisive. No attenuated metaphysical subtleties of speculation were necessary to convince mankind of its enormities. Its character was unequivocal and obvious; so that no sooner were its faults

1

first developed, than the world began to wonder at its own infatuation in not having discovered them long before. Even Pope Adrian himself could not but admit and that at a moment when such an admission, from such a quarter, was most ominous and fatal-that the Church had considerably deviated from its original purity; and although his predecessor Leo X. whose elegant licentiousness had much obtunded his moral susceptibility, saw it prudent to maintain a contrary opinion, yet it cannot be doubted but that the majority of the more respectable and intelligent Romanists were conscious that abuses had prevailed, though they might hesitate as to their extent, and felt no desire for their correction It is indeed almost incredible, that Christendom could groan for centuries under such flagitious enormities as were afterwards detailed in the celebrated "Centum Gravamina," without being in some measure sensible of its misery; and in fact we find, that even in the darkest ages, reformists occasionally sprang up, though, alas! unpro tected and alone; and who were usually induced to yield in silence to those irresistible argumenta ad hominem which a blood-thirsty priesthood was accustomed to employ. Nor were their innovations, however laudable, likely to spread; as no conclusion could be more deeply impressed on the minds of the people, than that a man whom an inquisitorial consistory had thought fit to condemn, must necessarily be a most malignant and irreclaimable heretic. If, as we find to have been the case with Galileo and others, the flames of the stake were held up to reflect a ray of light upon physical science, we cannot wonder that they should have possessed the same magical power in the elucidation of divinity.

The devotees of Papacy were not only avaricious, profligate, and sensual, but so completely immersed in pride and ignorance as to exhibit a spectacle at which we know not whether to laugh or weep. The authentic stories which are recorded on the subjects of relics and indulgences alone, would furnish volume upon volume of more cruel satire upon poor human nature than the pen of Juvenal could have produced; to which the nauseous intemperance, inebriety, avarice, impurity, superstition, and frauds of the religibus orders, would form a most voluminous appendix.

The very devotion of the age was grafted on ignorance. In Italy itself, once the proud seat of elegance and learning, there arose a detestable order of friars, denominated" Fratres Ignorantia," who were obliged by the statutes of their foundation to take the most solemn oaths neither to know, learn, nor understand any thing wiratever; but to answer every question

with the silly but appropriate word NESCIO. The pontific college absolutely encouraged the grossest ignorance, especially amongst the mendicant friars; shrewdly observing, "Should these brethren study and become learned, they would master us; therefore hang a bag about their necks, and send them begging through cities, towns, and countries."

As for the laity, they appear to have been completely stultified on every subject connected with the prevailing superstitions. Thus, for instance, if an image, as was often the case, gave signs of favour or disapprobation to the surrounding de votees, in exact proportion to the sum of money invested in the priest's hands for its use and benefit, it never occurred to the adorer to ask whether there might not be wires and springs in its interior mechanism. A curious and most delectable instance of this credulity is related in the Table Talk of Luther. A priest, it seems, had charitably bestowed upon á pilgrim the leg of a certain humble quadruped, mysteriously wrapped up in a silken cloth, as a relic of immense value, with strict injunctions not to open the sacred treasure till he should enter upor the borders of his native country. Here, however, he casually meets with four other pilgrims, each of which, like himself, immediately begins to boast of having received from Rome a leg of the identical animal which had carried our blessed Lord into Jerusalem. We might have conceived that the inference, that the priest had imposed upon their credulity, was absolutely irresistible; but so far, however, from suspecting their kind father, who had so beneficently rewarded their pilgrimage, they began to speculate upon the problem whether or not the aforesaid quadruped had really been in possession of five legs when alive! They had not, it appears, arrived at that admirable solution of Father John Ferrand, who, on being pressed with a somewhat similar difficulty respecting the number and perpetuity of relics in their nature perishable and unique, sagaciously replied, that "God was pleased to multiply and reproduce them for the devotion of the faithful!"" Spalatin enumerates no less than nineteen thousand three hundred and seventy-four sacred relics in the great church of Wittemberg alone;-what then must have been the number and value at more celebrated shrines! We can, however, give credit to almost any stories of Romish absurdities, astonishing as they may appear, when we consider the strange facts which were disclosed in our own country at the dissolution of the monastic institutions, and which, after the most charitable deductions, still present a picture which every feeling mind must shudder to behold.

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