troduced principles so loose that nothing which has ever been held or practiced by parties of any consideration in the Church can be consistently excluded. This principle of development would give countenance to every heresy and superstition which has existed, or shall exist, in any portion of the Church considerable enough to hold a place in history.

Again, we repeat it--the truths of Christianity depend not upon-are not to be decided by-a majority. It was not so in the time of our Lord-it was not so in the times of the first apostles. Nay, the Church was warned that they should be hated of all men for the truth's sake: yet the word of comfort is "Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom: in the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." But for this assurance, how could Paul have stood when all in Asia had forsaken him, and when at his second answer no man stood by him? At other times it has been observed, with astonishment, that Athanasius stood against all the world, and all the world against Athanasius: and that Christendom wondered and groaned to find itself Arian. And so, in prophetic language, it is said at one time that all the world wondered after the beast; and at another time that he deceiveth them that dwell on the earth, by means of those miracles which he had power to do: and he caused all, both small and great, to receive a mark in their right hand or foreheads; and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

We have in this book the evidence of what is meant in the warnings given by St. Paul against becoming spoiled by false philosophy. The form of sophistry is changed in the lapse of ages, but it is in substance the same. Many of the early fathers caught the infection directly and immediately from the Greek writers: the schoolmen derived their sophisms partly from the Platonizing fathers, partly from the Greeks, but added disingenuousness to sophistry: and the modern doctrine of Development" is an amalgam of the three, and baser in its quality than any of the ingredients :

"Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ, for in him dwelleth all the fulness of the godhead bodily; and ye are complete in him "(Col. ii. 8). "Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, and not holding the head "(18). Keep that which is committed to thy trust: avoid profane and vain babblings,

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and oppositions of science falsely so called: which some professing have erred concerning the faith "(1 Tim. vi. 20). "Continue thou in

the things which thou hast learned, and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; and that from a child thou hast known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation, through faith which is in Christ Jesus "(2 Tim. iii. 14).

These things being so-however much we may lament the step which Mr. Newman has taken on his own account-on account of the Church of England, it is a favourable sign for her that he has left our communion. While any of her members entertain such opinions, they must have the effect of a festering sore rankling within. It is good that such humours should come to the surface-it is better that they should break and discharge themselves. When the body is infected with the plague, if it shows itself only in blotches or plague-spots, the danger is great; but if the constitution has vigour enough to expel the virus, the plague-spot will gather to a head, and the deadly virus may be ejected, and the patient may recover. It is always a favourable sign when the vital principle is strong enough to slough off the parts which may have mortified or become corrupt, from whatever cause.

"There must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you." (1 Cor. xi. 19). "They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us." (1 John ii. 19).

And it augurs well for the spiritual vigour and inherent vitality of the Church of England, when those who would corrupt her doctrines, or would introduce superstitious novelties into her sacraments and ritual, find themselves constrained to leave her communion. The Church will not only regain her proper and becoming attitude of tranquility and peace, by the removal of these causes of irritation; but, as after the recovery from sickness there is a reaction which has the appearance of new life and vigour and which gives a zest to the enjoyment of health which makes it almost worth while to be sick for the sake of the pleasure of recovering-so we expect that, when the present excitement shall subside, the Church will be found to have gained by the trial, and come out more vigorous than before; and by the reaction will receive an impetus which will carry her onwards with greater speed and steadfastness in the right direction, after having overcome all the efforts which have been made to impede her straight-forward course, and divert her into the paths of error,

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ART. II.-Remarks on the Athanasian Creed, and Justification by Faith. By A BISHOP'S CHAPLAIN. London: J. G. and J. F. Rivington.

THE history of the creeds of the Church is but the history of the laws by which human thought is inevitably governed under given conditions. Creeds of some kind, written or unwritten, every society must hold, as one essential condition of its existence. Unwritten creeds (such as are professed by certain religious societies which most vehemently abjure ours) are but ready-made instruments of tyranny and oppression; though we do not say they are always employed for that purpose. Written creeds court universal judgment, and must, therefore, ultimately stand or fall by their own native truth. The Church of England is said to have an unwritten creed. This is not true: the Prayer Book contains her only creed; for though parts of it are distinctively and popularly called creeds, yet they are no more her creeds than the Thirty-nine Articles, and the sentiments embodied in the single sentences of the prayers. There is, however, this important difference to be noted, that the Articles, and the so-called creeds, contain systematic divinity-the contents of the New Testament systematized; that is to say, what was not given forth to the Church, in the original documents of revelation, dogmatically and systematized, has been by the Church reduced to system and put forth dogmatically: and for this the Church has been vehemently assailed; that is, she has been condemned for not having drawn up the formularies of her faith in the exact terms of Scripture, and then permitting individual subscriptionists to supply the interpretation. This, it is said, would have produced Christian unity. For in such a society the Socinian, who quotes the words of Scripture for his creed, and the Antinomian, who defends by its words his creed, might, it is said, have worshipped together within the same walls in brotherly love; and thus the scandals of a divided Church might have been obviated. It cannot, however, be needful to pause for removing from our path such an hypothesis as this, which sets up unity in words over unity in thought; which assumes the naturally impossible-namely, that two men can kneel side by side, in the most solemn hours of human life, and treat each other with the respect due to rational beings, whose object and the means of pursuing it in effect are the same, when one of them is worshipping God upon the supposition that Christ is man, and the other is worshipping Christ him

self as God. We can realise unity upon such divided terms in an assembly of parrots, with whom certain words are but one chance form of chattering instead of another; but not in an assembly of reasoning and deeply-moved men, with whom words are the symbols of solemn thought. If we could bring four earnest-minded men together, of the closest habits of friendship, with but one creed in literature, arts, science, and polity; and if, after discussing the true character of Christ, two of them arrived at the conclusion that he was an archangel, the highest order of created beings, who had voluntarily degraded himself to the conditions of humanity for the welfare of our race; and the other two concluded that he was God, manifested in the flesh; from the moment this decision was arrived at and proclaimed, they would profess separating creeds, making it as possible that there should be a physical unity between fire and water, and between light and darkness, as a spiritual unity between these opinionists.

If it had pleased the divine Author of the Christian revelation to put it forth in dogmas, and systems, and definitions, creeds or formularies of belief (which, being human, are liable to error) would have been superseded. Had the inspired writers of the Gospel histories and epistles been directed to draw up their compositions according to some elementary and progressive arrangement, many apparent difficulties and dangers might have been avoided; but as the literary forms in which the All-wise caused his revelation to be delivered to us absolutely excludes all this, hence it can be proved that the Church must construct creeds.

The totality of our written revelation is made up of a series of historical books, composed upon principles but little followed by secular historians: the prosaic and poetical writings of prophets, consisting of temporal and spiritual predictions, clearer and darker, intermingled arbitrarily with moral and doctrinal teachings: what may be termed four biographies (Memorabilia, rather) of Jesus Christ: a series of letters written to meet accidental emergencies in individual infant Churches: and one book of dark mysteries. Now, the literary forms of such compositions, by their very nature, excluded system. It seems evident that the peculiar commission of authorship, given to the inspired writers of the New Testament, expressly and purposely excluded the means of writing what we call a system of divinity. Their absorbing object, so far as we can judge by tokens which would certainly not mislead in human compositions, was to meet present moral, spiritual, and ecclesiastical events, which they saw actually pressing down the Church

when struggling for her very existence. We have not been able to discover a vestige of evidence that either of the evangelists, or letter-writers of the New Testament, proposed to himself the limiting task which Thucydides declares was that for which he worked-to write a history in which he preferred to seek the benefit and applause of distant ages to the fading crown of an Olympian victor. Certainly, it is impossible not to regard with admiration and respect the sublime declaration of the Greek historian, that he was content to forego (such was his meaning) the praises of a giddy, thoughtless, unjudg ing age, for the prophetic enjoyment of contemplating his great work standing before the impartial tribunal of posterity, and receiving its homage of praise from them whose praise alone he coveted--the wise and the good of all times and all climes. It was, then, the first object of this great man to write for posterity, and not for the wants of his own generation. Guided by this, his published principle, we can understand why, in framing his work, he introduced into it a subtle logic that must have baffled the attention of the ear, since it so often taxes to the utmost the attention of the eye: and guided by it, we can understand how, with self-conscious reliance, and in a spirit of prophecy which is the gift to such minds, he gave it a name which the judgment of posterity has so willingly confirmed-Tua es act. But not one of the inspired historians professes to have so written. They seem to have had but one immediate object before them, with which no ulterior purposes was permitted to interfere. Each addressed one section of his contemporaries, moved by an earnest impulse to meet palpable and pressing wants and dangers, but with no suspicion of the ulterior uses that would be made of his brief composition-that it was to be a Kтηua es ac to the Church of Christ. We can find no internal evidence (and it could hardly have escaped us) that those writers comprehended the fulness of their great mission, as contributors to what we now know to be the canon of Scripture. They wrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost for the present circumstances of individuals, whose condition and dangers, in the infancy of the Church, were painfully known to themselves, and about which they were absorbingly anxious. Each of the four biographies of Christ was written, according to our judgment, sufficiently independent of the others, to lay claim to the characteristics of an independent document-each having been drawn up in reference to some distinct temporary object. St. Luke, in the short preface to his work, simply explains that his immediate object was to correct the errors into which false