to suppose that his rejection of the only means of salvation, may have a virtuous cause, and a safe issue.

It is evident, that on most of the points which distinguish the Christian from the infidel, Bishop Watson's opinions were not decided. He quotes with high satisfaction, the following declaration of Dr. Harwood:

After expending a great deal of time in discussing, I am neither an Athanasian, Arian, or a Socinian, but die fully confirmed in the great doctrine of the New Testament, a resurrection, and a future state of eternal blessedness to all sincere penitents and good Christians.'

In a similar strain, is the extract he gives from the learned Peter Daniel Huett.

"If any man ask me what I am, since I will be neither academic, "nor sceptic, nor eclectic, nor of any other sect; I answer that I "am of my own opinion, that is to say free, neither submitting my "mind to any authority, nor approving of any thing but what seems "to me to come nearest the truth; and if any should, either ironi"cally or flatteringly, call us Idayμovas; that is, men who stick only "to their own sentiments, we shall never go about to hinder it.” '

Taking Bishop Watson's implied approbation of such declarations as these, in connexion with his conduct towards the Duke of Grafton, and Mr. Gibbon, there is just cause to entertain the fear, that to whatsoever the difference of sentiment between the advocate for Christianity and his opponent might amount, the foundation of that difference, as regards his Lordship's belief, was not laid any deeper than the understanding. It should seem, that even in his own conscious judgement, the ground upon which he believed in the truth of Christianity, was not very dissimilar from that upon which he supposed the unbeliever rejected it, and that he considered sincere persuasion as possessing, in either case, in relation to the character, the same moral value; nay, the reasonableness of doubt might in his view, exceed the reasonableness of belief, in cases where doubt was the result of more enlarged investigation and more liberal inquiry. Faith, as a moral act of obedience to the Divine authority of Revelation, had as little to do, apparently, with his Lordship's convictions in favour of religion, as with the infidel's reasonings against it. The authenticity of Christianity rests upon buman testimony; the substance of the Christian doctrine, upon Divine testimony. Human testimony is a species of evidence cognizable by the reason; Divine testimony requires the exercise of that modification of belief, which the Scriptures denominate faith the former Dr. Watson received as fully decisive of the historic facts of Christianity; the latter appears not to have furnished any part of the basis of his creed. The dif

ference, then, between him and Mr. Gibbon, consisted not so much in his believing what the other did not believe; as in his admitting one species of evidence in favour of religion, while Mr. Gibbon rejected both the one and the other-the attestation of its facts, and the authority of its doctrines.

• That Jesus Christ lived, died, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven,' (writes the Bishop to a gentleman who addressed him en the subject of the evidences of Christianity,) are facts established by better historical testimony than that Alexander fought Darius, conquered Persia, and passed into India. But on the resurrection of Christ all our hopes as men, and our obligations as Christians, are founded. And if we have as great or greater reason to believe that fact, than we have to believe almost any fact recorded in history, we shall act irrationally, and, in a matter of such high concern, foolishly and culpably, if we withhold our assent to it; and if we do assent to it, our duty is obvious.'

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Compare this with the preceding paragraph in the same letter. As to the mysteries of the Christian religion, it is neither ćern nor mine to explain them; for if they are mysteries, they cannot be explained. But our time may be more properly employed in enquiring whether there are so many mysteries in Christianity as the Deists say there are. Many doctrines have been imposed on the Christian world as doctrines of the Gospel, which have no foundation whatever in Scripture. Instead of defending these doctrines, it is the duty of a real disciple of Jesus Christ to reprobate them as gangrenous excrescences, corrupting the fair form of genuine Christianity.'

What the doctrines are to which the Bishop alludes, it is not difficult to surmise; but we have no wish to do violence to that reserve which is maintained throughout the volume, as to the specific character of his religious sentiments. We know, indeed, that in common with the majority of the Episcopal Bench, orthodox and heterodox, he had a horror of Calvinism, and he was one of those who ardently desired a revision of the Liturgy. 'I am not,' he affirms, however, an Unitarian ;' by which term we conceive that his Lordship understood something below Arian, and that the disavowal, therefore, does not express a decided belief in the proper Deity of Christ: all that appears is, that the pre-existence of Christ' he held to be the doctrine of the New Testament, and that he regarded him as sustaining the character of a Saviour.

'The fact is,' says his Lordship, that I was early in life accustomed to mathematical discussion, and the certainty attending it; and not meeting with that certainty in the science of metaphysics, of natural or revealed religion, I have an habitual tendency to an hesitation of judgment, rather than to a peremptory decision on many points. But I pray God to pardon this my wavering in less essential points,

since it proceeds not from any immoral propensity, and is attended by a firm belief of a resurrection and a future state of retribution, as described in the Gospels.'

Notwithstanding the inference which might be fairly drawn from this meagre confession of faith, that these were the only points on which he had found certainty attainable, we have reason to hope that his belief did not terminate here. In a subsequent letter to the Duke of Grafton, who thought himself dying,' there occurs perhaps the fullest exposition of his sentiments, and it is the more striking, in some respects, as being addressed to a Socinian, although it is very far from being satisfactory.

Why should we be disturbed by gloomy apprehensions of death, since he who made us can and will, even in death, preserve us? Unless we cease to love him, (which neither you nor I can, I trust, ever do,) he will not cease to love us: the human race, in falling from their first estate, did not fall from the love of God. Are we not assured, that God so loved the world' (even in its fallen state-that world which some, even good men, represent as a mass of corruption vitiated to the very core, and doomed before its existence, to everlasting, not merely perdition, but punishment,) that he gave his only begotten Son, who every one who believeth in him may not perish but have everlasting life? John iii. 16.'

It is unnecessary to pursue the subject further. Bishop Watson was, we think few will deny, a liberal man, and a candid man; a man of upright intentions and of unaffected sincerity. His liberality was, however, in part the effect of indecision of sentiment, while his candour was grounded on false reasoning, and, we must be allowed to add, ignorance of religion. His own ingenuous representation of himself, conveys the idea of a man "always learning, and never able to arrive at the knowledge of the truth;" who, at the very time he was a teacher of others, had need to be himself confirmed in the first principles of the oracles of God; for not even at the close of life had he got beyond what the Apostle, in reproving the Hebrews, ranks among those very initial truths, "the resurrection of the dead." Thus are the things of God hidden from the wise and prudent! How can they believe who receive honour one of another, aspiring to be called Rabbi, before they have entered the school of Christ? A Professor of Chemistry is to transmigrate into a Regius Professor of Divinity: and nothing should seem to be easier than the process. At the period of his appointment to the theological chair, Dr. W. knew, by his own confession, as much of divinity as could reasonably be expected 'from a man whose course of studies had been directed to, and whose time had been fully occupied in other pursuits! But now, theology,' as he says, demanded his care'; and in pre cisely the same spirit, and with the same confidence of success,

in which he had successively engaged in the study of the Greek and Roman classics, had sought for fame in mathematical know'ledge', and, during seven years, had immersed himself in the pursuit of chemical discovery, he entered upon the study of theology, to qualify himself for the office to which the unanimous voice of the University had raised him. In this new pursuit, however, he soon felt himself strangely baffled that persevering attention which had enabled him to penetrate the arcana of science, and to conduct the most abstruse process of mathematical reasoning, here seemed to be of no avail. At the very threshold of the Temple he stood repelled and bewildered, as if unable to discover the entrance. The first measure he adopted, was, indeed, a wise one. He knew that if there was such a thing as theological science, it must rest upon the certainty of fact, that facts must form the principles of the science, and that these facts were to be sought for only in the Holy Scriptures. In discarding, therefore, all the speculations of uninspired human wisdom, he acted the part of a philosopher: these he knew, had no pretensions to certainty, and could be of no use to him, as materials, in arranging a system of theology that should deserve the name of science. But when he proceeded to investigate the Bible for himself, it was inevitable for him to perceive, that an order of facts are there alluded to, relative to the moral condition of man and the state of the heart, which had no existence in his own consciousness, and the appropriate evidence of which was derivable from no other source. To a man who had too much good sense and honesty to get rid of a plain text by a false gloss, or an improved reading, there are several declarations of the kind we allude to, which must have tended very much to repress the confidence with which he set out on the inquiry. What, for instance, could be more embarrassing to a mind not conscious of having undergone the spiritual change they describe, nor dissatisfied with its own righteousness, than to read, that "Christ came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance;" that "the whole need "not the physician;" that "except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of heaven;" that "the natural man perceiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, neither "can he know them :" positions which evidently intimate, that a peculiar state of heart is absolutely indispensable as a pre-requisite to the right understanding of the Gospel. The doctrine of religious conversion would be, to such a man, far more unintelligible and mysterious, than the Incarnation, or than Predestination itself; the more so, as the appropriate evidence of its truth consists, in part, in its accordance with experience. With this species of internal testimony, which, in the affairs of life, is held to be a legitimate source of evidence, a solid basis of certainty, our Professor had little or no ac

quaintance; and since all knowledge rests upon evidence, from this imperfection in the foundation resulted a corresponding deficiency in the superstructure; and he must have felt as he confesses he felt on some other points: I have read volumes on the subject, but I know nothing. Nor were these the only class of facts which must have appeared enveloped in mysterious darkness, owing to his not being in possession of the clew to discovery. The harmony of the various parts of the Christian system, its adaptation, as a scheme of recovery, to the actual condition of human nature, the moral necessity of the revealed expedient for reconciling the world to its Maker, and the illustrations which the Gospel exhibits of the Divine perfections, which altogether form a body of internal evidence most satisfying to the believer, were considerations in his mind of little force, since he had not learned the first principles, by the help of which alone he could work the problem. With regard to those truths which could not have been known had they not been revealed, faith in the Divine testimony is the only means of knowledge, because that testimony is the only possible evidence of their truth. We feel warranted by our Author's confession, in saying, that he was disqualified by his habits of mind, for the perception of this species of evidence; he was not in a moral condition to submit to the witness of God, as the law of belief; and hence arose his complaint, that in theology he did not meet with that certainty which accompanies mathematical reasonings; a complaint which a habit of prayer, and a meek dependence on the illumination of Divine teaching,-which, in other words, an experimental insight into the spiritual nature of religion, and of the facts on which its doctrines rest, would most assuredly have obviated. "If any "of you lack wisdom," says St. James, "let him ask of God. "But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering." For with regard to a man of this description, it is added, " Let him not "think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord. A double"minded man is unstable in all his ways." To be assailed with doubts, sometimes of the most painful description, is the trial of many a sincere believer; but that state of total hesitancy, in which the Bishop confesses that he remained through life, is chargeable, not on any deficiency in the evidence with which Christianity is accompanied, but on causes which had their existence in his own temper and character. "If any man among you "seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool that he may be wise." "This is a hard saying" to Regius Professors, and Heads of Colleges: "Who can hear it ?" The Anecdotes relating to Bishop Watson's political life, will occupy the remainder of this Article,

(To be concluded in the next Number)