gion has been produced by and accompanied with an increased zeal and desire for the preaching of the cross. In proof of this, I refer you to the history of every church in every by-gone time. But you need not read far. Most of us can refer to the days of our childhood, when a ten-minutes' sermon-if sermon it might be called, that unction of truth had none-once on the Sunday, was enough for ears polite, and when our clergy were the sportsmen of our fields, the stewards of our race-courses, and the beaux of our ball-rooms, and the 'Family Bible' was a 'Sunday book.' Howbeit, those were the days in which our grand-mothers wore black in lent, and our church bells rang duly, we say not how persuasively, every Wednesday and Friday through the year; the penance of the rapid parson, and the droning clerk, whom the attendance of some half-dozen card-playing septuagenarians brought within the compulsory limits of the law. We have seen great changes, and these are things out of memory, save to our gratitude that they exist no longer.

"But what in scarce the third part of a century has made so great a difference? The foolishness of preaching,' the zeal for preaching, and the demand for preaching, first out of our church, and subsequently in it. Our gospel preachers have changed the tastes of the people, and the opinions of the people have affected the whole character of the ministry. The moral essays have succumbed to empty pews; the dissipated churchman has become the marked exception among a body of truly pastoral clergy; the knowledge of divinity is now necessary to reputation in the profession of it; selfinterest looks for spiritual gifts in the incumbency, and where the truth is to be heard, the week-day bell no longer rings in vain. We have been witnesses of this great change, and we know it is attributable to God's blessing, not upon sacraments and church services-for they were always therebut upon the evangelical preaching of the cross in the churches. Must we live to see these steps retraced? Are our ministers to be taught once more that it needs no sacred study to read a form of prayer, and no spiritual experience to deliver sacraments, and nothing but ordination and a cure, to make a minister of Jesus Christ?

"Shall our people be taught again, that all who love or need the word of life must forsake the church and betake themselves to the meeting-house? We trust, and yet we fear. With deepest grief we see the leaven working far distantly from where the insidious mischief lurks. We hear the altered tone of some whose hearts we think unchanged-some who owe the conversion of their souls to the preaching of the gospel; who loved it better than their necessary food; have been cheered by it in their sorrows and checked by it in their sins, and would have made many sacrifices rather than forego it. Now they discover that preaching does not signify, they go to church to pray. We tell them, had they always thought so, they had not been what they are. Why not? There is a liturgy sufficient for the exhibition of the truth. It has not been found so, and it has not been written so. The commission and command of Jesus is to preach and the blessing of the Father has ever been upon the hearing of the gospel. We appeal to scripture and we appeal to facts: we appeal to the experience of your own souls, which you are dulling into indifference, and chilling into stone, by withholding yourselves from the sustenation God has appointed for you; to feed not upon prayer-that was never separated from the hearing of the truth, in public or in private; as if the urging of God's gracious message upon you should supersede the responses of your soul to him, or the invitations of your grace indispose you to communion with himself. They never did, they never could. You know they did not; you know you never joined the public services with less fervor, because you came to hear the truth from the pulpit; possibly you know, that till you heard it from the pulpit, you never felt the value of the liturgy, or enjoyed those services at all. Alas! the liturgy itself is to share the degradation; the value is to be in the place where it is said, the lips that utter it, the parish church, the canonical hours, the clerical vestments, the disused ceremonies. Give us votaries at once to count our paternosters, for our most spiritual liturgy has become a dead-letter, toowaiting upon this mummery to give it efficacy."

LECTURE XI.

THE PRELATICAL DOCTRINE OF APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION ESSENTIALLY POPISH IN ITS TENDENCY AND RESULTS.

WE now proceed to show that this doctrine of the apostolical succession is, in its tendency, decidedly and essentially popish, and as such is to be eschewed by every protestant who prefers spiritual liberty and pure doctrine, to spiritual despotism and corruption.

This truth has glared forth upon us already, in attempting to fathom the depths of that thick darkness in which its history is so impenetrably shrouded. But it will be important to bring it into the clearer light of a distinct discussion. For some time, we questioned the expediency of introducing this topic at all. We are well aware, that such a charge, alleged against any sincerely protestant communion, is, if not well sustained, the most opprobrious and calumnious with which we could assail it. We are also apprized that the abettors of this doctrine, from Laud to Percival, or Hook, disavow altogether any tendency toward Romanism, and even controvert many of its grossest errors;1 and that we may very easily be made to appear, by such representations, in the light of a false witness against men of learning, piety, and true devotion to the English church. Not

1) On the disavowal of this charge the London Christian Obs. remarks, (Feb. 1841, p. 72,) "True it is, that the Oxford tract sect are loud in their declamations against what they call 'the errors of the church of Rome,'-though not so loud as in their denunciations of the fundamental tenets of the churches of the reformation, under

the unfair epithet of ultra-protestantism; but amidst all their foil-fencing with popery, they manage never to put in a mortal thrust; there may be dust, and noise, and a little superficial wounding, but its vitality is safe at their hands; it plumes itself upon their aid; it boasts that they advocate its leading principles; and wherever the Oxford tracts have

withstanding, however, all this, and more than this; and although we may subject ourselves to the charge of illiberality and harshness, we do not feel at liberty to "keep silence." The interests of truth, of charity, and of the great protestant cause, demand the candid and explicit avowal of our sentiments and our fears. The very fact that the true character and tendency of this system is not understood by many who receive it;-by many of the clergymen, and we believe the greatest portion of the members of the protestant episcopal church upon which it is fastening itself, and into whose veins it is infusing its poisonous influence, loudly demands that the subject should be fairly presented to their minds.

The remembrance also of the open, avowed, and continual reprobation of this doctrine, from the very first intimations of it until the present hour, as popish, and as dragging with it many popish consequences, by all our puritan, non-conformist, and presbyterian ancestors;1-equally requires that we, their posterity, should sustain them in their faithful contendings for the truth, as far as circumstances make necessary. The signs of the times, the ominous portents which skirt the lowering sky, and foretoken coming danger, the events which are daily transpiring around us, and the boasted and increasing converts to

produced any effect, popery has risen in estimation. It is not indeed immaculate; that is not pretended-but it is much more estimable than protestant slander has accounted it; and much is it lamented that the Anglican and Romanist churches do not better understand each others' good qualities, and make common cause against the incursions of that direful monster-protestantism." To the allegations that these Oxford divines are eminent for piety, for talent, and for opposition to popery, see the reply of Bishop McIlvaine in his "Oxford Divinity," &c., in which he shows that herein lies the greatest danger from their writings. See pp. 12, 27, &c., 30, 132, 133. Again, speaking of their service for Bishop Ken's day, he says, "a more barefaced result to all decent consistency with the principles of the Church of England was never perpetrated." p. 271.

"You disclaim,' says Dr. George Miller in his Letter to Dr. Pusey, (p. 26,) "and doubtless with sincerity, any intention, or wish, to return to the communion of the church of Rome; but you do actually return to that assertion of

church authority, which by degrees was matured into the monstrous usurpation of the papacy."

See on this apparent opposition to Romish errors, and the greater danger to be apprehended in consequence of it, Lond. Chr. Obs., 1839, p. 631, &c.

Bib. Report, 1838, p. 116.

Mr. Taylor, in the second volume of his Ancient Christianity, declares that "the controversy which has been originated by the Oxford tract writers involves nothing less than the substance of christianity itself," (Dedication, p. 8,)-that "the venom of the Oxford tract doctrines has been insidiously shed into the bosoms of perhaps a majority of the younger clergy of the episcopal church," (p. 3,) and that "this system differs from popery theologically in several points, and politically or ecclesiastically; but that there is A SPIRITUAL AND MORAL IDENTITY OF THE TWO." (p. 69.) See also Note A.

1) See above in Lect. vii. See Neal's History; Price's History of Nonconform.; Pierce's Vind. of Dissenters, &c. Lond. 1717, part ii. ch. i. p. 6, &c.

Romanism and prelacy; all conspire to determine the question of duty, and to inspirit us to put the trumpet to our mouths and blow an alarm in Zion.

We will, therefore, proceed to a more full consideration of this charge against this system, and to place it in such a light as that it cannot possibly be denied.

We will not, however, argue that, because this system is common to the Roman, and to the Laudean sect in the Anglican church, therefore, the Anglican church is popish; for it is very clear, how many things may be both scriptural and proper, although found in the Romish system, which, with much error, has also preserved much that is valuable and true. We will appeal, therefore, to evidence clear and incontrovertible; and which shall be authenticated by testimony from episcopalians themselves.

This tendency we will illustrate in the first place, by showing the analogy between this doctrine, as embraced by the Romish and by the Anglican churches.1

The church of Rome puts in the place of the one mediator Jesus Christ, not only angels, the Virgin Mary, and the saints, but the church in general, and every priest in particular. This vicarious religion, by which the heart is led to repose its cares, and to rest its hopes, upon something external to itself;-veiled as it is from full comprehension, by a character of mysteriousness and terror-is the very soul of superstition, and of the whole mass of Romish errors. Now the channel through which the full tide of this mysterious grace is made to flow is the church; and that tide itself is invisibly conveyed by the agency of this lineal succession, on which the honor, the power, the efficacy, and the increase of the church depends. This is the idol, not only of rabbinical and Romish, but also of protestant popery; which has its traditionary legends also, of which this doctrine is the manifestation. Or we may say, that as there is Jewish popery, so this is Gentile rabbinism; of both which, it is the inevitable tendency, to exalt man and dethrone God; to make void, and vain, and powerless, the divine record; and to confirm human authority; to establish a righteousness to be accomplished by works; and to overturn that righteousness, which is by faith in the meritorious righteousness of another.

These, therefore, are fundamental principles in the system of popery, that God has delegated to the visible corporation of the

1) That is, supposing this system to be embraced, as its advocates contend, by the Anglican church.

2) Whateley on Romish Errors, ch. ii.

3) See McCaul's Sketches of Judaism, p. 2.

church, the entire management and control of man's spiritual relations, and has, therefore, committed to their trust the plenitude of grace: That this visible society is, by express appointment one, unchanged, and perpetual: That however wicked may be the persons who administer the government of this church, the church itself will be assuredly preserved indefectible, and its acts be ratified in heaven: And that the whole efficacy of the church depends on the transmission of this original communication of divine grace, in an unbroken succession of lineal descendants of the apostles.

On these apparently harmless propositions is reared the entire fabric of that spiritual despotism, which at length usurped dominion over the civil and religious interests of man-over his body as well as his soul-over his thoughts as well as his actions -which claimed to direct his understanding and to tutor his conscience which haunted him with fear through life, with terror in death, and then "delving into the sepulchre," followed him with its persecuting anathemas to the very fires of that penal wrath, from which it alone could deliver.1

Now every one of these principles, from which these consequences have flowed, are most certainly included in this prelatic theory; and are most fully avowed by its advocates. This doctrine of the apostolic succession is nothing more nor less than a second edition of the Romish anathema-extra ecclesiam prelaticam salus non esse potest. By confining to the clergy— and to one order of the clergy-and to a baronial and aristocratic class of the clergy—the exclusive, supreme, and heavenappointed right to all ecclesiastical power and jurisdictionwith the uncontrolled power of continuing their own succession, and of interpreting, by their authority, (i. e. the church,) the laws and doctrines of Christ's kingdom-there is a foundation laid, broad enough to sustain the most unbounded exercise of ghostly tyranny. These avowed principles justify all those practices, which necessarily flow from them, and by which the church has asserted her right to a universal lordship over the bodies and the souls of men.

This apostolical succession is distinctly affirmed by Mr. Newman, to be one of those many essential points, which the Romish and the Anglican churches, "in common both hold."

It is the same "ruling, grasping, ambitious principle," in both. In both, it is involved in that same profound obscurity which gives fitting room for fabulous legends, and unauthenti

1) See Dr. Rice's Considerations on Religion, pp. 79, 82, 83, 84. 2) See Henry Martyn in Hough's

Vindication, p. 64. He denominates this antichrist.

3) On Romanism, p. 56.