the tools of the priesthood, and the prey of all that is sensual and devilish in our fallen nature.

It would be easy, we think, to illustrate these remarks very fully by an appeal to the history of corrupted Judaism and corrupted Christianity. Without entering, however, on so wide a field at present, we need only to point to those ordinances of the Christian church which form the subject of Dr. Halley's work, now on our table. No person can reasonably pretend that the place assigned in the New Testament to these ordinances is other than secondary and auxiliary. They form no part of the essence of saving truth, or of the religion, strictly so called, recommended to us by God. Whatever disadvantages the neglect or the wrong observance of either of them may inflict (and on this point we are far from holding latitudinarian sentiments), neither by the express words of scripture, nor by the general spirit of christianity, are we justified in maintaining that these amount in any case necessarily to a forfeiture of the essential privileges of the christian church. With all the wise and gracious adaptation of these ordinances to our spiritual well-being, they are nevertheless mere adjuncts of the far more important and essential part of christianity-viz., the adaptation of divine truth to enlighten the understanding, relieve the conscience, and purify the heart of man.

How different from this the place which many assign to the sacraments, it is unnecessary that we should at any length describe. Every one knows that under the sacerdotal system of the Roman Catholic church they have been elevated into the place of divine mysteries, and made primary and essential parts of christianity. It is by them that the thaumaturgic deeds of the priesthood are chiefly wrought. By the waters of baptism the priest regenerates the sinful child of Adam; by the elements of the eucharist he offers sacrifice for him, and confirms, strengthens, and fructifies the grace implanted in the regenerated soul. By the one he washes away the birth-stain which man brings with him into the world; by the other he atones for the guilt which man has actually committed in the world, and sends him out of it with a comfortable viaticum for his journey to the next. Wielding the sole power of the former, the priest holds the keys of the church below; wielding the sole power of the latter, he holds the keys of the church above. The christianity of Catholicism thus becomes a religion of external observance and of vicarious responsibility. It is not by a great change wrought in him through his own apprehension and appreciation of divine truth, under the influence of the divine Spirit, that the Catholic is taught to expect salvation, but by a change effected upon him in consequence of something done to him by his priest.

The sacraments are thus made the means of gratifying, at the expence of genuine christianity, the two propensities to which we have already referred as naturally operating in man to the deterioration of his religious views and habits. As sensible rites they are adapted to his love of an external religion; and as the implements of priestly therapeutics, they render unnecessary a personal, and gratify the love of a vicarious religion. They offer man an easy and sensuous road to heaven. He can be religious without the labour of thinking, or the trouble of reasoning, or the mortification of self-examination. He can dispense with the burden of anxiety altogether as respects his religious state and prospects, by transferring the care of his soul to his priest. It is by what the priest does to him in baptism that he is regenerated; it is by what the priest does for him in the sacrifice of the eucharist that he is justified. The whole affair is a matter of vicarious operation, in which personal obligations and responsibilities are, for the most part, left out of sight, and that which is spiritual in christianity becomes entirely superseded by the inordinate and misplaced importance attached to what is ritual.

Against this gross and ruinous error of sacramental salvation, Dr. Halley has directed the battery of his clear and cogent argumentation in several parts of the volume now before us.

As in this volume he deals only with the ordinance of baptism, his remarks on sacramental efficacy are almost exclusively devoted to the exposure and refutation of the Roman Catholic doctrine of baptismal regeneration; but he promises a subsequent volume, in which the ordinance of the Lord's Supper shall form the leading topic of discussion. The question of sacramental efficacy, however, forms only a small part of what Dr. Halley has undertaken to examine. His plan includes the consideration of all the questions which have divided professed christians regarding the sacraments. Their nature, their permanency, their origin, and the mode in which they are to be administered, no less than the uses they are designed to serve, fall within the field which Dr. Halley has marked out for himself. To traverse so wide a space with anything like intelligent and satisfactory scrutiny, he has found impossible in one course of eight lectures, the number which custom seems to have prescribed for the congregational lecture; and accordingly he has divided his course into two, expanded his allotted eight lectures into fourteen, and taken his place by the side of his single-volumed colleagues, with the enviable distinction of having secured, what most of them have deplored the want of,-a sufficient space to say all he has thought necessary for the adequate discussion of his subject.

Since Dr. Halley had made up his mind to occupy so wide a field, it might, perhaps, have been deemed ungracious on the part of the committee with whom the management of the Congregational Lecture rests, had they sought to stint him to narrower limits than, in his own opinion, justice to his subject required. But that Dr. Halley should have chosen so wide a field as the subject of a congregational lecture, we greatly regret. For one thing, as this lecture is designed to partake rather of the character of academic prelections than of popular addresses,' we are sorry to see it made the vehicle of discussions which are literally vulgarly popular, which no learning or talent can ever invest with academic dignity, and upon which an able writer would find a hearing as readily without as with the assistance of the Congregational Committee, and the prestige of a Congregational Lectureship. Our principal cause of regret, however, is, that Dr. Halley should, like most of his predecessors, have been ambitious rather of being at the head of a department than of doing the work of a laborious official, whose aims are bounded by the desire to leave nothing belonging to his allotted task undone. The design of such an institution as the Congregational Lecture, we take it, is not only to procure treatises on important subjects, in which the popular mind is not sufficiently interested to make the writing of books on them a safe speculation, but to have these subjects discussed in that elaborate, minute, and exhaustive method which, however distasteful to the mass, gives to a book, in the eye of a real student, its chief value. The bounty of this institution, in our opinion, should be directed to encourage the publication of works which the bookseller would not venture to patronise, but which would be inestimable treasures to the man who reads not merely to pass the time, nor merely to pick up what is useful, as it may chance to occur, but to settle his mind upon some important questions to enable him to form a precise and definite conclusion on some point of moment. Of single books that would suit the purpose of such a student, there is in our British literature a melancholy lack; and unless the managers of the different lectureships take the thing into consideration, and act rigidly on the principle of allowing their lecturers only one subject at a time, we see not how it is to be remedied. Hitherto the Congregational Lecture has been almost profitless in this respect. When we look at the capacity of the different lecturers, we cannot but deplore the loss which theological literature has sustained by such men spreading their efforts over fields which the undivided energies of a life-time would barely serve to cultivate thoroughly, instead of concentrating them upon one or two points of importance, and discussing these so exhaust

ively that to a student wishing information upon them, one might have been able to say-read Mr.'s Congregational Lecture, and you will find all you desire.' With hardly an exception, the volumes already published are all too popular and too diffuse. Some of them, indeed, are avowedly fragmentary, and imperfect; others of them are no less avowedly addressed to the popular mind, and intended to bring the subject discussed before the public in a popular manner; whilst others of them aim at discussing a whole series of subjects, both popularly and scientifically. To this latter class Dr. Halley has, we think, unfortunately chosen to belong. All that he has written in this volume bears the marks of high intellect and sound scholarship; but after all, it is the work of a popular preacher or controversialist, not that of a purely scientific enquirer. Had he selected one part of his subject-say that of sacramental efficacy -had he brought all the keenness of his logic and all the resources of his learning to bear upon this one point, the result would, we have no doubt, have been the production of a work which would have become standard upon the evangelical side of the question, so as to render it unnecessary for any one to write again upon it. As it is, Dr. Halley's able paragraphs on this subject are mere contributions towards a settlement of the question, distinguishable from many others only by their superior vigour and brilliancy.

We have another cause of regret, arising from the wideness of the field which Dr. Halley has selected; and that is, that it has led him to devote a considerable part of the volume before us to controversies which have divided congregationalists themselves. We allude especially to the questions which have been raised as to the proper subjects and the proper mode of baptism, on both of which he bestows a lengthened notice. On this subject the writer of the present article feels the more at liberty to express his opinion from the circumstance that he stands upon the same side of these questions with Dr. Halley, though he is free to confess that he would much rather have seen this discussion in a separate shape, than as forming part of the Congregational Lecture. It should be the aim, surely, of such an institution, to occupy as much as possible ground that is common to all evangelical congregationalists, and especially to avoid whatever might cause it to be regarded as an instrument for strengthening the one section of the congregational body at the expense of the other. Why should not the volumes produced by this lectureship be such as that by the congregationalists who practise only adult baptism by immersion, no less than by the congregationalists who practise both adult and infant baptism, without being scrupulously careful whether it be done

by immersion, or sprinkling, or pouring, they should be held in honoured estimation, as defences of great common principles, and sources of credit and strength to the whole denomination? In this light Dr. Halley's book cannot be regarded; for on no part of it has he apparently bestowed more care and labour than on that in which he argues against the advocates of adult baptism by immersion alone; and by these, consequently, his work can be viewed in no other light than in that of a hostile battery, which either they must silence, or before which they must capitulate.

We shall now proceed to give our readers a brief outline of the contents of the volume, pausing to make an occasional remark or two on such points of interest as may present themselves.

The first lecture is on the term 'sacrament,' and the several institutions to which it has been appropriated.' Here the author lays down and maintains the position, that baptism and the Lord's Supper are 'both of them symbolic representations of evangelical truths.' The word sacramentum he argues, came to be applied to these rites from its being used to designate sacred truths, and hence, by an easy transition, the symbols of such truths; an hypothesis which seems to us by much the most satisfactory which has yet been offered in explanation of this usage, only that it still leaves unexplained the process by which this word, originally used to denote a sum of money deposited by parties in a suit in the hands of the Pontifex Maximus, to be forfeited by the losing party to a sacred purpose, came to be applied to designate a sacred truth. Perhaps the process was this: the money deposited in such cases might assume a twofold aspect it might be viewed as a pledge for the sincerity of the parties in the suit, indicating that it was no idle litigiousness that had brought them into court, but a bona fide case of difference necessitating an appeal to the law; and at the same time it might be regarded as the consecrated symbol of a yet unuttered verdict of which, when uttered, it became, so to speak, the practical exponent. From the former of these aspects the Romans seem to have deduced the usage of the word to denote generally any sacred pledge; and from the latter we would suggest they derived the usage of the word to designate a sacred truth. What seems to confirm this view is, that Apuleius speaks of the sacramentum judicii,' by which he means the judicial sentence pronounced in a cause. His words are, ad gravissimum judicii vestri sacramentum eum curavi producere,' (Metam. iii. sub. init.) where sacramentum cannot mean either the pledge of the suitors, or (as Cicero often uses it) the suit itself, but must denote the sentence of the judges. If this theory be admitted, it would so far affect Dr. Halley's doctrine, as to reverse