interesting and venerable. The attempt to make them practi. cally our masters on earth in doctrine, under a notion that they received their whole structure of religious intellectualism ready built from the Apostles-this it is which anti-patricians of my Father's mind contemn. Belief in the phoenix was no sign that the early Christians were incapable of receiving a spiritual religion; but surely it is one among a hundred signs, that their intellectual development of it might be incorrect; that they had reflected but little on the nature and laws of evidence. I believe that the whole of the opinions which my Father expresses on the Eucharist may be reduced to this, that both transubstantiation and Luther's doctrine of consubstantiation may be so stated as not to involve a contradiction in terms; but that neither doctrine is necessary, that there is no real warrant for either in Scripture, and that the spiritual doctrine of the Supper of the Lord involves a different statement. The gift and effect of the Eucharist he believed to be "an assimilation of the spirit of a man to the divine humanity." How he sympathized with one who fought against the old sensualism appears in his poem on the dying words of Berengarius. But Berengarius certainly taught & presence in the elements, for he said that the true body is placed the table. To the imperfection of light vouchsafed in that day my Father seems to refer in the last lines of his poem: The ascending day star with a bolder eye That my Father, though an ardent maintainer of the Church as a spiritual power, organized in an outward body, co-ordinate with the Spirit and the Scriptures, did not admit the ordinary 30 These opinions are expressed in various places of vols. iii. and iv. of the Remains. The Romish dogma involves the supposition that a sensible thing can be abstracted from its accidents. This may not be false logic, and yet may be false philosophy. The substance of the material body could do nothing for our souls: the substance of the divine humanity can be present to our souls alone So it seems to many of the faithful. mysticism on the subject of Apostolical succession, seems clear from this passage from some of his manuscript writings, dated 1827. "When I reflect on the great stress which the Catholic or more numerous Party of Christians laid on the uninterrupted succession of the Bishops of every Church from the Apostles, the momentous importance attached by the Bishops themselves at the first general council to this unbroken chain of the spiritual lightning, ever present to illumine the decisions and to scathe in the anathemas of the Church-when I read, that on this articulated continuum which evacuated the time which it measured, and reduced it to a powerless accident, a mere shadow from the carnal nature intercepting the light, a shadow that existed only for the eye of flesh, between which and the luminary the carnal nature intervened, so that every Bishop of .the true Church, speaking in and from the Spirit, might say, 'Before Peter was, or Paul, I am!"—Well!-Let all this pass for the poetry of the claims of the Bishops to the same Spirit, and, consequently, to the same authority as the Apostles, unfortunately for the claim, enough of the writings of Bishops, aye, and of canonized Bishops, too, are extant to enable us to appreciate it, and to know and feel the woeful difference between the Spirit that guided the pen of Tertullian, Irenæus, Epiphanius, &c., and the Spirit by which John and Paul spake and wrote! Descending into the cooler element of prose, I confine myself to the fact of an uninterrupted succession of Bishops in each Church, and the apparent human advantages consequent on such a means of preserving and handing 31 After describing Episcopal succession as a "fixed outward means by which the identity of the visible Church, as co-ordinate with the written Word, is preserved, as the identity of an individual man is symbolized by the continuous reproduction of the same bodily organs," as, more than this, not merely one leading symbol of permanent visibility, but a co-effcient in every other," my brother says, "Yet it must be examined according to this idea. I dare not affect to think of it, in order to render it intelligible and persuasive to faithless and mechanical minds, as of a inere physical continuity, by which the spiritual powers of the pastorate are conveyed, like a stream of electricity along a metal wire." My brother had never seen the passage from my Father's MS. Remains, which I have given in the text, when he wrote this;-and I believe it to be a perfect coincidence. down the memory of important events and the steadfast form o. sound words, and when I find it recorded that on this fact the Fathers of the Nicene Council grounded their main argument against the Arians, &c., I cannot help finding a great and perplexing difficulty in the entire absence of all definite Tradition concerning the composition and delivery of the Gospels." He then goes on to suggest a solution of this perplexity. Noscitur a sociis is a maxim very generally applied: we trust and love those who honor whom we honor, condemn whom we disapprove. My Father's affectionate respect for Luther is enough to alienate from him the High Anglican party, and his admiration of Kant enough to bring him into suspicion with the anti-philosophic part of the religious world,-which is the whole of it except a very small portion indeed. My Father was a hero-worshipper in the harmless sense of Mr. Carlyle; and his worship of these two heroes, though the honors he paid to the one were quite different from those he offered to the other, was so deliberate and deep seated, that it must ever be a prominent feature on the face of his opinions. He thought the mind of Luther more akin to St. Paul's than that of any other Christian teacher, and I believe that our early divines, including Hooker and Field, would not have suspected his catholicity on this score. Indeed it is clear to my mind that in Luther's doctrines of grace (no one has ever doubted his orthodoxy on the subject of the divine nature, but his doctrine of the dealings of God with man in the work of salvation), there is nothing which ever would mortally have offended High Churchmen, Romish or Anglican; that they tried to find heresy in these because of the practical consequences he drew from them to the discrediting and discomfiture of their spiritual polity. On the doctrine of Justification he has been represented as a mighty corrupter; let us see how and how far he differs on that subject from his uncompromising adver saries." There are but three forms in which that doctrine can 32 My authorities for the following statements are the Decrees and Canons of Trent, Luther's Commentary on Galatians, and Table-Talk, Bishop Bull's Harmonia, with his thick volume of replies to the censures of it, and Mr. Newman's Lectures on Justification, all of which I have dwelt on a good deal. I have not yet read St. Augustine on the subject, possibly be presented to the mind, I mean there are but three ways in which St. Paul's justified by faith without the deeds of the law can be scientifically explained or translated into the language of metaphysical divinity;-namely the Tridentine, or that set forth by the Council of Trent,-the Anglican or High Church Protestant, set forth by Bishop Bull;—and that of Luther. Nay, I think that, really and substantially, there are but two, namely the Tridentine and High Anglican or doctrine of justification by faith and works as the condition of obtaining it, and Luther's solifidianism or doctrine of justification by means of faith alone,— a faith the necessary parent of works. All parties agree that God is the efficient Christ, in His sacrifice, the meritorious cause of salvation: all profess this in words, all the pious of all the different parties believe it in their hearts. The dispute is not about the proper cause of salvation, but only concerning the internal condi tion on our part, or what that is in us whereon justification ensues, which connects the individual man with the redemption wrought by Christ for all mankind. Bull teaches that this link within us to the redemption without us is faith informed with love and works-faith quickened by love and put forth in the shape of obedience. The Tridentine teaches, in like manner, that we are justified directly upon our holiness and works wrought in us by the Spirit,-that faith and all other graces of which it is the root, are the condition of acceptance with God. Between this statement and Bull's I see no real difference at all; it is but the same thought expressed in different words. The but suspect, from extracts, that his view was the same as Luther's, so far as he developed it. Mr. Newman says in his Appendix: "I have throughout these remarks implied that the modern controversy on the subject of justification is not a vital one, inasmuch as all parties are agreed that Christ is the sole justifier, and that He makes holy those whom He justifies." Yet, one who professed to hold Mr. Newman's religious opinions in general, could talk of Luther's doctrine as a doctrine too bad for devils to hold consistently, contrary to natural religion, corruptive of the heart, and at war with reason. It should be remembered that the state of mind in the justified is precisely the same in all the different schemes. The dispute is only about the name to be given to certain constituents of it; whether they are to be called justifying, or only inseparable from, or the necessary product of, the justifying principle. Anglican chooses to add that our holiness and works, in order to be thus justifying, must be sprinkled with the blood of the covenant; the Tridentine declines that well sounding phrase: perhaps he thinks it a tautology offensive to Him who forbade vain repetitions; and for my own part, I cannot think that his Saviour requires it of him, whatever divines may do. His anathemas against those who say either more or less than he says on these points are, in my opinion, the only anti-christian part of his doc. trine of justification. Drive the thing as far back as we may, still there must be something in us-in our very selves, which connects us with salvation; it seems rather nonsensical to say that this is the blood of Christ. We should never have obtained this something without Him; He created it in us and to Him it tends; what more can we say without nullifying the human soul as a distinct being altogether, and thus slipping into the gulf of Pantheism in backing away from imaginary Impiety and Presumption? Even if with Luther we call Christ the form of our faith, and hence the formal cause of our salvation, still there must be that in our very selves which at least negatively secures our union with him; to that we must come at last as the personal sine qua non of justification, whether we call it the proximate cause, or interpose another (the Holy Ghost dwelling in our hearts by faith) betwixt ourselves and heaven. The Anglican may call our holiness inchoate and imperfect, and may insist that only as sanctified and completed by Christ's merits is it even the conditional cause of salvation; still this holiness, if it connects us with the Saviour or precludes the impediment to such connexion, is, in one sense, complete and perfect, for it does this all important work perfectly; it is no slight matter, for it is all the difference between salvation and perdition, as being indispensable to our gaining the first and escaping the last. Now in what other sense can the Romanist imagine that our holiness is perfect and complete? Does he think that it is perfect as God is perfect, or that it is more than a beginning even in reference to that purity which human nature may finally attain when freed from a temptible body and the clog of the flesh?" 33 To call our inherent righteousness inchoate in reference to the power of justifying would be incorrect, would it not?-for it is the beginning |