or produce really good works; that he denied the use of conscience in keeping Christians from sin and wickedness; and that he separated justifying faith from love.

That he denied the good works of Christians is just as true as that he denied the sun in heaven. He beautifully compares them to stars in the night, the night and darkness of surrounding unjustification; and beautifully too does he say, that even as the stars do not make heaven, but only trim and adorn it, so the charity of good works does not constitute blessedness, but makes it shine to the eyes of men, that they may glorify the Father of Lights." That Luther denied the work of the Spirit to be really good is one of the many charges against him which sound loud and go off in smoke. He considered them relatively good, just as any man else does,-saw a wide world of difference betwixt the deeds of the justified and of the unjustified. If he thought that, as sin remains in the best men, so likewise something of human infirmity clings about the best deeds, who shall convict him of error? That he denied any portion or quality of real goodness to be in the soul in which Christ lives, I cannot find and do not believe. But when Luther said that because our righteousness is imperfect, therefore it cannot be the ground of acceptance with God, he drew, in my opinion, a wrong inference from his premiss. Our faith is as imperfect as our works; but if it unites us with Christ, it is (not of course the deepest ground, Christ alone is that, but) the intermediate ground of our acceptance. The question is, shall we call faith alone, or faith, love, obedience, all Gospel graces, the "connecting bond" between us and Christ? If faith alone, then faith alone is our intermediate ground of acceptance; and repentance, love, and obedience are not excluded because they are imperfect, but because of their posteriority to faith.

That Luther denied the power of Christians to fulfil the law is the self-same charge in another shape, and false in that shape as in the other. He reiterates that the faithful do fulfil the law, and that they alone fulfil it; that by faith they receive the Holy Ghost and then accomplish the law." "I come with the Lord 43 Table Talk, chap. 14, p. 232.

44 Comm Gal. v., 23.

7745

Himself," says Luther; "on Him I lay hold, Him I stick to, and leave works unto thee: which notwithstanding thou never didst." He shows that against the righteous there is no law, because he is a law to himself. "For the righteous," says he, "liveth in such wise that he hath no need of any law to admonish or constrain him, but without constraint of the law, he wil lingly doeth those things which the law requireth.' What more would we have a teacher of the Gospel say? Ought a Christian to perform the law unwillingly by a force from without? Luther teaches that in the justified there is an inward law superseding the outward: that the outward law remains, but only for the sinner: that it either drives him to Christ or bridles him in his carnality. This is the idea expressed in that passage at the end of the introduction to his commentary, which sets forth the argument of the Epistle. "When I have this righteousness reigning in my heart, I descend from heaven, as the rain maketh fruitful the earth: that is to say, I come forth into another kingdom, and I do good works how and whensoever occasion is offer ed." What is there in this that is worthy of condemnation or of sarcasm? Is it not true Pauline philosophy to say, that the realm of outward works is another kingdom from the realm of grace?—that the true believer is freed from the compulsion of the law?—to call the sum of outward things and all deeds, considered as outward, the Flesh? To me this animated passage seems the very teaching of the Apostle to the Gentiles uttered with a voice of joy. It is the unconfusing intoxication of Gospel triumph and gladness. Some say mocking, The man is full of

45 Mr. Ward thinks the Commentary on the Galatians such a "silly” work! Shakspeare has been called silly by Puritans, Milton worse than silly by Prelatists and Papists, Wordsworth was long called silly by Bonaparteans; what will not the odium theologicum or politicum find worthless and silly? To me, perhaps from my silliness, his Commentary appears the very Iliad of Solifidianism; all the fine and striking things that have been said upon the subject are taken from it; and if the author preached a novel doctrine, or presented a novel development of Scripture in this work, as Mr. Newman avers, I think he deserves great credit for his originality. The Commentary contains, or rather is, a most spirited Siege of Babylon, and the friends of Rome like it as well as the French like Wellington and the battle of Waterloo.

new wine; but Luther was not really drunk when he spoke thus; he spoke it in the noon day of his vigorous life, with all his wits, and they were sound ones, about him.

46

It is affirmed that Luther denied the use of conscience in religion, and this is the grand engine which Mr. Ward brings to bear upon him in his Ideal; you would think from the account of the Gospel hero's doctrine therein contained that he was a very advocate for unconscientiousness, and would have men go on sinning that grace may abound; would have them "wallow and steep ir all the carnalities of the world, under pretence of Christian liber ty," and continue without any fear of God or remorse of conscience in accomplishing the desires of the flesh; or at least that his teaching involved this: I wonder how men can have the conscience to write thus of Luther on the strengh of a few misconstrued passages, while the broad front of his massive fortress of Gospel doctrine, a stronghold against Antinomianism, must present itself to their eyes unless they are stone blind." Luther teaches that the con

46 Mr. Newman points out that fine passage on faith in Gal. ii., 16, and 334 Paulus his verbis, &c., and he quotes that admirable exposition of his on "incarnate faith or believing deeds," in Gal. vii., 10, in which he brings in the analogy of the Incarnation.

I have read Mr. Ward's Ideal with so much interest, and, I humbly hope, benefit, that I am far more grieved by the chapter on Justification than if the writer were a narrow, stupid, uncharitable man. I have heard persons say it was the clever part of the book; the whole of the book is clever, but this part has no other merit than cleverness, and that is a sorry commendation of a discourse upon morals and religion: as the author himself would readily admit in general. It is the force with which he has made this and other cognate truths apparent, the way in which he has vitalized and, to use Luther's phrase, "engrossed" them, for which I have to thank him. But he special-pleads against Luther, and in a way which no pleader could venture upon in a court of Justice. He presents his doctrines upside down-wrong side before. If we tear up the rose tree and place it root upward, with all its blossoms crushed upon the earth, where are its beauty and its fragrance ?-if we take the mirror and turn its leaden side to the spectator, where are its clear reflections and its splendor?

By the by it struck me that Mr Ward, in his searches for Socinianism, after he had done demonizing the doctrine of Luther, slipped himself into something like heresy on the human nature of our Lord. His words seemed (seem, for there they are still), to imply that our Saviour had not,

straints and terrors of the law remain to keep the flesh in subjec tion; what he says concerning conscience relates to sins that are past, not sins to come. He exhorts men to lay hold of Christ:

not to let the sense of their ungodliness which aforetime they have committed make them doubt of his power to save them. and purify their souls by the Holy Spirit. His reasons for insisting on this doctrine are obvious; it was to prevent men from trusting for the washing out of sin to penance, the fearful abuse, or rather use, of which he had witnessed. His doctrine is, that in those who are in a state of grace through a living faith, the flesh remains, and is to be bruised, exercised, and kept down by the Law-(be it observed, that by the Law he always means the Law viewed carnally or as a force from without)— while the spirit rejoices in God its Saviour, the conscience sleeping securely on the bosom of Christ. And surely, so far as we can contemplate man in a state of grace at all, having firm faith in the Redeemer and His power to save, he must be contemplated as free and joyful, confident of salvation notwithstanding the infirmity of his mortal nature, not paralysed by the Law in the conscience or agonized by a fearful looking back upon sins that while upon earth, a human mind as well as a human body. He introduces the Godhead into the Manhood so as to destroy, as it seems to me, the character of the latter. Certainly Pearson and South, who were ever held orthodox on the Incarnation, and good Patricians, teach that our Lord, while upon earth, had the "finite understanding" of a man; that he stooped to the meanness of our faculties;" and indeed it is evident from the language of the Evangelists, that they supposed Him to arrive at the knowledge of ordinary things in an ordinary way; to have grown in wisdom and knowledge, an expression not applicable to Omnipotence. If He foreknew all that was to happen to him in one matter, so Abraham and Isaiah foreknew the future. Doubtless He knew far more of the mind of God than they, even as a man. Perhaps Mr. Ward was led to this error, as I believe it to be, from following too heedlessly certain remarks of the Tract for the Times against Jacob Abbott. But surely it is a great and fundamental error to deny by implication, the real humanity of our Lord --that he assumed the very soul of man; which he must have done iu order to redeem it --a worse error than that of the Phantasmists, who denied his fleshly body. How he could be very God and very man at the same time is an inscrutable mystery, but no less than this is the Catholic Faith of the Incarnation, and to deny it is the heresy of Apollinaris Shall "Catholics" rationalize away a mystery?

are past. Surely the conscience may sleep on the bosom of Christ, if it be really His bosom on which it is resting; that is, if we know that upon the whole our heart is set upon the things that are above, we may safely cast our eye forward, in peace and gladness hoping and striving through grace to live better from day to day; not backward upon the detail of our past transgressions, with a soul-subduing solicitude to balance them by penance exactly proportioned to their amount.

Luther affirmed that we must make a god of the law out of the conscience, but that in the conscience it is a very devil. Doubtless he had seen fatal effects of the tyranny of the law in the conscience, had seen how, like the basilisk's eye, it benumbed the gazer, and prevented him from flying at once to Christ for pardon and purification and power to follow His steps; how it threw him into the hands of the priest, who, in those days, too often, instead of preaching faith in the Saviour and fulfilment of the law by faith, prescribed a certain set of outward observances, which never could take away sins, but which the terrified yet unrepentant spirit rested in, and substituted for general renovation. Looking at the Law in this point of view he called it with great force and truth the very diabolus, the malignant accuser, who by its informations and treacherous representations kept the soul separate and estranged from the Prince of Life. Bunyan has worked upon this thought powerfully in the Pilgrim's Progress, and he too makes the murderous Moses give way to Christ when He appears, and "depart out of the conscience." "Luther," says Mr. Newman, contrasting him with the ancient Father, declares that "the Law and Christ cannot dwell together in the heart; Augustine, that the law is Christ." Well! but what Law? Surely not the outward Law, which St. Paul declares dead for the Christian," which Luther declares incompatible with Christ, but the inward law, "the law of grace, the law of the

49 I know not whether there remains upon the face of the earth any of that generation of Scripture interpreters, who were wont to affirm, that, when St. Paul declared the law dead, he meant only the ceremonial law of Moses! That such people existed in Bishop Bull's time seems clear from his taking the pains to refute the notion methodically. See Harmonia, cap. vii., Diss. Post. Oxford edit., vol. iii., 120-21.