Christians; but every instance of conversion among them, of which we have any authentic account, was produced by the Holy Ghost leading them through a course of private meditation, and not by the instrumentality of pulpit preaching.

Various reasons have been assigned in the magazines for the miserably low state of theology which modern sermons present; and which it is not necessary to enumerate, because they are all inadequate to account for the phenomenon to explain which they are adduced. We therefore proceed to set forth our own opinion upon the matter, which differs from them all; but which we think will furnish an abundantly sufficient solution for all that is complained of. We think, then, that ministers in general entirely and fundamentally err in their idea of what is their proper business--and we are now speaking of the highest order of them; of men far above the temptations of avarice, fame, or vanity; and who are most truly anxious to perform their duty. We hold that the first duty of a pastor is honestly to declare to the people all that he believes to be the truth of God; and the second point to be, to place that truth before his auditory with such perspicuity, line upon line, and precept upon precept, as to make it impossible for the people not to understand the idea he means to convey. Now the leading notion in the generality of ministers is, that it should be their first aim to convert souls; and secondly, to state the truth in such a way that no one in their congregation shall be offended, and leave off in consequence attending the services of the church. Whoever has read the writings of Adams and Cecil, will remember that this was the main-spring of all their motions: in the first, it led to the most painful self-reproach and dejection of spirit; in the second, to a scandalous concealment of the truth from his congregation, and bitter repentance on his death-bed.

The essential characteristic of Christianity, that which distinguishes the Christian Religion from every other creed under heaven, is, that it is VICARIOUS: the punishment of the sinner is vicarious; the merit which conducts him to glory is vicarious. Many other creeds contain intercessors and mediators; and all unite in one point, be they Deists, Heathens, Bûdhists, Papists, Socinians, Mohammedans, &c. &c., which is, that by some means or other their future state is dependent upon the personal merit or demerit of the individual. It is hardly possible that any persons, who have the power of reflection at all, should not know that it is one of the most difficult things to make men receive ideas by any form of words or expressions whatever on which account it should be the constant labour of the minister to make himself understood. The power which demagogues possess over the people depends altogether upon their faculty for making the ideas intelligible which they wish to impress upon

them. Observe the manner in which the late Lord (when Mr.) Erskine, and Mr. Fox, laboured to express themselves with perspicuity. Oh, if ministers of Christ's kingdom were half as earnest and as pains-taking to make the people understand the details of his kingdom and government, as the politicians of this dispensation are to explain the mysteries of the rule of this dispensation, what a different aspect would the church soon

assume!

There are in this land thousands and millions of individuals, who use the words of the Liturgy, and subscribe to the Assembly's Catechism and the Westminster Confession, who do not believe one of the essential truths contained in these formularies, and who are yet perfectly conscientious in thinking that they subscribe to them ex animo. Whitefield observes, that when he says in the reading-desk, in the Lesson of the day, "Many are called, but few are chosen," nobody objects to it; but when he expresses precisely the identical truth in the pulpit, an outcry is raised against him, as if he had broached some unheard-of heresy. On the same principle we find Cowper's Poems read and admired by persons who disagree with every iota of his theology, and who certainly would never read them if they understood the creed he so beautifully expresses. Nay, the very clergy themselves do not understand their own Liturgy, nor the Lessons which they read from the Scripture, as is proved by their almost invariably laying the accents on the wrong words.

'We We can illustrate this subject by three examples taken from nearer home. We happened lately to be present at Guildford, at a meeting of the Surrey Auxiliary Jews Society: among other persons, Mr. Irving attended. It was during the sitting of the quarter sessions for the county, and the town was full of lawyers. As soon as Mr. Irving began to speak, several of them left the court, and came to the meeting to hear him. His line of argument was to shew our duty in preaching the Gospel to the Jews, with special reference to those national promises which were not to be fulfilled in this dispensation, but in the next, when the Lord should return to the earth. One of those lawyers could scarcely be induced to believe that he had heard aright, when Mr. Irving had said that the Lord was to return again to the earth; for, be it observed, neither the period nor the mode of the return was debated, but the fact of a return at some time: aud though the person who was so surprised is an able and very intelligent member of his profession, and a very regular frequenter of the church, and observes family devotion in his house, and consequently must be often in the habit of saying the words "I believe that he shall come again to judge the quick and the dead," it is obvious that the idea of the return of the Lord to this earth, ever, and at any time, was perfectly new to him.

The next example shall be from this journal. No opinion respecting the mediocrity of modern theology has been expressed by us, that has not been put forth by some of our contemporaries also; but we are conscious that our expressions will give an offence that theirs have not given; and for this plain reason, that we produce impression by making ourselves intelligible, which they have not done: for if they have written a clear sentence in one place, they have written a contrary opinion in some other place, and thus the truth has been neutralized. For this reason also we have found the excellent work of Mr. Riland, on the present state of the religious world*, vehemently censured, although it contains little that might not be found in other, but less intelligible and more contradictory, pamphlets. Many illustrations of this might be found. The Christian Observer says that there is nothing which Mr. Irving has described in his sermons on "The Last Days," as characteristic of the present state of the religious world, but what has been often reiterated in that journal; fragments of which it adduces in proof of the justice of its remark. This is not to be disputed; but, then, these descriptions have been so diluted by the mixture of contradictory matter that they have produced no effect. And, since the Christian Observer has said the same thing itself, it is marvellous that it should censure its own opinions when echoed by Mr. Irving. In like manner, Cobbett has made known the advantages of the acacia tree: he has said nothing new, but only that which has been often repeated before. Some wise men have denied his merit, because they can find all that he says in Miller's Gardener's Dictionary, published above 100 years previously. His defence is complete: he replies, "This is all very true, gentlemen; but how comes it to pass, then, that you never planted these trees as a source of profit from what you read in Miller, and that you never thought of doing such a thing till I wrote about it?".

Our third example is from two Reverend Doctors, who shall be nameless; one of whom preached for a while at Brighton, and the other is actually located in a chapel in London. By an application of terms, which they of course call judicious, and we call artful and dishonest, they contrive to keep their chapels full; and among their auditory are to be found Calvinists, ready to bristle up for every one of the five points; Arminians, straining after perfection in the flesh; and worldly people (and of considerable acuteness of intellect too, as their published works shew), who absolutely deny the root of the Christian scheme, and who maintain that they never hear from their minister any thing to which they do not cordially agree. This is effected by the use . of conventional terms, not one of which is ever defined and * Antichrist; Papal, Protestant, and Infidel: an Estimate of the Religion of the Times.

therefore the preachers and the hearers are constantly playing at cross-purposes. The preachers conceive that they are doing great good to the unawakened part of their congregation, by acting so as to bring them under what they call the sound of the Gospel;' whereas they are, in fact, starving the children of God for the sake of retaining a particular body of followers. Nay, so little disguise do the preachers themselves assume as to their object, that whenever they go to other congregations, and especially if composed of poor people, they preach in a totally different

manner.

It would scarcely be credited, by those who have not made the comparison, how close a resemblance there is between the statements of doctrine in the published sermons of the Evangelical Clergy, and those of the Church of Rome. We could point to scores of volumes in which not one sentence occurs that would offend the ears of the most sensitive admirer of the Council of Trent: for be it remembered, that the Papists admit the doctrine of justification by faith, in a certain sense, and that the Evangelical body does no more. If our limits would permit, we might, moreover, proceed to point out sermons which pass for Evangelical, and which nevertheless contain no one sentence that might not have been written by an Arian or Socinian. not mean to assert that Bishop Jebb, for example, holds either of those heresies; or to suppose, that, if he did, he would be so dishonest as to receive the wages and dignities of that church from which he was in heart an apostate: but if any one is tempted to doubt the accuracy of the tenor of our remarks, we beg him, by way of experiment, to turn to the volume of Sermons by this Bishop, and try whether he can, out of it alone, prove the writer to be orthodox on the Atonement.

We do

There is one other cause still of the low state of theology prevalent amongst us; and that is, the absence of controversy, and the distaste of controversial writing. It is totally impossible that a Christian can be solidly established upon any one point unless he have examined both sides of it. The spirit of personal abuse, which usually accompanies works of controversy, is not only to be avoided on account of its inherent impropriety, but also on account of the distaste which it creates in delicate minds; whereby it repels, rather than entices, the perusal of really valuable works. Such is, doubtless, the cause of many excellent persons having an instinctive horror at the very name of a controversial publication.-It is also to be admitted, that very few works of this nature enter really and honestly into the merits of the point in dispute. The writings of Dr. Wardlaw on Socinianism are a model of this species of composition. If ever he states the argument of his adversary in any other language than his own, he also does so for his opponent's advantage: whereas controversialists in

general fasten upon some collateral expression, to which a meaning is attached directly at variance perhaps with the main scope of the author, and he is charged with holding opinions as abhorrent to himself as to his slanderous accuser. Of this we have a recent example in the dishonest attack upon Mr. Irving by Mr. J. A. Haldane and his associate Cole.

Another cause will be found in what more nearly touches our own gentle craft; we mean, that of Reviewers and we earnestly exhort our brethren in this vocation to remember, that it is impossible, or at least extremely difficult, to teach sound theology upon any of the great and deep mysteries of God in periodical journals. Whether it be owing to an entire want of capacity in the conductors, and a total ignorance of what is and what is not the highest department of theology; or whether it proceed from some other cause; certain it is that the Religious Magazines have never entered, as far as we have been able to discover, into a full examination of any one of the few works of this character which have appeared in latter years among us. A brief notice of the title and contents, with a little abuse or flattery, according as the author happens to be or not to be of the sect of the reviewer, is all that we can detect in the piles of the Christian Observer, Evangelical, Eclectic, Congregational, Methodist, and Baptist Magazines. Goode's Essays, Williams on the Decrees, Vaughan's Notes to Luther, or his Popular Essays, President Edwards's Treatises, Irving's Preface to Ben Ezra, and a few other works of a similar description, seem to be as much beyond the grasp of editors of religious magazines as if they were written in Chinese. We mention this as a ground of watchfulness to ourselves; and as one to which our contemporaries should especially direct their attention. If our brother journalists are really anxious to advance the interests of religion, we entreat them to remember, that as the necessary tendency of reviews is to substitute shallow for deep and solid views of all subjects, so it requires a continued effort on the part of their conductors to counteract this natural bias. But the fact is, that the magazines have tended to inculcate quite an opposite opinion, and to encourage the idea that they have been the means of advancing sound theology. We have already, in a former number, proved that they have not done this: and we beg it may be distinctly understood, that in going beyond this, and in saying that it is impossible that this species of publication should become a complete theological instructor, we fully include ourselves. Indeed, we should hold ourselves to be most arrant quacks, if we did not honestly avow that we can at best but give hints and ideas and outlines, which may suggest, or direct, meditation; but that it is meditation alone, upon some of the revealed characters or purposes of Jehovah, that can make a holy Christian.