That vast scheme of impiety and cruelty which, by an error, has been called Popery, and against which Luther protested, embraces several elements intimately blended indeed within the Romish system, but which are easily separable in theory, and have actually existed apart.

Looking no deeper at present than the surface, we may enumerate the ingredients of the Romish impiety under the heads of ASCETICISM, SUPERSTITION, and DESPOTISM; otherwise termed MONKERY, DEMONOLATRY, and HIERARCHICAL TYRANNY: and they are here named in their chronological order-the first (asceticism) dating its origin from almost the earliest age; the second (superstition) from the middle of the third century, or earlier;-the last (despotism) as visible and in act, from the middle of the fourth.

But these elements severally and collectively imply, and may be clearly traced as having sprung from, a removal or dislodgement of the doctrine which is characteristic of the GOSPEL, as proclaimed by the apostles. Now, whereas many of the earlier witnesses for apostolic Christianity seem (so far as the very scanty evidence enables us to judge) to have assailed directly, either the asceticism, or the superstition, or the despotism of the prevailing system, Luther, even while yet himself an ascetic, and while bowing to much of the superstition of Rome, and while allowing, and submitting himself to, her usurped authority, had become vividly conscious of that fatal departure of the church from the first truth of the Gospel, of which departure the monkery, the idolatry, the cruelty were but the exterior products, and the indications.

Luther had become substantially possessed of TRUTH, in his cell at Erfurt, long before he had disengaged himself from the errors of Romanism. He did not assail those errors in the detail, until after he was grown to a mature stature in the knowledge and enjoyment of THE TRUTH. When he did assail error in the detail, it was because he had already felt its incompatibility with THE TRUTH. He reasoned always from the centre outward; not as from without toward the centre. He threw

off the errors of the Church, article by article, from the interior force of a spiritual vitality; or as a husk which the ripened fruit rejects. The false principles, and corrupt usages in which he had been bred, and to which he had himself been most firmly attached, shaled away, one by one from his mind, from his conduct, from his creed, as exuviæ, which the energy of a genuine piety could no longer endure.

Just where most men would have commenced their attack upon the errors of Rome, Luther ended his. In the devout perusal of the scriptures, while yet, not merely a monk, but a devoted son of the church, he had discovered the glory and peculiarity of the Christian system. This -the doctrine of Grace, became from that moment his doctrine: it was to him a rock of strength, and his steady adherence to it was manifestly the prime reason of his success. When, early in his course, roused to protest against the shameless traffic in Indulgences, the horrible abuses that were connected with that traffic, furnished only incidental reasons, with him, for withstanding the rapacity of the Romish court, in this particular. Minds of inferior stamp, or minds not" taught from above," would almost certainly have spent themselves in decrying the abuses of the practice: Luther at once denounced the principle; for he felt that the doctrine assumed by the church, in pretending to have pardon at her disposal, could never be made to consist with the first article of a genuine Christian belief.-The sinner needs nothing which he may not immediately obtain by looking to the Saviour, who once offered himself, "the just for the unjust:"-the sinner who has already believed in Christ, has "passed from death unto life," and is no more liable to condemnation; nor can the church either sell or give that which can never either be at her disposal, or even exist at all. There is no supererogatory merit-there can be none; the outrageous impiety therefore of selling licenses to sin, is preceded by an error even more fatalthat of denying the first truth of the gospel.

The Romish system, and with it a system much older than the Romish, was

overthrown virtually, by this protest against the principle of Indulgences; and, in adhering to this principle, from which in fact Luther never swerved for a moment, he was himself drawn forward-or one might say driven, and often against the whole force of his early prejudices, to denounce error after error, of the Mystery of wickedness.

It was not on the ground of any abstract deduction that the Reformer came to affirm the supreme authority of the Holy Scriptures, and rejected the interpretations, if contrary thereto, of Fathers, Councils, and Popes. The Doctrine of Grace was God's truth; and he had not only found it in the letter of scripture, but he had felt its vitality as a heaven-descended energy.Whatever then contravenes this truth, can de of no valid authority, and ought to be rejected. The second step, therefore, in the Reformation, was an involuntary, or rather an unavoidable consequence of the first; but then from this second, namely, a bold and unbending affirmation of the supreme authority of the Canonical Scrip. tures, every other article of the protest against the papacy necessarily followed; including the pregnant principles of religious liberty, and of individual responsibility of men to God, in respect of their religious opinions.

On the ground of a copious induction of instances, drawn from the history of the twelve preceding centuries, it may safely be affirmed, that, if the Monk of Wittenberg had stopped at the scandals and abuses attaching to the Papacy, nothing more, at the very best, would have resulted from declamations, than a temporary correction, or rather a cloaking of those abuses. Or had he commenced with an assault upon such things as the worship of the virgin and the saints-the doctrine of purgatory -the evils and follies of monkery-or the usurped lordship of the Bishop of Rome, his books and himself would, within five years, have perished in the flames; and the last hope of mankind (ór such to appearance) must have gone out, amid the embers of his pyre.

A perusal of Luther's history must surely bring home to the mind a powerful

conviction of this truth-That the doctrine of grace, the freeness, sufficiency, and unencumbered efficacy of the justification ob- . tained through faith in Christ's work, and his once offered sacrifice, was the spring and reason of the Reformation. If this be granted, an inference, most momentous, will not be denied-That the same doctrine, vividly felt to be true, and clearly proclaimed, must, in every age, furnish the means, and the only effectual means, of excluding from any church, or from any country, how enlightened soever, the follies, the superstitions, the crueltiesthe black cloud of ignorance and ferocity, which is at all times imminent, and actually near, to spread itself over the social system. Popery is nothing but man's own religion, embellished with the spoils of Christianity. To be rid of Popery we must have recourse, if not to Atheism, to THE GOSPEL the very same Gospel, in substance, by a recovery of which, Luther, and the great men who were his associates, in his own and other countries, broke the despotism of Rome, and opened the way for its final, and now approaching overthrow.

Very many are accustomed to exult in the political and intellectual consequences of the Lutheran reformation; and many applaud and defend Luther (as did Bayle) who fail to recognise, and would even deny, if affirmed, the simple fact we are here insisting upon, that Europe would have seen no Lutheran reformation, had not Luther, and Zuingle, and others, before they thought of acting the part of reformers, and while they were yet themselves the abject slaves of the Papacy, received from on high a doctrine with which no forms of superstition, no spiritual despotism, will ever be made to consist; and which doc trine, while in its aspect toward man, individually, as a sinner, it affords the only ground of hope, so, in its less direct, but inevitable influence over the condition of man in society, constitutes the unobtrusive, but effectual guarantee of national liberties. It does so, as well by the firm moral tone which it imparts to the social system, as by the necessity it involves of a constant appeal to the supreme authority of scrip

ture; for this very appeal implies religious liberty; and religious liberty secures political liberty.

Luther's prime doctrine-the spring and power of the reformation, and the distinction of the canonical scriptures, can be established only by evidence and argument, thence immediately derived. Almost all human authority is against it. Hence it is that, whoever, by perusal of the scriptures, by the means of scriptural instruction, and by the "teaching from above," has cordially embraced this doctrine, is thereby brought into a position in which, by an indirect but necessary consequence, he is compelled to be the advocate of, and, if need be, a martyr for, the natural rights of mankind, and the inviolability of conscience. Many, even among those whose temper and prejudices have inclined them always to side with "authority," legitimate, or illegitimate, have, by the irresistible tendency of a deeper influence, been compelled to speak and act on the side of liberty, when drawn or driven to make their protest for THE GosPEL. So true is the word, whether understood as addressed to men individually or socially, "If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed:" and again, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

As well with the view of corroborating by instances these general affirmations, as to enable the reader to connect his notions of the Lutheran reformation with the current of preceding events, during the lapse of centuries, we shall, in this essay, and as succinctly as possible, mention several endeavours that had been made, in the course of ages, to recover apostolic Christianity; or, at least, to maintain a protest against the illusions and the tyranny of the prevailing church system.

When the question is insultingly put by Romanists, "Where was Lutheranism, where was Calvinism, where was the boasted doctrine of Cranmer, Knox, Zuingle, before the sixteenth century?" We are ready with our reply:-This doctrine was not merely in the scriptures, but in the hearts, and on the lips of a continuous succession of witnesses: it was professed

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by churches, taught by a series of pastors, and sealed by the blood of thousands of martyrs. But these, how few they were!" We answer, first, they would have been many more, had not a sanguinary despotism "worn them out," from age to age, by the sword and fire; and, secondly, they doubtless were, in every age, many more than can now be fully ascertained, inasmuch as their triumphant enemies have used every means of fraud and calumny, to distort, or to expunge from the page of history, the evidence, whence the extent of their own horrid malice might have been learned by posterity.

Looking through the gloom of the middle ages, we descry fierce columns of fire ascending from many points over the surface of Europe; and we catch a confused sound-the stifled protest of the victims, and the yells of their persecutors; and we divine, well enough, what was taking place there; but a Righteous Heaven only knows whether it might be five of our brethren, or fifty, or many hundreds together, who, at such and such a spot, were found "faithful unto death." This however we do know, for the prophetic spirit has told us, that "the Woman," at whose pleasure those victims perished, from age to age, quaffed blood enough to be always "drunk with the blood of the saints;" and then, adhering to the analogy of experience, which shows that the perpetual drunkard needs larger and larger potations, from day to day, to produce the beastly bliss which he seeks, we safely infer that the Intemperate Personage who satiated her appetite with a handful of victims in her young days, could not have asked for fewer than thousands after she had practised herself in inebriation during centuries.

Our Lord's promises to his people and ministers, extend no farther than thisThat a TESTIMONY in his behalf should be maintained, from age to age, even till he shall come again; and that this office of witnessing for him in an evil world should be committed to a Visible Community, which, although driven into the wilderness, and threatened perpetually with extermination, should not, at any moment, become extinct:-the gates of Hades shall

not prevail against it-the true church shall never be swallowed up, or cease to have a place among the living.

At the same time the ordinary condition of the true church, through a long course of ages, is so significantly described as wholly to preclude the pretensions of the spiritual tyranny which has called itself "the church." The persecuting power too, symbolized as ecclesiastical, not secular, is so specified, and the temper and conduct and principles of the two parties -the sanguinary and idolatrous majority, and the suffering minority, pure in faith and practice, are so pictured by the hand of prophecy, as to remove all ambiguity from the interpretation which we should put upon the tenor of church history. When read in the light of the New Testament-a light shining" forward into "a dark place," the history of Christianity, during the past eighteen centuries, is thoroughly intelligible, and it conveys a lesson which, at the present moment, it behoves every Christian most seriously to ponder.

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It is assumed that the reader's religious sympathies are unreservedly on the side of Luther, and his associates, as the servants of God, righteously contending for the Truth, with a corrupt, cruel, and apostate church. In thus speaking of the Reformers, German, Swiss, and English, we neither affirm them to have been faultless in creed, like men inspired; nor faultless in personal conduct. They were honest and eminently godly men, who, at the risk of their lives, reclaimed for mankind the blessings of Christianity.

But if such were the Reformers, and on this point a difference of opinion is not here anticipated, there may be room for some misunderstanding, and even disagree ment, when inquiry is made as to the Body, or the Power, or the System, with which the Reformers had to contend. The ready reply is, The church of Rome was their a tagonist. But if we mean by this, merely the usurping Bishop of Rome, and his ministers; then an exception must be taken, inasmuch as the Reformers geneally, and some of them especially, advanced very far in the work of reforma

tion, and actually awakened the nations to a sense of their spiritual destitution, while yet themselves bowing to the successors of St. Peter, and admitting them to be the holders of the keys, and the legitimate lords of the church.

If our answer be-It was the doctrine of the Romish church, and its many superstitions, and its corruptions, which the Reformers assailed; this is true indeed; but it is a portion only of the truth; for, in the first place, nearly the same doctrine, and the same superstitions (though not the same despotism) attached to eastern, as well as to western Christendom, and therefore something far more extensive than Popery was equally liable to the assault of the Reformers. But secondly, and this exception is of more immediate moment, what the Reformers protested against in doctrine, practice, and principle, was (as may readily be proved,) two or three centuries older than the papacy.

The papacy was indeed the visible object of assault, and the party actually contended with:-it was the party named and inveighed against; and the party coming forward with its energies of cruelty to crush the protest. This however was but a circumstance of the controversy; the SUBSTANCE of it was the recovery of apostolic Christianity, as opposed to illusions dating their rise from the moment of the cessation of the personal ministry of the apostles. That the Reformers themselves should have been imperfectly conscious of the high antiquity of the errors they denounced, is not surprising. In the contest with their adversaries, concerning particu lar superstitions, or corruptions, they could not but avail themselves (as often as might serve them) of the authority of the writers of an older time, when these superstitions or corruptions, not having been enacted and enforced, were not recognised, and even, perhaps, were sometimes denounced; although, by the very same writers, admitted in principle.

The Reformers therefore, by an argumentative necessity, always pressing upon them, were trained in the habit of making their appeal against modern Rome to the Fathers of the first four or five centuries,

and on some points their appeal was open to no fair exception. Such, for example, as the universality of the vicarship claimed by the bishop of Rome; a pretension only whispered until a late age, and stoutly opposed when first advanced-the direct and undisguised worship of "the Queen of Heaven"-the doctrine of purgatory in a distinct form, as the reason of the mercenary practices of the church, in selling deliverance from its pains;-and the broadly expressed enormities of Transubstantiation. These things were clearly Rome's own. They could not be made good by patristic authority, and in protesting against them, the Reformers called the Fathers, their Fathers--and justly.

The age of the Reformation was a time of too much confusion—of too much contention-of too much labour, suffering, and fear, to favour calm and laborious researches, or to allow of a due regard to important, but recondite distinctions. The Reformers therefore very generally claimed the Fathers as their allies, in their controversy with the papacy;-this was natural. But the inevitable consequences, embarrassing to themselves, and much more so to those, in later times, who have inherited their opinions, were, in the first place, that they left, with the Church of Rome, a high argumentative advantage, which might still substantiate the greater part of her doctrines, and the elements of all her superstitions, by allowing an appeal to these same Fathers; and, in the second place, an adherence, on their own part, to more than one or two of the errors, doctrinal and ritual, of the third and fourth centuries.

Along with other causes (not connected with our immediate subject) this pending upon the authority of the early church natural and excusable as it was, saved the papacy on the one side, and so enfeebled and embarrassed the reformation on the other, as that the energy and movement of the sixteenth century were scarcely continued into the seventeenth, and that a relapse, or reaction, soon took place, from which the reformed churches have not yet recovered, and which, at this very moment, is putting more than one of them in

peril of a return to the illusions and superstitions of the darkest era of Christian history.

The Reformers burst away from the very bosom of Romanism, and while they renounced what had been more recently appended to the church system, they brought with them too much of what the papacy had passively inherited. If, instead of having sprung from the Romish church, they had sprung from the ancient, and then almost forgotten remonstrant communities, which Rome had so long been endeavouring to crush, they probably would have disengaged themselves more readily and effectually from the thraldom of patristic authority. We, however, of this age, acknowledging the Reformers as the restorers of the great principles of the gospel, need feel little difficulty in allowing for the inauspicious deference they paid to writers who, in spirit and tendency, were much more nearly allied to Rome, than to themselves.

The theological predecessors of the Reformers-the long series of witnesses and martyrs, in a word, the true, afflicted church, had been anathematized, and driven into the wilderness by those very menthe Nicene divines, to whom the Reformers, as we have said, were induced by their early predilections, and the peculiarity of their position, to render an illmerited homage. The fact is most remarkable and instructive, and it affords a striking instance of the narrow limits within which the human mind takes its range, when those who, in the sixteenth century, protested against Romish errors, are seen appealing for support to the authors of those errors, and who, in the fourth century, had used the engines of church tyranny, for crushing a remonstrance, identical almost in terms, and quite so in spirit, with their own. curious point of religious history, well deserves our attention.

This

Although many indications occur, even in the third century, of dissatisfaction, on the part of better-minded Christians, in regard to the gross superstitions and the spurious, ascetic pietism, which were then every day making new advances, yet it