REMARKS ON THE CENSURE OF MODERN DISSENTING PREACH

ING.

(To the Editors) GENTLEMEN,-I have read Mnason's paper in your number for October, entitled, "An Hint on Modern Dissenting Preaching" with some attention, and perceive that he anticipates a declension and decay of the dissenting cause, from a novel and unevangelical mode of preaching, which he fancies has become prevalent. To prevent, if possible, the dreaded evil, he invites one of the fathers of Independency to write essays in your Magazine, to teach his younger brethren how to enforce Gospel truths from the pulpit. Whether "Paul the aged," will undertake the office or not, I cannot tell; but if you will be kind enough to insert in your next number the following remarks, they may not, perhaps, be useless.

Young preachers are particularly referred to in that paper, and the fault of which it is insinuated they are guilty, certainly involves a censure on their character, and must be a preven tative of their usefulness. For "wordy unevangelical harangues" can never subserve the interests of the kingdom of God, and they prove those who deliver them to be neither scholars nor divines. I own, that my knowledge of the young ministers of this kingdom, throughout the whole of which your Magazine is circulated, is not very general, (and perhaps Mnason's information concerning them is not much more extensive than my own;) but I have the honour intimately to know a very considerable number of them, and I must say, that if Doddridge, whose memory Mnason venerates, preached the Gospel-if the discourses of Watts, and many other fathers of Independency, are not wordy and unevangelical," then

the generality of young ministers in the present age may justly claim exemption from the charge. There may be a few indeed to whom the imputation will apply, but what are they to the whole number? They are but as the small dust of the balance, and a hint given thus generally, only serves to sink the character of the class, and to furnish restless and evil-minded persons, (of whom most congregations have their share,) with an authority to rail at pious and indefatigable young men, who are too much the servants of Christ to gratify individual and erroneous caprice. If a few leaves wither in the summer, are we from thence to infer that all the trees in the land are blighted? And because there are a few deserters in the army, is it either wise or proper to insinuate, that defection pervades the whole? Young preachers have enough to endure, without having the mouths of factious professors needlessly opened against them.

Of all the religious denominations in England, none have a better opportunity of securing a succession of able and holy ministers than the Independents, if they only act on their own principles, and adhere to their own system; and consequently they should be the last to complain of an inefficient ministry. They have the privilege of choosing candidates for the ministry, and of superintending their education; and they have an uncontrolable right to choose their ministers; and if, in the course of his ministry, he relinquish the Gospel of Christ, or become inattentive to charge, they can, in most cases, remove him, without difficulty. If, therefore, churches act injudiciously in recommending candidates for the ministry, or quietly abandon the control they constitutionally possess in that business, and permit improper persons

his

Almost forty years before that period, Dr. Burnet had written, that the Dissenters had then, in a great measure, lost that good character for seriousness in religion, which had gained them their credit, and made such numbers fall off to them." It would be easy to quote similar statements from both earlier and later writers. What the Dissenting interest was in its best days, before this decay seized it, I know not; but this I know, that eight out of every ten of the Dissenting chapels that I have seen, have been built since the days of Burnet and Doddridge, and have been built too in places, where Dissenters, as a body, then had scarcely any existence. How is it that the Dissenting cause is decaying, and its preachers unevangelical, when every year your magazine tells us of many new chapels that have been built, and of many old ones that have been enlarged?

Complaints against ministers for not preaching the gospel are easily made, and very readily propagated; but are those complaints just and true? I impute not to Mnason, or any of your respectable corre spondents, antinomian prejudices, but I believe that they may he seduced to join in the cry of those who would have condemned the ministry of Doddridge and Watts as unevangelical, and who would have found the practical discourses even of Goodwin and Owen unpalatable to their taste.

I dare that the young say preachers of the time, though many of them have repeatedly read with care, what Burnet, Baxter, Wilkins, Jennings, Franck, Watts, Doddridge, Claude, Whitherspoon, Booth, Dwight, and others, have written on the ministerial office, will be happy to read any thing that Paul the Aged may have further to say on the subject.

CANDIDUS.

FRAGMENT OF A JESUIT'S SERMON,

ADDRESSED TO THE CHINESE.

(To the Editors.)'

GENTLEMEN,-I was much interested in the valuable tract of Mosheim you have republished in the course of the present year, "Authentic Memoirs containing of the Christian Church in China," and which, I doubt not, has diffused the valuable information it contains, amongst a thousand readers who never heard of the very rare pamphlet from which it was printed.

The other day, whilst looking through that curious and learned work of the celebrated Robert Fleming, entitled Christology, &c. I was not a little pleased to light upon the following specimen of the preaching of the Jesuits in China, which that honest writer states he received from an English gentleman long resident in the celestial Empire, and who was himself an auditor of this contemptible that cross in which the Apostle of effort to conceal the reproach of the Gentiles gloried.

As the passage strikingly illustrates and confirms the statements of Mosheim, and as the book which contains it is now antiquated and scarce, allow me to request you will insert the extract in your Miscellany before you close the present volume. That labours your may be continued through many more, is the wish of your constant reader,

X. X.

"Ye have had many very great, wise, and excellent Emperors here in China, and no nation can boast of the like; but yet none of these, nor indeed all of them, can be compared to the Eternal Emperor, Jesus Christ. That ye may know this, I will now give a short, but true and exact account of him. The world being very wicked, and men very miserable, by reason of the ty

ranny of these kings and princes that ruled before his coming, especially the head of all these, the Emperor of Rome, who reigned over the greatest part of the world at that time, with terrible rigour and cruelty; God took pity upon mankind at last, as finding their state grow worse and worse. To rectify this, he resolves to send his own Son from heaven to subdue these tyrants, and reduce things to order again. Well, at length the heavens appear more glorious than ever before, a wonderful light, bright and glorious, that outshone the sun by ten thousand degrees, breaks forth, great noises are heard in the air, with most wonderful and delightful music, and at length a prodigious army of more than a thousand thousand millions of angels appears in sight, before whom marches a chariot of a prodigious bigness, all of solid gold, most curiously wrought, but so thick set with precious stones, that the gold could hardly be seen for their sparkling and dazzling splendour. This chariot was drawn by ten thousand bright and nimble spirits, and a hundred thousand of a nobler rank guarded this chariot before and on either side, being commanded and led by Raphael the archangel, as the rest of the army that followed the chariot was by the great Michael, the first of all the archangels, and lieutenant-general to Christ himself, who rode in this golden chariot, and commanded all. Now, says the Jesuit, here all language fails me in setting forth the glory of this great General; he was of a most prodigious stature, as big as a thousand men, but most wonderfully beautiful and exactly symmetred. His face outshone the sun so far in splendour, as is beyond all conception; he had a prodigious flaming sword in his left hand, the very sight of which was terrible; but in his

right hand he had the ensign of the cross, which had a sanative virtue in it, to remove distempers, and cheer the heart, to recover the frenzical and distracted, to raise the dead; and in a word, to work all manner of miracles, to remove mountains, dry up seas, &c. Now (says he) all tyrants and wicked men were convicted and punished by him, and the Roman Empire destroyed; in the stead of which he raised up one Peter, a most eminently holy and excellent person, to rule the whole world for him as his vicegerent. He destroyed not only the empire of Rome, but the name of einperor, and the very form of that government; and in its stead, he erected a holy constitution, over which he set this wise and holy man Peter, ordering, that when he should be called out of the world into heaven, that his chief priests should come together and pray to him, and that upon their so doing, he would send them an angel to tell them what person he had pitched upon to succeed in this sacred and universal headship over the world. And when he had done this, he took his leave of Peter and his bishops, and went to heaven with all his army, in the same glorious and triumphant manner in which he came. he assured his viceroy Peter, that as often as he desired, he should hear from him by a special messenger, who should assist him in all dark cases, and affairs of consequence. And he never failed to do so to Peter, and all his successors the Popes. So that (says the priest) the Pope that now is, has had frequent messages from Christ in heaven, commanding him to send holy men to the great empire of China, out of the great love he has for that learned, wise, and excellent people, to invite them to leave their idolatrous priests and false worship, and own him and his vicegerent the Pope.

But,