impartial but ridiculous extent to which the Christian Legislature must be carried!! But still the question may be-how know we that the Church will teach religion in its broad and moderate spirit, apart from the extremes of Puseyism or Calvinism? We answer-you have every guarantee for such teaching laid down in the articles and liturgy of the Church of England. From these the Church cannot depart, and will not depart, until Parliament should compel her to do so; and that Parliament must represent the will and wishes of the people of England. The bishops have lately set down even a slight attempt at construing the meaning of the articles (No. 30), which was considered not agreeable to the plain construction of the Church; and they are bound to do so again, should any attempt be made in the same direction. The religion of those articles and liturgy form the Christian sentiments of the Established Church, and that Established or National Church is the Church of the nation at the rate of five to one of its people. The State, then, may feel obliged, even on this ground, to teach the doctrines only of that Church which is in connexion with herself. But there are yet higher grounds than this; for it might be (as in Scotland) that a scriptural and apostolic Church may not be in connexion with the State. In England we have happily no apprehension on this point. We are the ancient Church formed irrespective of any aid or countenance from any civil power or State. We date from the commencement of Christianity; and our after connexion with the State is not an accident, or a yielding of the principles of the first formed Church, but of the will of God. We boast an antiquity prior to the Scriptures themselves, and by our first ministers the Scriptures were written at the command of the Most High and Holy One, from whom they received their commission, and the Scriptures their inspiration. We therefore stand on the ground of being of the first Christian Church in the world-of being the very first Church in this country-of having purified ourselves from the transient errors of Rome; and, as being of apostolic constitution and discipline, entitled to the priority of rank and esteem in preference to the ever varied and ever divisible sects that always will exist, whether in ecclesiastical or political matters, to the one grand established system under which the vast majority own it to be secure and salutary to live. All that now remains to be considered is the manner, under the circumstances of a schismatic period, in which education should be given-that education which is to be of the heart, in sanctified knowledge, as well as of the mind. We would say, then, that, as Christians, we would thrust our teaching on no man, and on no man's child (contrary to the inquisitive and proselytising custom of Dissent). And we would say to any Dissenter, "we will teach your children all the good we are capable of in the way of education, and if you put a veto on our teaching them our own religious opinions, we will at once refrain; but, at the same time, we cannot like to see schools erected and supported for the inculcation of all kinds of heterogeneous opinions, which, in the majority of them, are exceedingly narrow and subversive of the best tenets of the Christian religion." This we might say, as holding broad and tolerant views of religion (whether we be of the Church of England or not), to any one professing and insisting on the teaching of opinions which we supposed to be more confined; but when, in addition, we belong to a Church established for ages, and when we are called on to give way to sects and societies of comparatively but yesterday in their formation and notions, (and how know we what new sect a day may bring forth?) and which sects, professing to be voluntary, now clamour for the money and countenance of the State and Acts of Parliament; and, moreover, when they have full and free course to educate their children as they please in religious matters. Surely, then, we are doing nothing unjust or illiberal-nothing more than a love of broad and comprehensive principles should incite us to do, when we decline to forward the heterogeneous scheme of schismatic confusion; but, at the same time, in a true spirit of liberality, say, "we will teach our principles to none but those who wish and love to be taught them; and, what is more, those who differ from us shall teach what they choose to others, undisturbed by any interference from us." Now is not this what the Government plan would say?-and can it reasonably say more? We do not certainly hold their plans to be quite sound, because the Gospel must be taught to those who may not like to be taught it. But it will give the children of Dissenters an education, and also a religious education, as far as reading the Scriptures is concerned; but it will not teach the peculiarities and prejudices of any sect, while it will teach the religion of the vast majority of the people (we mean the catechism and creeds of the Church) only to those who desire to be so taught. What can any honest and candid Dissenters find to cavil at in this-and who would have imagined that this liberal scheme would have caused that black out-pouring of Dissenting bile which the country has so unfortunately witnessed, thus giving a just cause for infidelity to plume itself on a partial triumph over a religion professing to proceed from the portals of heaven? Sir James Graham has nobly, in the true spirit of Christianity, when he was reviled, reviled not again; he has held out the olive-branch of peace and friendly feeling, in answer to all the exaggerations and deliberate misrepresentations of Dissenting communities; and do let us hope that his generosity and kindness may yet be honourably and peacefully met-that this religious frenzy may be composed, in this instance, before the awful consideration of the ignorance and religious destitution around us; and especially that Wesleyans, not forgetful of Wesley and his attachment, under all circumstances, to the Church, may join with Churchmen in the words of Wesley's excellent biographer "From public fountains the perennial stream O England! wheresoe'er thy churches stand, Where the rich harvest of mortality Is laid, as in a garner, treasured up, There plant the tree of knowledge! Water it Shield it against the storm, And bring forth fruits of life." ART. X.-Christ as Prophet, Priest, and King: being a Vindication of the Church of England from Theological Novelties, in Eight Lectures, preached before the University of Oxford, at Canon Bampton's Lecture in the year 1842. By JAMES GARBETT, M.A., Rector of Clayton, Sussex, and Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. 2 vols. London: Hatchards. IF we allowed the creation of saints to be one of the functions of the Church, and that saintship depended upon the amount of benefit conferred on the Church by an individual member, few men whom we can call to mind would be better entitled to it in the Church of England, or would stand in a higher rank, than the founder of the Bampton lectures; in speaking of which we know not whether we should most admire the judgment which prompted their institution, or the constantly-sustained energy and learning by which they have been so long distinguished. The conditions of the endowment, vesting the choice of the lecturer in the Heads of Houses, has ensured a learned choice-as forbidding the appointment of the same person more than once, has secured freshness and vigour to the lectures; for since the opportunity can but once occur to any man, he will endeavour to distinguish himself on that one occasion, and, being enrolled in such a list, will put forth all his strength. And such expectations have been justified in the results, whether we look at the importance of the subjects which have been handled, or at the long list of lecturers, amongst whom there is scarcely a name which has not afterwards become associated with eminence in literature or in the Church. And while the range of subjects has been prescribed and wisely limited to the great practical questions of divinity, there has been found ample room, under one or other of these heads, to introduce the discusssion of every important religious topic which has from time to time occupied the attention of the Church. So that these lectures might almost serve for an ecclesiastical history of their corresponding years, as far as doctrine bears upon history; and they certainly indicate the doctrines which were most prominent in the Church of England at the time, and denounce the prevailing errors. The only drawback upon the lectures arises from their being contemporaneous with the questions which arise and agitate the Church, since the lecturer cannot speak with authority-cannot settle any question-can only lay it open for discussion; and he, being, as an individual, liable to some personal bias, will unconsciously impart it to the question he discusses. And Mr. Garbett, having been elected to the Professorship in opposition to one of the writers of the Oxford Tracts, and alluding to the doctrines held by those writers as "theological novelties," from the reproach of countenancing which he would vindicate the Church of England, is on these accounts to be regarded as a partizan, and almost as pledged, and bound up, and committed to one side of the question. But on a manly and generous spirit this committal to a party does not lead to misrepresentation or contempt of the opposite party, nor any of the vulgar practices of vilification which ordinarily disgrace party strife. On the contrary, a noble mind, desirous of doing ample justice to an opponent, is apt to err in the opposite extreme; and, where praise can be given, to be lavish and extravagant, as we think Mr. Garbett has been in such passages as these: --- "No adequate conception can be formed of the masterly intellect which has consolidated them (the theological novelties) into one gigantic Church system, if they be examined from the standing point of the Church of England, instead of from that so-called Catholicism from which they themselves regard them......... the work of a most luminous intellect, and every part coheres with every other, in a dependence alike of logical deduction and moral analogy."Preface, xi., xii. When a man like Mr. Garbett speaks of the framers of this system in terms like these, we may rest assured that they are not to be despised. Yet we must not take this praise without some qualification, or it would prove Mr. Garbett's book to be written in vain, since he has avowedly taken the Church of England for his standing point. And the best way of arriving at the just medium is by averaging the two extremes; the unfavourable extreme being taken from Mr. Goode's work, of whom, notwithstanding, Mr. Garbett always speaks highly: "Their extracts from the works of our divines generally will be found to be, for the most part, general, and loose, and indefinite passages, whose meaning depends altogether upon the context, and which are applied by the Tractators in a sense which the views of the writers, gathered from their works as a whole, altogether repudiate.......... Almost equally incorrect and fallacious are their references to the early fathers, of whose writings one might suppose, from the language they have used, that their knowledge was most accurate and extensive."Goode, xxiv. "Able and learned men," says Mr. Garbett: "equally incorrect and fallacious are their references," says Mr. Goode. The truth lies between these two extremes. These writers began, with rather more than ordinary learning and ability, a work which required the most consummate ability and most accurate research; since it was the bold undertaking of passing judgment upon a whole generation of the Church, and that such a generation as stands alone in the history of the Church-a generation of giants in theology and biblical learning, raised up to accomplish such a work as the Reformation. Mr. Garbett asserts that we need to go back beyond the standing point of the Church of England, in order to comprehend that "gigantic Church system" which our contemporaries are ambitious of constructing, and that this system should be considered, not in separate fragments, but as one luminous whole. Far more precisely does this apply to the Reformers-they were above the standing point of the Church of England; they were thrown upon themselves, and could not do the work at all except by doing it as a whole; and as one luminous whole we should always regard the Reformation. It comes out even historically, and in opposition to the Romanist branch of the Church. For what has given any semblance of unity to modern Rome? Indisputably nothing but the council of Trent. And this council, which gave all the unity which it has to Rome, was but a treading in the steps of the Reformers, and doing what they could to sustain the Roman system, the opposition to the "gigantic Church system" which the Reformers had constructed, of which |