glances of eccentric genius. We are, therefore, by no means disposed to be either angry or sad, to utter lamentations, or indulge forebodings, when such strange visitants cross our path. We presume that the world will go on much as it has been wont -that the threatening portents will pass away and return again only at distant intervals, to amaze or amuse future generations.

There is rather a puzzling question, however, which might be raised concerning the uses of these phenomena. The astronomer is perplexed with the one, and our readers must excuse us for waiving any explanation of the other. What purpose can possibly be served by much of the speculation that engages human intellects, it requires an intellect more than human to determine. Happily in the case of the singular volumes before us, we shall not be required to show that they have any useful purpose, or can by any chance subserve one. It will be some consolation to our readers, as it has been to ourselves, to perceive, that the mischief to the cause of religion, threatened by the opinions of such a writer, is in great measure counteracted by the attempt to soar higher, penetrate deeper, and take a much wider range than any other advocate of the same school. For the superstructure which is raised too high for the foundation falls by its own weight, and the ambitious frog that would surpass the ox only bursts his own skin.

'dum vult validius

Inflare sese, rupto jacuit corpore.'

We cannot better describe the present work than by saying, it is an elaborate attempt, prompted by the resuscitated spirit of popery in the Church of England, to philosophize Puseyism into a transcendental theology. It might seem that a theory so essentially dogmatic must pass through a singular process before it could be sublimated into any thing that might aspire to the ambitious name of philosophy. But we can assure our readers that nothing will satisfy the towering genius of our author, short of demonstrating that the New Doctrine is the very light from heaven, which is to explain all the seeming mysteries of man, society, and the world, and to raise human nature to the highest perfection of which it is susceptible. It will not, we trust, be imagined, that we are in the slightest degree caricaturing or satirizing the author in this statement; for he literally pretends that his theory of the kingdom of Christ is the one and the only one that is all-comprehensive, or that possesses the peculiar quality of supreme and infallible truth-that of perfect harmony with every other truth.

It is somewhat amusing that he should have chosen to put forth his speculations in the form of Letters to a Member of the Society of Friends; for it does not appear that any member of that body desired the aid of his lucubrations, or that any specific inquirer is

really addressed; and for ought we can discover, this is a mere ruse de guerre employed to impart a tone of novelty to the performance, or to surround the first principle of the author's theory with an air of superior spirituality, as identical with the fundamental principle of quakerism-which proves to be neither more nor less than the sufficiency and supremacy of the inward light. If we have understood the author correctly-a matter of which we are far from feeling confident-then his whole argument upon the nature of Christ's kingdom is built upon the very perilous and questionable notion of the identity of this inward spiritual light with inspiration; for he goes fully into the crude and strange doctrine of the indwelling of the Eternal Word in every man, and thence proceeds to make the whole scheme of redemption, the doctrine of a universal church, and of its institutions and administration, adjust itself to the covered and modified deism which, as it appears to us, is the essential element of early quakerism, and which it is here endeavoured to make the stock on which may be grafted, by a process as novel as it is ingenious, the author's peculiar notions of Christianity, his favourite dogmas of sacramental grace, the divine authority of the episcopal priesthood, and the exclusive identity of the English church with the catholic church of Christ. The following passages will sufficiently show the author's agreement with the quaker doctrine of the Eternal Word dwelling in all by nature.

The reasons and principles upon which your friends based their opposition to our priesthood and liturgy, are those very reasons and principles which Dr. Wardlaw and the Eclectic Reviewers would persuade you are utterly false and heretical, and inconsistent with Christianity. Now here is the point on which I join issue with them. I say the principles were not false and heretical and inconsistent with Christianity.' But this is not all. I maintain, that those truths which your early friends asserted, lie at the foundation of the institutions which I love. In recognizing those truths, I believe that I am upholding those institutions, and showing on what an immoveable basis they rest.' I hope I have sufficiently explained how entirely my views respecting your present position, differ from those of the churchmen and dissenters who have hitherto addressed you. Instead of wishing to dispossess you of your patriarchal faith, I lament to see that that faith is not stronger and deeper. Instead of thinking you too firmly rooted in the principles which George Fox promulgated, I would, if I could, establish you more thoroughly in them.' In plain words, I wish not to unquaker you in order to make you churchmen, but to teach you how to be thorough quakers, that you may be thorough churchmen. And this power of interpreting to you your own position, of leading you to be what each of you in some sort is striving to be, I possess, not in virtue of any talents or insight which belong to me as an individual: I possess it, because God has been pleased to

place me on the high ground of a church polity, from which I can look down and see the directions that you are taking, and show you to what point they are tending.'

The Italics are ours, and we have employed them for the purpose of marking out this passage as one of the choicest specimens of presumption, of priestly arrogance, and of an approach to infallibility, which the would-be apostolicals have yet put forth. It will serve to prepare our readers for what is to follow. The sentiment is by no means peculiar to this author. It will awaken a pious response, no doubt, in the breasts of hundreds of our established ecclesiastics, who have not yet ventured to broach it in their congregations. But we proceed with our extracts.

I consider George Fox a great man and an eminent teacher. Do not mistake me. I do not think George Fox had a commission to preach the gospel. I do not think that, in the strict sense of the word, he did preach the gospel; but I think that he was raised up to declare a truth without which the gospel has no real meaning, no permanent existence. All around him George Fox heard men preaching the doctrines of Christianity-preaching justification, sanctification, election, final perseverance, and what not; exhibiting amazing logical subtlety; making nice distinctions; building parties upon them ;his heart required something which none of them could tell him.' 'All the doctrines were about God and man-all talked of a connexion between God and man; but all their theological skill, and all their theories on human nature, seemed to George Fox only to make the distance wider between the poor man and his Lord. Impassable gulfs of speculation intervened. There was a voice in the heart of this mechanic which told him that this could not be. As he studied his Bible to understand that voice, he found continual encouragements to believe that it could not be. At the same time, the darkness that was over his mind, his incapacity for realizing that communion which he felt somehow must be possible, told him that the teachers of the day were in some sense right-that there is a deep fountain of corruption in man, and that man, unless raised out of that corruption, could never apprehend God. The tumult within him becomes more and more awful; till at last the bird of calm lights upon the waters, and the day begins to dawn. He perceives that man is a two-fold creature; that there is a power always drawing him down, to which he is naturally subject, and to be subject to which is death; but that there is also a power drawing him up, a light shining in darkness; and that to yield to that power, to dwell in that light, is life and peace. conclusion he was brought himself, and this, with the earnest zeal of a lover of mankind, he longed to tell to all the world-My brother, there is a light shining in the darkness of your heart; the darkness has not comprehended it. Oh! believe in that light, follow in that light, and be happy! Dare I say that one atom of this belief was deception? Dare I say that he was not taught this truth from above?

VOL. VII.

M

To this

Not till all the deepest and most sacred convictions of my own heart have been resisted and have perished; not till I become a traitor to God's house, and deny all his discipline; not till truth and error become hopelessly confounded and intermingled in my mind.'-p. 7—15, vol. i.

This is new and strange doctrine to be promulgated by one of the episcopally ordained and apostolically descended divines of our state church. Let the Record and the Evangelicals eschew it. But before passing on to develop the other speculations of our author, we may just observe, what an unanswerable case he has made out to annihilate the pretensions of his own church, as a teacher of all essential truth. If the whole body of the episcopal divines were in utter ignorance of this one essential key to the gospel, without which it had no meaning and could be of no service, while this illiterate quaker was the man to whom it was given to bring this one truth to light-of what use was all their apostolicity? And how much does this author's statement place the poor sectarian teacher above all the bishops and clergy, albeit apostolically descended, qualified and authorized to teach the gospel, which could neither save nor bless any without the explanation of the inward light. Yes, literally, all the bishops and clergy of preceding and of subsequent ages were in darkness and error. Alas! for the dilemma to which Mr. Maurice reduces them. They must all hide their diminished heads before the quaker preacher; for he only says to all mankind, there is a light shining in the darkness of your heart; believe in that light, follow in that light, and be happy.'

Disguise it as our author may, the inevitable tendency of this quaker doctrine is to deism; and the fruits of it are evident enough, both in the great Hicksite schism in America, and the agitated state of the body in this kingdom. The inward light which is thus boasted has all along been set up against the spirit and the letter of Christ's teaching. It is true a nominal respect for revelation has been maintained; but the commanding, practical authority has been the inward light. Its supremacy and independence have been as strongly maintained by writers of that school, as by any of the pure rationalists, though under a phraseology altogether different. Tindal never could and never would have written the three folios of Fox's Journal, Epistles, and Doctrinal Pieces; nor Fox Christianity as old as the Creation'; but the pervading principle of both writers appears to us to be identical, bating only the mysticism of the quaker phraseology. Could Tindal have been induced to give a scriptural name to his light of reason, or Fox to have written without fanaticism and as a philosopher, they might on this subject at least have shaken hands and subscribed to each other's doctrines. Happily, the unsuspected deism of the one has at last been extensively detected by his own

followers; and the open deism of the other has lost its vitality, and remains only as a mummy in the museums of the curious.

Nothing we have now written will, we trust, be construed into a denial of Fox's piety, or into a charge of any sort of heresy against our author. He is a clergyman of the apostolic church; whether of apostolic doctrine or otherwise, can be of only secondary importance, seeing' he has been placed by God 'on the high ground of a church polity, from which he can look 'down,' and show the truth to the poor quakers (yet it seems by the essential light of their own founder; for apostolical as our author is, he is content to borrow his first principle from the quakers) that he may condescendingly guide them and all other poor unillumined sectaries into the bosom of that true church, whose singularly harmonious authorities and teachers, at the present moment, believe and propagate all the widest diversities of theological opinion, from popery down to quakerism, and lower still.

But the most remarkable fact disclosed by this extraordinary production has yet to be stated; it is this, that with all our author's admiration of quaker doctrines, he still remains a churchman-yea, a high churchman, as we should say, the highest of the high. And the most curious part of his performance is that by which he manages, most satisfactorily to himself, to connect his quaker principles of the inward light with his doctrines of a catholic church, an exclusive priesthood, a permanent living authority, and sacramental grace. It will be quite impossible for us to follow him through his long course of reasoning, distinguished as it unquestionably is by much ability, and no mean share of learning. It must suffice to present to our readers a brief analysis of his scheme. This we shall endeavour to do in such a way as can scarcely be objected to by the author himself. We can assure him we have read his volumes through both with care and seriousness; that we entertain no wish to misrepresent his views, but rather to do him ample justice; and that we seek no reprisals upon him for the manner in which he has spoken of ourselves, and of the whole body of protestant dissenters. We proceed, therefore, at once to his general theory. It seems to us to be as follows. If we have mistaken him, he must pardon our obtuseness, but give us credit both for sincerity and candour.

Having amply elucidated the doctrine of the indwelling word or divine light in man, he next proceeds to show that this very light is insufficient (we presume for the maintenance of a visible church, though not perhaps for individual salvation) without the doctrines of justification and imputation, and that these doctrines are insufficient and even false when separated from the doctrine of the indwelling word; thence he advances to a universal atonement, as the foundation of the christian community. The church is the type to which the indwelling light is to conform itself;