doctrine against which the Church of England protests a so strongly, and from which the king's supremacy has so happily delivered us. But this is the doctrine to which the pretended apostolical succession directly leads; for with a ministry such as that of the Church of England, the notion of the succession is absurd; our clergy are neither priests nor governors; and if there be no divinely appointed succession for our kings and parliaments, who are the only supreme governors of the church, it is impossible to suppose that such a succession can exist in the case of the clergy, who are subordinate ministers, with no independent power in the church whatever. And, therefore, they who insist the most on this pretended succession, are really desirous to overthrow our actual church constitution, and to make the clergy either priests, or governors, or both. They complain loudly of the tyranny of the state over the church; in other words, of those wholesome laws by which the church put down the usurpations of the clergy; and they long for the Roman Catholic system of government, substituting only, according to the doctrine of the Council of Constance, the supremacy of a general council for that of the bishop of Rome. It is

a It is needless to refer to the well-known declarations of the king's supremacy; but it may not be superfluous to notice the language of the twenty-first Article respecting General Councils : General Councils may not be gathered together without the commandment and will of princes.” For this effectually asserts the supremacy of Christian governors all over the world over Christian ministers; thus distinctly denying that the government of the church is conveyed by the so called apostolical succession, inasmuch as the persons claiming to have this succession can only legislate for the church, with the permission, and at the command, of persons who do not claim to have it, and yet are members of the church, and rulers in it, and of it.

said that the Catholics are reviving the old story of the Nag's Head consecration, in order to impugn the validity of our ordinations. Now it seems to me, that any man who believes that their validity would be shaken, if that story could be proved to be true, so far from being able to answer Roman Catholic arguments, is quite fit to be a Roman Catholic himself. Our ordinations are valid, because we preach Christ's Gospel, and are appointed to our work by the law of our church; and he who seeks another warrant for them, injures the cause of Protestantism far more than he can possibly serve it by establishing the fact of the regularity of the suc

cession a.

In the foregoing pages, I have spoken of the error of the notions which I have been combating, as superstitious and mischievous; as entitled to no respect, either intellectually or morally. An error which has been itself so intolerant of truth, as well as so extensively injurious, must be opposed in plain and strong language; we must not plead for the truth as defensively, but assail the corruption which oppresses it. But I wish to make the widest difference between the error and the individuals who hold it. Had I been arguing against any one or more individuals, and not against an erroneous opinion in the abstract, the tone of my language would have been different; because in them, along with the opinion, which is merely bad, there would probably be other opinions merely good, together with many qualities, both intellectual and moral, which would claim, in a high degree, respect and love.

APPENDIX TO SERMON XVIII.

IT is assumed in this Sermon, that the tendency of atheism is towards practical wickedness. With regard to atheism in its common form actually, the truth of the assumption is self-evident; for the object of vulgar atheists is simply to take off a restraint upon the indulgence of our passions; and that the release from this restraint would involve a very great demoralization, is too plain to require proof. But, taking any purer or conceivable form of atheism, and admitting that its advocates mean by virtue and vice what we commonly mean by these terms, and that they have no intention or wish to discourage virtue and favour vice, yet, still I think it may be shown that their system has this tendency, and that, compared with Christianity as a moral engine, it is so greatly inferior, as to make its propagation, in the face of Christianity already existing, an act positively immoral.

The proof of this position appears to me to lie in this fact, that no conceivable sanction to be discovered, on a system of proper atheism, is reconcilable with some of the principal ideas expressed by the word "virtue:" in other words, that on a system of proper atheism, we cannot attach their usual meaning to the terms "obligation" and "duty;" and being thus obliged to divest the notion of virtue of its most characteristic elements, we make it synonymous with good taste or

with expediency, and substitute in the place of the perfect notion, another notion, imperfect and of a far lower kind, inasmuch as it retains only some of the less valuable elements of the entire compound.

A system of atheism may be said to offer three sanctions of moral conduct; viz. 1st, The law of nature, or the fitness of things; 2d, The law of our own consciences speaking within us; and 3d, The law of other men's judgments, whether written or unwritten. It does not matter for the present, whether we suppose virtue to consist in the love of abstract goodness and excellence (Aristotle's rò xaròv), or in the practice of what is most expedient for the welfare of mankind. Whether it be the one or the other, the question is, why, under a system of atheism, are we bound to seek after it? and the law which binds us to do so, must be either the law of nature, or of our conscience, or of other men's judg

ments.

I use these terms as I find them, and as they are often used. But, I think, that on a system of atheism, the law of nature and the law of conscience are expressions which involve a fallacy: the first, because nature, setting aside God, contains nothing capable of binding morally; the second, because it is an abuse of language to talk of a man's being bound to himself.

1. "Nature, setting aside God, contains nothing capable of binding morally." It is possible that "the law of nature" may be so interpreted as to become merely another name for God. A constitution of things favouring virtue and discouraging vice, and requiring men, as parts of the great whole, to act in conformity with it, and to support its tendencies, is little more

than the strong recoil of anthropomorphism2. Men feeling the grossness of anthropomorphic notions of the Divine Being, and following up rigorously the notion of God's omnipresence, have thus run into a denial of his personality, or pantheism. And though pantheistic doctrines have an injurious moral tendency, inasmuch as by removing all the analogies which might help us to conceive of our relations to God, they cannot but destroy religious affections: yet still they are but an awkward and obscure expression of the truth, and by no means a denial of it. They make the course of things to be a matter of order, not of accident; and by fur

Traces of this feeling are to be found in a most excellent work, written by a most sincere Christian; I mean, "The Corner Stone," by Mr. Abbott, of New England. The writer is so anxious to repel the anthropomorphic notion of " a monarch on a throne of marble and gold, with crown and sceptre, and sitting in a fancied region which we call heaven," that he ventures to describe God as "the all-pervading Power, which lives and acts throughout the whole universe. He is not a separate existence, having a special habitation in a part of it." He is the "invisible and universal Power, pervading all space and existing in all time." Now these descriptions, however true in themselves, are yet likely, I think, to produce an untrue impression, by dwelling so much upon the difference between God's personality and ours, and by so representing him as immaterial, that the language makes him appear, at the same time, almost impersonal. What Mr. Abbott denies, he denies truly; but when, not content with negative truth concerning God as he is in himself, we wish to arrive at something positive; then the imperfections of our conceptions and of our language lead us immediately into error. And this is the explanation of most of the erroneous opinions which have been entertained concerning the Divine nature. The Sabellian was right in denying Tritheism; and the Arian was right in protesting against the confusion of the notion of the Son of God with that of the Father; but both fell themselves into error when they attempted to substitute positive notions of their own in the room of the opposite notions which they condemned. And I cannot but think that the positive notions of the Unitarians as to the unity and personality of God, as if his nature, in these respects, was perfectly comprehensible, have been one main cause of their rejecting the scriptural revelation of the divinity of Christ.