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ven. Madame de Krudener published a small pamphlet upon this military review. "On beholding such a day,' she says, "who does not share all our hopes? Who does not think that the Emperor Alexander is capable of carrying all the victories of faith, and of giving all the lessons of charity?

Yes, 'old things are passed away,' as the Apostle says, and all things are become new.'

But here was the end of her great influence. The ministers of the Emperor Alexander, the members even of his family saw with displeasure that he gave so much of his confidence to Madame de Krudener. They took all possible measures to remove him from her. When Alexander left France, he did not conduct this lady into Russia. Gradually he detached himself from her, and his respect changed afterwards even into aversion. He absolutely forbade her to come to St. Petersburg, or to attempt to make proselytes in his states. Sad result of calumnies invented against her by the czar's courtiers! They were afraid, apparently, that their monarch would give his heart too completely to God!"

Then, Madame de Krudener directed her steps to Switzerland, hoping to continue among the young and the poor, the work which she was not allowed to effect among the great ones of the earth. She was accompanied in these excursions by two very suitable persons, Mr. Empeytas, minister of the Gospel in Geneva, where he then had the pastoral charge of a dissenting congregation; and Mr. Kollner of Brunswick, who, having been imprisoned for political reasons, had been converted to the Lord by reading the Bible. Madame de Krudener stopped at Bale, held religious meetings, and drew a large concourse of hearers. She succeeded by her persuasive words and deeds in gaining many proselytes. Some young ladies and some women, constrained by her discourses, distributed to the poor all that they possessed. This created some disturbance in the city. The pastors declared that Madame de Krudener pushed people into extravagance and fanaticism. The magistrates said that she dis

turbed the public peace. At last the Council of State ordered this lady to leave the country.

She went to reside in other cantons of Switzerland, and in the grand duchy of Baden, preaching everywhere, collecting the poor together, and giving them abundant alms. She had sometimes as many as four thousand of the poor around her; and from the hill-top, she would address to them pathetic entreaties to repent. Then, she distributed among them bread and other such things. It was a sort of camp-meeting, of which she bore all the expenses, drawing them from her friends' purses.

It is easy to see that this mode of distributing charity would produce disorders. The poor would no longer labour. They left their homes, their children, and flocked from a distance of eight to ten leagues to receive the gifts of their benefactress. Madame de Krudener was thus as eccentric, as inconsiderate in her conduct as in her notions. She did not reflect that by scattering indiscriminately her alms, the essential object which she proposed to gain was endangered. The poor came to her, not to be fed with the Word of God, but to get bread without working. The government of Baden sent in their turn soldiers to drive from their territory Madame de Krudener. She complained bitterly of this rigorous act, and wrote to the Prime Minister of State the following lines which I copy because they are characteristic: "I should not be reduced to the necessity of justifying myself, if I had not to traverse the desert of civilization. Your laws are condemned by the only code which I recognize that of the living God. It is for the Lord to command; for the creature to obey. The Lord knows how the voice of a feeble woman has resounded before the nations, stopped the arm of the wicked, asked and found means to feed thousands of the hungry. A mother was needed to take care of orphans. A woman brought up in the abodes of luxury was needed to say to the poor that she was happier on a wooden stool, while serving them, than when she lived in all the pomps of the world. A simple woman must confound the

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come by contrivance that over-strictness, and to obtain a measure of concession, which should seem to give countenance to the recently established idolatry. His plan was well laid. He assumed directly the fact of another communication from on high. He said, "I am a prophet as thou art; and an angel spake unto me by the word of the Lord, saying, Bring him back with thee into thine house, that he may eat bread and drink water. But he lied unto him."

The sin of the prophet of Beth-el is then very evident. It is the assumption, for a nefarious object, of a revelation from heaven; of a source of divine communication which, for the maintenance of an evil and forbidden thing, calls in question the absolute authority of the previous undoubted expression of the divine will, "I have an intimation of the will of God. I have a source of divine authority. I have a guiding revelation also." And with all this pretension, it was a falsehood. There had been no such revelation. could not be any such recognized, except it had been made to the individual himself, in the same direct unquestionable way in which the revealed instruction was originally given.

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What, then, was the special sin of the prophet from Judah? It was want of simplicity of confidence in, and of adherence to, the plain and unequivocal revelation which he had received. It was the allowing himself to observe an inferior authority, a pretence to authority, which coming to him on questionable or secondary grounds, however plausible, on mere creature averment, ought not to have weighed with him at all. He allowed the assumed authority and testimony of the Church to supersede the authority of a direct and undoubted reve lation. An inconsistent prophet, in a state of carnal backsliding through worldly compliance and conformity, chooses, in order to vindicate his own errors, to assume the fact of a communication from heaven. And he to whom a direct and undoubted communication had been made, was weak enough to listen to the pretension, and to turn aside from the path of light which a pure unequivocal

revelation had marked out for him; and to turn back upon his steps, and to take a directly contrary course, on the authority of a profession of which he could not know but what it might be a falsehood; and which, if he had seriously considered its contradictory aspect to his previous instructions, and its evident leaning towards the idolatrous association which he had been commanded to denounce and avoid, might have been fairly conIcluded to be a falsehood.

Surely we have here a very striking illustration of the two leading divisions of the Romanizing party, viz., the thorough Romanist, and the misled and erring Anglican or Tractarian. The history marks, with extreme and wonderful accuracy, the amount of sin in the two cases.

The Romanist is an apostate to an idolatrous religion. He has identified himself with that great political scheme for power which has laid hold of the moral weakness of men, and set up its idols in the house of God, and said, "These be thy Gods, O Israel." It was impossible to justify so palpably unscriptural a course, in the face of the letter of divine revelation as it stood; in the face of the absolute prohibition to introduce the likeness or image of anything whatever, into the house and the worship of God. What, then, has the Romanist done? He assumes the fact of another revelation, a communicating power of control and development in the bosom of the Church itself. "I am a prophet as thou art, and an angel has spoken unto me by the word of the Lord." The pretence of the priesthood in this respect is a very complicated affair. It is a profession of authority and revelation from the saints, from the Virgin Mary, as a sort of demi-god and partner with deity, and even from the blessed Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and the eternal Father himself. It is the assumption of a divine authority which is to supersede the plain teaching of the written Word; and which, on their unsupported testimony, even when it goes directly to contradict the injunctions of inspired Scripture, they expect to be implicitly obeyed. The original revelation, sup

ported as it has been by miraculous evidence, forbids all idolatry in any shape and form. The Romish prophet says, "An angel hath spoken to me from the word of the Lord," and said that due veneration and adoration is to be paid to Mary, the holy mother of God, and to the saints, and to their images, and to their relics, even their dry bones. And so, also, of all the other errors, superstitions, and abominations in respect to which the Romish apostasy sets itself in opposition to the written word. They cannot do away the fact that the word of the Lord hath spoken. Copies of the written word were multiplied too largely and too widely to admit of a corruption which, from the grossly improper introduction of apocryphal writings into the canon, it is evident would have been attempted if it had been possible. The art of printing providentially came at a very critical time to the rescue, when the Romanists had all but hidden that which they could not pollute; and there remained to them, therefore, no other expedient but that of the prophet of Beth-el-a lying assumption of a new and contradictory revelation; setting an invented revelation against the true one; and superseding the divine command by a pretended one. "Thou shalt make to thyself a graven image. Thou shalt bow down to it and worship it."

Nor is there any foundation whatever for this pretension to a divine and infallible authority in the Church but their own falsehood. "He lied unto him." It is a lie and nothing else, in direct opposition to the whole rationale of a written revelation, and to the universal tenor of the teaching of the book; which asserts its own supremacy, and vindicates its claim to exclusive teaching, condemning alike those who add to it or diminish from it.

How awful is the sin of a body of men, of professed Christian teachers, thus endeavouring to maintain and justify an essential and ruinous perversion of the religion of revealed truth, by that which they know, beyond the possibility of mistake, to be a falsehood-a falsehood artfully and perseveringly put forward to discredit

With that

and supersede the truth. mass of hypocritical and apostate pretenders retribution will be an awful and final matter. Their wilful persistency in so great and pretensive a system of error is not to be met or punished by any special and particular correction like that which befel the prophet of Judah. The system is too wide, too universal. It is too much the great prevailing scheme, the masterpiece of the arch enemy, to be dealt with now in its detail, in its individualities. A day is coming, a day which shall burn as an oven," a day in which the system will be destroyed "by the breath of the Lord, and by the brightness of his coming," and one heaving cry of relief shall go up from the nations of the earth. 'Babylon is fallen, is fallen; that great city, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and the cage of every unclean and hateful bird."

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But the Anglican, the man of the anti-evangelical, anti-protestant, antipuritan, anti-scriptural school, stands out, like the disobedient prophet from Judah, in a more prominent position for present and immediate condemnation and punishment. Like him, the Anglicans have received and acknowledged "the word of the Lord." They have set to their seal to this guiding truth that "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation." They have avowed by their subscription that they have received a full and sufficient rule of faith and practice. To have taken such a position is a serious step, and one which ought not to be retracted but on the most serious and satisfactory grounds. The sufficiency of that rule, as it has been established on supernatural evidence, that of miracle and prophecy, ought not to be called in question, but by a body of evidence equally strong; and any claim which may be advanced to interfere with the authority of that rule, should be shown to stand upon that equally satisfactory ground, or it can be no claim at all. Yet the Anglicans have received and reverenced the testimony of the false prophets of idolatrous Beth-el. "I also am a prophet as thou art, and an angel spake unto me by the word of

the Lord." To controvert the real authority of God in his written word, they pretend to have received additional communication. And the guilt of the Anglican, just lingering himself on the verge of apostacy, is precisely that which was so remarkably punished in the prophet of Judah. They had the means of judging accurately between the true and unquestionable revelation by the word of the Lord on the one side, and the mere assertion of an additional revelation on the other. It was quite competent to them to discriminate clearly between the two-between the book which they even yet admit to be THE word of God, and the unsupported assertion of a lex non scripta in the bosom of the clergy. And having the means of judging, and not using them, but yielding as the prophet of Judah yielded, they are guilty before God of the neglect, of the mistake, and of its miserable consequences. The case of the Romanist is bad, thoroughly bad; but the case of him who, on the mere ipse dixit of the Romanists, abandons his own position of avowed obedience to the paramount authority of the written word, and retraces his steps, and enters into association with the idolatry of Beth-el and its abettors, is far, far worse.

This instance of modern crime, of unwarrantable tergiversation, seems to throw a new light on this remarkable passage of the Scripture; and the truth which the history teaches appears to shine forth with new lustre, as if intended to bear upon this sad exhibition of the weakness and perversity of human nature. It brands with a peculiar infamy, it marks unmistakably the sin of turning aside on meagre or unjustifiable grounds from the intimations of a direct revelation; and, whatever may be the sins of superstition and yielding to the

puerile inventions of a false religion afterwards, the great sin of the Tractarian party will be found to be the having admitted incautiously, on the authority of man, another and a forged rule as the rule of faith. They have been the cause of their own blindness and wandering, because they have allowed the light to be put out. And it is more than probable that some dispensation towards them, equally striking with that which visited the disobedient prophet, will visit, and hold up to reprobation, their crime. The lion of a hard and relentless infidelity will slay them, and leave them a mere lifeless form, without any of the vitality of true religion—the mere cadaver and "carcass" of what they once were. The dark and wretched scepticism of Mr. Blanco White is a sad instance of this evil state. And it does not stand alone. There are, it is to be feared, many such cases. He who leaves the plain and unquestionable authority of God for the dictation of man, or for obedience to that which men choose to assume to be of divine authority, has prepared his mind for universal doubting, he has unfitted it for the impressions of truth. He may, for a time, find a false peace in unhesitating, unenquiring submission to the tyranny of a new rule; but the dormant principle of thought and conscience will awake again; and when it does, and he looks round for some solid basis of comfort and repose, he will find none. In yielding to the authority of man he has admitted a principle which incapacitates the soul for a simple obedience to, and trust in, the divine remedy; and little remains to him but to wander hopelessly in the cheerless wilderness of this world, and at last to perish in its wastes, a sad monument of disobedience against light and knowledge.

LATIMER.