have returned to the primitive Church of the Apostles and ancient Fathers."

The controversies between the Reformers and the Papists were conducted by appeals to the Fathers, as well as to the Scriptures, and we have often felt the painful position of the former in this appeal to evidence, which often made as well for their adversaries as for themselves; for the Fathers blew hot and cold, councils were against councils, fathers against fathers, and the consent of one age was against that of another.

Bishop Warburton, in the Preface to his Julian, has not hesitated to say, that "the Reformers, though they shook off the tyranny of the Pope, could not disengage themselves from the unbounded authority of the Fathers, but carried their prejudices with them into the Protestant religion. They thought it for their credit to have the Fathers on their side, instead of reposing themselves, where they should have done, on the true antiquity of the gospel. The consequence of which unhappy error has been, that Protestants and Papists, adopting the common principle of the decisive authority of the Fathers enabled the Papists to support their credit against the evidence of common sense and sacred Scripture." But we find the English Reformers, when not engaged in controversy, expressing most strongly their reliance upon Scripture alone. "It is mine opinion," said Hooper, "that the Scripture solely, and the Apostles' Church is to be followed, and no man's authority be he Augustine or Tertullian." "I am so fearful," said Ridley, "that I dare not speak farther, yea, almost none otherwise, than the very text doth as it were lead me by the hand."

But whether the English Reformers in their private opinions leaned too much to antiquity or not, there can be no doubt of their deliberate sentiments as expressed in their authorized documents, the Thirty-Nine Articles. In the VI. Article, they say, "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation." In the VIII. Article, they further say: "The Nicene creed ought thoroughly to be received and believed." Why, because it can be proved by most certain war

rants of the Fathers? No, this is not the reason, however true it may be, which they give, but because it can be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture. In the XIX. Article they define the visible Church of Christ, to be a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure word of God is preached. The XX. Article speaks of the Church as a witness and a keeper of holy writ. What is the precise meaning of these terms, as referred to the primitive Church? The inquiry is the more important, as some have taken occasion to exaggerate our dependence upon the testimony and fidelity of the primitive Church, as though we had no other testimony nor resource in its absence. The Primitive Christian Church stands in the same relation to the New Testament, that the Jewish Church did to the old. To both alike have been committed the lively oracles of God. It stands too in the same relation to us, which we occupy towards the generations to follow. We owe to it a great debt of gratitude for ascertaining and settling the canon of the New Testament, and for quoting it so largely, that, as Bentley says, "They have scarce left a verse of the New Testament uncited." Without its testimony, we should have had to have gone over the same ground in our day, which in fact has been done, but without the same advantages in our decision. We should have had, without our appeal to them, to have relied more on internal evidence.

Not only do we find in the Fathers most unimpeachable testimony to Holy Writ, but also to orthodoxy of doctrine. The faith of the early Church can be as easily ascertained, as its government or worship. We find in them the Orthodox doctrine held in the same way as now. We find, from a perusal of their writings, that they had to combat the same heresies with those at the present day; and we are indebted to them for valuable refutations of Arians and Pelagians. The historical argument for orthodoxy from this quarter, is of great force. It is not to be believed, that men who lived so near the Apostles times as we do to Jeremy Taylor and Tillotson, before the ink of the apostolic autographs had faded, could be mistaken in matters of faith. This argument has been triumphantly made use of by Bishop Bull, in his defence of the Nicene Faith; Waterland, in his Importance of the Doctrine of the Holy Tri

nity; Burton, in his Testimony of the Ante-Nicene Fathers to the Divinity of Christ; Faber, in his Apostolicity of Trinitarianism; and Cary, in his Testimonies of the Fathers to the XXXIX. Articles. In the Romish controversy, Faber, in his difficulties of Romanism, has made use of the same line of argument, that the Romish additions are novelties, unknown to the early church, and introduced at a later period, and are, therefore, of human invention. Not only are the Fathers witnesses to orthodoxy of doctrine, but also to the primitive mode of worship and government, to the observance of the Sabbath, infant baptism, and the Lord's Supper, and to matters of fact which passed under their notice. Bishop Warburton, in his Julian, has made use of them, together with Pagan historians, to prove that the emperor Julian was defeated in his attempt to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem by an earthquake and fiery eruption. The Fathers are constantly appealed to by the lowest Independent, where it serves his turn, to prove the observance of the first day of the week, and infant baptism. President Edwards says: "The tradition of the Church is a great confirmation of the truth. We read in the writings that remain of the first three centuries, that it was the universal custom to keep the first day of the week. The universality of the custom is a good argument that the Church had it from the Apostles." Why the same argument is not as good for Episcopacy, it is hard to see, though Edwards would not have admitted its force. We would add a word concerning their interpretation of Scripture. While writers of the Church of Rome, such as Cardinal Wiseman, and others, have set them up as models of interpretation, some Protestants have gone too far in the opposite direction. We see no reason to prefer an interpretation of God's word by Jerome or Augustine, to that of Thomas Scott or Bishop Lowth. We would judge of each of them by his own merits and means of information. We should value Jerome more, as he spent twenty years in Palestine, and acquired the Hebrew language at great labor and expense, and Augustine less, as an interpreter, because he was ignorant of Hebrew, and not even familiar with the Greek language.

They lived in a credulous age, at a time when there was a general breaking up of the old, and bringing in of the new, and

they received, without scruple, much that critical and accurate inquirers would have rejected. They sought for plausible and effective arguments. They were governed by no fixed rules in the interpretation of Scripture, and hold sometimes to three or four senses in the same passage, and their proof texts are often wholly irrelevant. They indulged in exaggerated expressions about the sacraments, so that, as Selden said, "the Fathers used to speak rhetorically, and thus brought in transubstantiation, which is only rhetoric turned into logic."

But with all this abatement, we revere the memory of the Fathers. They were set for the defence of the gospel. Their lives were great, if not their words. "Non eloquimur magna, sed vivimus," said Minutties Felix.-"Our piety," said Justin Martyr, "consists not in words but in deeds." The Protestant principle, as expounded even by Chillingworth himself, does not require us to traduce their memory, to say with Milton: "whatsoever time or the heedless hand of blind chance hath drawn down from of old to this present, in her huge dragnet, whether fish or seaweed, shells or shrubs, unpicked, unchosen, these are the Fathers."

ARTICLE VI.

DOCTRINES OF THE ROMISH AND OF THE PROTESTANT CHURCHES ON JUSTIFICATION, CONTRASTED.

1. Oxford Divinity, compared with that of the Romish and Anglican Churches, with a special view to the illustration of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith; as it was made of primary importance by the Reformers, and as it lies at the foundation of all Scriptural views of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. By CHARLES PETIT MCILVAINE, Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Ohio. Philadelphia: Joseph Whetham. 1841.

2. Symbolism; or an Exposition of the Doctrinal Differences between Catholics and Protestants, as evidenced by their Symbolical writings. By JOHN ADAM MEHLER, Dean of Wurzburg, &c. New York: Edward Dunnigan. 1844.

WE have placed at the head of this article two works, not

with the design of reviewing them at large, but rather as the representatives, respectively, of the opposing systems contrasted in this discussion. One, a masterly, exhaustive defence of that truth which is the life-blood of Christianity, a treasury of argument to the student of the Bible, leaving him nothing to desire: the other, the latest, ablest, and, we may say, fairest exposition of the system of Rome. It will be pardoned, we trust, by the reader, if we pursue the general topic, without special reference to the works above-named.

It is a striking and suggestive fact, that no formal statement or declaration concerning the doctrine of justification was made in the first fifteen centuries of the existence of the Church.

In all the ancient creeds, the Apostles', the Nicene and the Athanasian, there is no deliverance touching this grand point. In all the decisions of general and provincial councils, where, to use the language of Gibbon, "the tremendous ball of Orthodoxy was kept vibrating from one point to another," there is no decision upon this question. The simple explanation of this fact is, that the doctrine of justification in the primitive Catholic Church was not a controverted question.

The creeds of the early Church, in their perfected form, arose out of the exigencies which were caused by heresies and defections from the truth. Thus the simple formula of faith, in the sacrament of baptism, gradually, and by a process not clearly traced by history, grew into the symbol now called the "Apostles' Creed;" and thus, by the rise of the Arian, and other heresies, into the full and more elaborate creed of Nicene. The fact, then, of the absence of all reference to the doctrine of justification, in these primitive symbols, is conclusive evidence of entire unanimity in the early Church upon this vital point, and that the Church of the first four centuries; the Church of the days of Clement and Ignatius, of Justin and Irenæus, of Athanasius and Ambrose, of Chrysostom and Augustine, held firmly and undividedly to the Pauline doctrine of man's justification before God.

The Rev. George Stanley Faber, in his learned work on jus tification, has given a catena of writers who maintained this doctrine, beginning with Clement of Rome, A. D. 70, mentioned by St. Paul (Phil. iv. 3) as "a fellow-laborer, whose name is VOL. I.-7