teresting occupations."* We have not space for the detail of daily duties and weekly work that accompanies this sketch; but looking at this only, no one can wonder, if the spirit that presided in the Watton Rectory prevailed in others connected with the School, that Evangelicalism should have obtained the hold and made the advances that it has.

But while thus speaking of the clerical agents in this movement, we must not forget that much, too, has been owing, under God, to the labors and the spirit of such individuals among the laity as Fowell Buxton, the two Thorntons, William Wilberforce, Cowper, and Hannah More. The Thorntons by their munificent contributions; Buxton and Wilberforce by their benevolent exertions; and the others by their various religious works, have done a great deal to advance and to commend the cause with which they were known to be identified. Nor would we seem to neglect or to ignore Whitefield and the two Wesleys, who, instar omnes, were the originators of the movement from which have issued such immense results. Great men, though not faultless ones, we reckon them; the giants of a day which called for Cyclopean laborers to heave off from the spouse of Christ the load of a worldliness that was crushing out her very life. The time is coming when their memory will be embalmed in the choice odors of the Church's earnest love, and when the men who drove them into Non-conformity will be reckoned, next to Laud and his coädjutors, almost the worst foes the English Establishment has ever had. They have not been more largely noticed by us, only because they did not come within the scope of our review, which was not intended to extend beyond the circle that labored for the advancement of the Gospel within the boundaries of the Established Church.

We meant to have presented, somewhat in detail, the work accomplished within the century last passed by the School that has come before us for review. But we have time and space to give now only the briefest recapitulation of it. One large part of this work has been the diffusion of far clearer views of Gospel truth throughout the Church; and through these views,

"Memoir of Bickersteth," chap. 22.

the raising up a purer spirit in it. Pervaded as it is at present by respect for Scriptural authority, by admission of the depravity of man, and by acknowledgment of his entire dependence on God's grace for renewal, justification, and the hope of heavenly life, it is quite another Church from what it was when Paley admitted that the doctrines of its Articles were repudiated by the majority of ministers within its bounds. And the difference in it in respect to this is owing mainly to that noble band who, scoffed as "Methodists," or despised as "Evangelicals," have, through reproach and persecution and abuse, labored to make her consistent with herself, with her Reformers, and with the word of God.

Nor is it a small part of the work they have performed that a missionary organization has been instituted, the most thorough and efficient that the world has ever known-that such men as Brown, Martyn, Thomason, Corrie, and Johnson have been trained for work in heathen lands-and that all over the land, there is a net-work of societies which are bringing the Gospel to bear upon all ranks, diffusing an active working spirit through the parishes, and doing all that it would seem can well be done for the bodily and spiritual, the temporal and eternal welfare of mankind.

But perhaps no service they have done is more worthy of remembrance than their provision of a religious literature, warm, earnest, practical in a peculiar degree; fitted not only to diffuse right views, but to diffuse them in connection with a holy and pure spirit. The publications of the School form now a library of practical as well as polemical divinity, of great extent and much spiritual richness. Imbued in large measure with the spirit of the Gospel, and dealing principally with great spiritual themes, they have, from Newton's "Cardiphonia,” and Wilberforce's "View," and Scott's great Commentary, down to the Tracts of Legh Richmond, Hannah More, and J. C. Ryle, found very generally a place upon men's shelves, and commended themselves to their better judgment and their consciences. Many, of course, in a long series of publications, have had their day, and are passing out of use; but long must it be ere the "Letters" of Newton, the "Lectures" of Henry Blunt, the "Better Covenant" of Goode, the "Practical Piety" and

treatises "On Prayer" of Hannah More, the "Lord's Supper" of Bickersteth, or the hymns of Toplady, Newton, Kirke White, and Cowper, shall cease to guide and influence the feeling of the pious members of the Church of Christ. The School that has produced such writers and given to the world a literature so pure, so full of heaven, and so fitted to lead to it, must ever be deserving of the grateful remembrance of mankind.

Primary Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese of Rhode-Island. By THOMAS M. CLARK, Bishop of the Diocese.

THE primary charge of a Bishop is always a matter of the greatest interest. It is like the first sermon of a rector at his entrance upon the duties of a new field of labor; except that as the congregation which the Bishop addresses is made up of his clergy, the pastors of his flock, whom he is expected to instruct and exhort, to guide, encourage, and quicken in the great work committed to them, it is from him, above all, that we are to expect, on such occasions, whatever may be the chief topic, such decided and open manifestations of those fundamental verities of Christ's work and way, constituting his Gospel, such incidental as well as direct reference to what ministers are to teach and seek in their solemn work as ambassadors of Christ and heralds of his salvation, as to leave no room for the least discerning reader not to perceive what it is the Bishop holds, and what views of religion he wishes his episcopate to be identified with. Certainly his clergy must desire and expect at least something of this kind in the primary charge of their Bishop. The opportunity is most propitious for a solemn, pointed declaration of Gospel doctrine; and it is difficult to understand how an earnest and spiritually-minded Bishop should fail to employ it, at least in part, for such an end.

Under such impressions, we began to read the Primary Charge of Bishop Clark. Its subject, "the Position of the Church," we confess did not strike us as very appropriate for the first occasion of a Bishop addressing his assembled clergy. But we know that even under that heading, it would be easy to introduce an abundance of plain, pointed, definite declaration of Gospel truth; or at any rate enough to make the author's position well understood in that particular.

It is with pain we say that we were never more surprised or disappointed. The charge is pervaded with a remarkable amount of negativeness-a singular avoidance of all distinct intimation of any positive Christian doctrine. It would have been agreeable in such an address to find some citation of, or at least some direct reference to, the words of Scripture; some such mention of Christ, in his person and office, as would, directly or indirectly, answer the question, "What think ye of Christ?" It would have been agreeable in such an address, from such a quarter, to find something so distinctive that the man who denies the Divinity and Atonement of Christ and all the doctrines peculiar to the Gospel could not have written it. But we have carefully looked for such features in vain. The nearest approach to any such thing is in his speaking with approbation of "that Church which is content with affirming the primitive creeds as the basis of Christianity." From this we learn that the author approves of the primitive creeds as exponents of Christian faith, which, of course, no man doubts; though we are not fond of calling the creeds, instead of the Scriptures, by the warrant of which alone they claim acceptance, "the basis of Christianity." But strange to say that sentence is the most direct expression of Christian doctrine in the whole Charge.

Before we advert to what our author says of the "position of the Church," we must tarry for a moment at his preliminary remarks on the present condition of Christianity; not undertaking, however, to define his line of division between it and the Church. He says that, notwithstanding all the efforts now made with unprecedented facilities to spread the Gospel, "it is still the fact that the Church is doing less in the way of actual conquest, outside of her borders, than she has ever done

in days past, when, though her faith may have been less pure, her organization was more compact." Here we complain of a want of definiteness of expression. The context intimates that by Church he means the whole visible Church, including Romish and Protestant. But what are we to understand by "days past?" Are the primitive ages embraced in the expression? It speaks of those "days past" as having a faith less pure than that of the Church in these days. Does he mean the days past of Romish corruptions? We suppose he does. But what then does he mean by "actual conquest?" Will it include the ingrafting of a merely nominal Christianity, with all the idolatries, and superstition, and heresies of the Romish Church, upon the old stock of paganism, just substituting one image for another, one darkness for another-a change of rites, and of priesthood, and of name and form, with no evidence of a change of heart and life, and scarcely of belief? We grant that such conquests are more characteristic of the Romish propaganda than of Protestant missions; and that in "days past" of the history of Rome, when "her organization was more compact" because the secular power was more at her command, such conquests were more extensive than any she now achieves. But when a Protestant minister speaks of "actual conquest" by the Church, we must suppose him to mean real conquests-conquests to the belief of that very Gospel truth which the Church is to preach; conquests to the embracing of that very salvation, and that very holiness of life, without which the victory is but in name, and the powers of darkness are still the conquerorsconquests which bring souls "into captivity to the obedience of Christ," such as St. Paul would have rejoiced in, and by which "the Gospel of the grace of God" is glorified. With this understanding, we must respectfully contend with our Right Rev. author, that there has been no period since the purer ages of ancient Christianity, and especially since the corrupt faith and "compact organization" of the Romish hierarchy put on their strength, when the Church was doing more "in the way of actual conquest outside of her borders," than at present-no period in which she was doing so much. Put the conquests of the Protestant missions in the islands of the Pacific, and in the countries of the East, during the last fifty