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It is to teach that "baptism and not faith is the primary instrument of justification" that we are not to neglect the doctrine of justification by works"18-and that "the prevailing notion of bringing forward the doctrines of the atonement explicitly and prominently on all occasions, is evidently quite opposed to the teaching of Scripture."19

It is to assert that in the Lord's Supper" Christ is present under the form of bread and wine" 9520 that he is "then personally and bodily with us"21-and that the clergy are "intrusted with the awful and mysterious gift of making the bread and wine Christ's body and blood."22

yet with a good conscience subscribe the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England.25

It is to maintain the lawfulness of prayer for the dead 23-to make a distinction between venial and mortal sins 24-and to assert that a person may believe that there is a purgatory, that relics may be venerated, that saints may be invoked, that there are seven sacraments, that the mass is an offering for the quick and dead for the remission of sins, and that he may

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We can perceive no unfairness in the manner in which these extracts are taken from the Tractarian authors, and given in their proper sense together, from the scattered and attenuated forms in which they appear in the originals. While men slept, the enemy sowed tares. Error is generally specious, insinuating, and tacked on to truth for its better deceitfulness and its easier currency. The great doctrines of regeneration and all the proper work of the Spirit, the spirituality of all true religion, the office of faith in our salvation, our justification freely by his grace, through the redemption that there is in Christ Jesus, the divine purposes in saving men, and the conservation of the saints as kept (as with a garrison) by the power of God through faith unto salvation; these and kindred truths, constituting the very vitals of Christianity, are avoided, suppressed, or denied, as well as the genuine doctrine of the atonement of our Saviour on the cross. Added to all which, they hold the doctrine of exclusiveness, excluding and denying all the reformed churches of Christ: the result of their super-eminent folly of the succession of lineage, or that all authority' in the Church of Christ comes in the way of a chain from the first Pope, down to Gregory XVI. and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and down to any and all of the other legitimates thereto appertaining, in England and her colonies, in America and her territories.

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Who sees not that all this is Popery disguised? It is anti-English, antiProtestant, anti-Christian. Let it only spread in silence, and its leaven will leaven the whole lump of society, and we shall all be prepared to yield, we and our children, before we know it, to the organized and antiquated oppressions of Rome; whence the sword and the keys united will subdue our liberties, and we shall fall victims to the worst form of despotism ever seen in our land. The Inquisition will be restored with all its beauties and its blessings!

And all this, as temporal disaster, is infinitely less than the spiritual damage it will do to our souls. It is another gospel-which is not another.

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Every plant," says Jesus Christ, "which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up." Tractarianism and Popery, and all their kindred anomalies, are such poisonous plants. And shall the English soil yield them a harvest? Are they here to be propagated, in this country of the pilgrims, in this land of Protestants, in this nation of freemen? Have our fathers of the Revolution bled in vain, or our ancestors of the Reformation suffered and burnt in vain? Let Christians arouse from their supineness, and be aware of the most formidable pest of the age. Already do they deny the existence of the churches of the Reformation, holding them as mere synagogues of apostacy from their chain of the succession, consigning them to the ". covenanted mercies of God" that never saved one soul, and denouncing their wisest, holiest ministers, whom God has so abundantly owned and blessed in preaching the Gospel, as no ministers of Christ, as gross impostors," intruders, usurpers, and traitors "to the Church" by which they mean themselves and their party.

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Let Christians look to God for his countenance and his arm against this flood of abominations. "Lift up a standard for the people. So shall they fear the name of the Lord from the west, and his glory from the rising of the sun. When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit

of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him."

WICKLIF AND LUTHER.

JUSTIFICATION.

SIR,-I had purposed to enter yet more fully into an examination of the strangely unsound, unscriptural, and un-Church-of- England opinions, so rashly advanced in Mr. Ward's book. But it has really become unHe has broken his own necessary. bubble, and it has vanished. The inconsistency of his ascetic preferences with the known habits of the man did create a little stir and surprise; but he has kept on the even tenor of his way, he has followed his own natural devices, and has at length practically refuted his unqualified praise of a system of self-denial, about which he could talk volubly, as he does of more things than he really considers, and left his wondering readers to conclude that he interprets ascetic dogmas in a non-ascetic sense. The young man may probably in after years both feel and express regret that his uncurbed vanity led him so boldly and intrusively to assert opinions, and so readily to renounce them. It is a painful thing, however, to have to carry through life the consciousness of having been publicly branded with a silly if not a dishonest notoriety. It would far more become him now, instead of disputing technicalities with the university, perpetuating strife, and keeping his smutched name before the public, to retire into the solaces of that domestic life which he professed to scorn, and to the private privileges of that Church which, if he could, he would have wounded. God grant that he may find it possible to be Scripturally holy in connubial happiness, and to mingle the tears of a late repentance with the cheerful smiles of a peaceful hearth. He would really do well to make a real and natural bonfire on his first-born's birth-day, of the unsold copies of his non-natural and non-ascetic Ideal!

This would be a praiseworthy sacrifice to insulted common sense and literary honesty. If he were seen, not only to contradict his book in sober practice, but in so many words to admit his hastiness and folly, the Christian community would readily pardon, as the airy flight of an aca demic youth, even those planetary retrogradations which no system of vortices, not even the Newmanian, can ever explain and harmonize.

Let us, however, now turn our back upon him. There is important work before us, in the midst of which the names of such tergiversating youngsters may well be forgotten. The party to which he belongs, in their vain regard to the efficacy of human merit, have grossly misrepresented and calumniated the grand characterizing truth of the Church whose bread they eat-the prominent feature of that Inspired Record which they profess to reverence the doctrine of Justification by Faith. For this sublime dogma of revealed religion, this grand and glorious mystery which is alone the support of the fallen soul above the fathomless abyss of a lost eternity, no language has been in their estimation too abusive, no scorn too bitter. The very doctrine as affirmed in so many plain and literal words both in the deliberate decrees of the Church and the pages of holy writ, they have denied and vilified, as if their signature had been against it and not for it; as if, according to the morals of the new school, they signed in a non-signing sense; as if it were a matter of indifference to append a name deliberately to a system of doctrine, as pledged solemnly to maintain it, and then, from the advantage of position which that signature gives, to use every artifice of practised intellectual manoeuvre, to discredit, and stain, and insult the subscribed system. To men who have lost their simplicity in the mazes of casuistical dispute, this may not appear in its true colours; but they may rest assured that wherever honesty and godly sincerity, and a respect for straight-forward truth-speaking

remain, such manifest deficiency in the first principles of morals will do far more to damage their own theology.

At such times, however, it is well not to be backward in the advocacy and support of this undoubtedly Scriptural and blessed system of mercy. And there are some thoughts on the subject that I would fain submit to the consideration of Christian readers through your Magazine. But first, let us look for a moment at the teaching of our Church in the appointed language of her homilies.

The Homily on Salvation, believed on good grounds to have been written by Cranmer, says, in a quotation from Ambrose, "This is the ordinance of God, that they which believe in Christ should be saved without works, by faith only, freely receiving remis. sion of their sins. Consider these words diligently: without works, by faith only, freely we receive remis. sion of our sins. What can be spoken more plainly, than to say that freely, without works, by faith only, we obtain remission of our sins?" Surely, this threefold repetition of the idea makes the view of the Church very distinct and specific! But observe again: "The Apostle toucheth especially three things which must go together in our justification. Upon God's part, his great mercy and grace; upon Christ's part, justice; that is, the satisfaction of God's justice, or the price of our redemption by the offering of his body and shedding of his blood, with fulfilling the law perfectly and throughly; and upon our part true and lively faith in the merits of Jesus Christ, which yet is not ours, but by God's working in us; so that in our justification is not only God's mercy and grace, but also his justice, which the Apostle calleth the justice of God; and it consisteth in paying our ransom and fulfilling of the law; and so the grace of God doth not shut out the justice of God in our justification, but only shutteth out the justice of man: that is to say, the justice of our works, as to be merits of deserving our justification. And therefore St. Paul

declareth here nothing upon the behalf of man concerning his justification, but only a true and lively faith, which, nevertheless, is the gift of God, and not man's only work with. out God." Here every part of the whole idea of justification by faith is brought out so vividly, that it manifestly presents itself broadly in every part to the malediction of these innovating theologians.

Let one other passage be added to these, to show what the Church thinks of those who contravene this plain statement. "This faith the Holy Scripture teacheth. This is the strong rock and foundation of Christian religion. This doctrine all old and ancient authors of Christ's Church do approve. This doctrine advanceth and setteth forth the true glory of Christ, and beateth down the vain glory of man. This whosoever denieth is not to be accounted for a Christian man, nor for a setter-forth of Christ's glory, but for an adversary to Christ and his Gospel, and for a setter forth of men's vain glory."

It is hardly conceivable that a man in a sane state of mind can have deliberately assented to the correctness of these statements, and also affirmed that justification by faith alone is "a soul-destroying heresy."

But now, taking these passages as a developement of the Church's teaching on the subject, and, of course, of what she believes to be the teaching of the inspired Word, I would make two observations which, if considered, may seem to commend this vilified doctrine to the affection of Christians.

1st. Such a scheme of mercy is worthy of an Almighty Sovereign, and,

2nd. It was absolutely necessary both for the glory of God and the restoration of man.

It is worthy of an Almighty Sove. reign to extend a free pardon to his guilty creature, contingent only on the creature's acceptance of the boon, and the power of acceptance itself graciously provided for. This savours not of the niggard barter and bargaining needful to beings in the same category of finite power, who

feel that they cannot risk their little dignity by too large and ready concession. It is a becoming act for one who is as benevolent as he is powerful and holy. And if in his mysterious providence he suffers a created race of moral beings to fall into disobedience and corruption, it is worthy of himself to accomplish their restoration, not by any circuitous process, in which human energy might be suspected to bear a part, and might claim to divide the glory of the deliverance; but in a way of direct and unequivocal mercy, in which nothing shall be more manifest than that the whole redeemed host shall owe their holiness, their peace, their safety, their life throughout eternity, exclusively to an act of grace, which at once pardons, sanctifies, and restores. This characteristic, against which the proud, impenitent heart rebels, is the grand and essential feature of the system. Like our planetary system, in which all the light which the various orbs receive and reflect is central and solar, it is evidently the purpose of the Sovereign Ruler to save by a mode which shall make it unequivocally certain that all good is in him and from him, and that an innumerable host redeemed shall simply receive that redeeming power and influence as an emanation from him; and in all the graciousness, and purity, and peace of after life, shall acknowledge their own native and original darkness, and only reflect and willingly, and thankfully reflect the radiant holiness, within whose attractive, and illuminating, and genial agency they have been mercifully brought. It is one of the universally admitted axioms of common life, that we are utterly dependant upon God for the origin and continuance of all our vital powers. Natural life is his sovereign gift. How strange it is that we should rebel against the admission that for all the higher blessings of a moral and spiritual assimilation to our God, a lifting up and restoration unto holy life, we are indebted to the same power! Now to make this manifest and unequivocal, to shut up the human soul to the inevitable consciousness and grateful avowal of it,

is the grand intention of this mode of deliverance. "Of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who, of God, is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption, that he that glorieth may glory only in the Lord." It is of the essence of the rescuing machinery, that the creature shall be shown to be all emptiness, and darkness, and inertion, and need; and that God, in his own way of manifestation, is all fulness, and light, and activity, and blessing. Man may be jealous of God's all-absorbing portion in the work, and petulantly thankless of the boon proffered; he may receive grudgingly the light by which he shines; but let him once really feel and comprehend the blessed power of that sole and central influence which animates, attracts, directs, controls, regulates, enlightens, vivifies, and warms, and it will be his delight to acknowledge, to the glory of his Maker, that grace alone has given him a position and a portion in this movement of heavenly harmony; that in the very highest sense of which his nature is capable-" in God he lives, and moves, and has his being"-and that this mode of justifying the soul, solely and simply by. faith in the Redeemer's righteousness, was to make this very conviction the eternal joy of his heart, and the great moral lesson of the intelligent uni. verse. If it is the glory of the Great First Cause to pour forth from his fathomless resources the infinite supplies that he has made necessary for all the orders of beings that he has formed, then is it still more peculiarly and essentially a Divine glory, that any fallen part of the universal family should be singled out by an

act of special grace, made to feel yet more strongly than others the dependance of the creature on the Creator, and brought in the humiliation of a total and acknowledged emptiness to the treasury of blessing, made to receive there all the gifts that pertain to life and godliness, through a channel which shall secure the absolute and grateful avowal, that they are not of man, or by man, but of and from God only.

And thus is the mystery developed of that prayer-"Father, glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee; as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him."

If we can rise to this view of the specific object of a justification through faith in a given testimony, and that faith itself a gift; if we can comprehend how it thus works for the Creator's glory, and for the bringing of the creature into that renovated state in which he should rejoice in that glory; how we must pity the darkness and sensuality of a mind which can dwell on the thought only to pervert and revile it? How we must sorrow for him who imagines that he can see in it nothing but danger to man and dishonour to his Maker; and who marks his position with this patent and melancholy inconsistency, that his virulence against the doctrine stands in close juxta-position with a subscription to the strongest and most distinct terms in which the calumniated dogma can possibly be expressed.

LATIMER.

P. S.-I will resume the subject in another letter.

Entelligence.

MISSIONARY INTELLIGENCE.

NEW ZEALAND.

Feb. 1844. SINCE my last letter, Dec. 15, 1843, the goodness of God has been conti

nued and extended among the natives. When I visited Mangakahiah in the latter part of November, I took my principal Kaikohi Teacher with me, who had been under very deep con

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