the same. men nation of the Scriptures, upon these six great heads of doctrine: First, The doctrine of Holy Scripture concerning the times of the Gentiles. Secondly, The duties of Christian ministers and people, growing out thereof towards the Gentile churches. Thirdly, The doctrine concerning the present and future condition of the Jews. Fourthly, The duties growing out of the same towards the Jews. Fifthly, The system of the prophetic visions and numbers of Daniel and the Apocalypse. Sixthly, The Scripture doctrine concerning the future advent of the Lord. And Lastly, The duties to the church and the world arising out of Now these are points on which are supposed to be wholly at sca, without chart, course, or polar star; and it is the common rebuke of the students of prophecy, that no two of them are agreed on any one matter: and therefore the thing which I am about to say, will appear the more wonderful; that though we were for the most part strangers to one another, of different churches and of different countries, and under no influence of one another, we were so overruled by the one spirit of truth and love, as to have found our way to harmony aud coincidence in the main points of all these questions. We believed in common that the present form of the dispensation of the gospel was for a time commensurate with the times of the Gentiles, which again are commensurate with the period of Jerusalem's being trodden under foot, and of the Jews' dispersion; that the restoration of the Jews would introduce altogether a new era into the church and the world, which might be called the universal dispensation of the benefits of Christ's death, while this is the dispensation to the church only, which is few compared with the whole. That the conclusion of the latter in great judgments, and the commencement of the former in great mercies, was hard at hand, yea even at the very door; all being agreed that the 1,260 and 1,290 days of Daniel were accomplished, and the remaining 45 begun, at the conclusion of which the blessedness will be fully arrived. And that during this judgment, which may open upon us any day, we are to look for the second advent of the Lord in person, to raise the dead bodies of his saints, and with them to reign upon the earth. All agreeing that in the view of these things, there was required of us the greatest vigilance at our several posts, and the most fearless constancy in affectionately warning and preaching righteousness to all; cording as they are admonished by our Lord in the sixth vial, under which it was the universal opinion we are now living, ready for the last great and concluding vial of wrath."-pp. clxxxviii-cxc. to find. Had the opinions canvassed and agreed to at this meeting, been fairly argued and compared with other conflicting opinions; had any thing like a fair estimate been formed at Albury Park of the labours of other opposing commentators and critics of prophetic fame, and after an impartial review of the different theories, had a modest and candid appeal been made on behalf of the approved theory, without any attempts, however, to make the speculative views of prophecy the clue to discover the path of Christian duty, we should then have hailed with delight the results of the sederunt. But what will the reader say to the following extravagances. "Thus Christ the Mediator is left out of the means, and the means are looked to without the Mediator, and Christ is dethroned from his mediatorial throne; whereas no mean is a mean of grace, without the honour of it being referred to Christ the Mediator. Hence they have no object on which to roll the honour of success, and therefore they divide it amongst one another; the Bible Society compliments the Missionary Society; this compliments the Bartlett's Buildings Society, and each says of itself, by the strength of my hand have I done it, and by my wisdom, for I am prudent; and my hand hath formed as a nest the riches of the people; and as one gathereth eggs that are left, have I gathered all the earth, and there was none that moved the wing, or opened the mouth, or peeped.'"'—p. 55. "The errors into which the church has at present fallen may be classed under three heads. 1st, That there are to be no judgments at the period when the times of the Gentiles are said to be fulfilled. 2d. That a period of great blessedness is about to be brought in immediately. 3d. That the millennial state is to be brought about by natural means; such as the diffusion of knowledge, commerce, peace, civiliza tion, improved views of political justice, jurisprudence, political economy, arts, &c. &c. From these three errors have arisen three kinds of evil fruits, from the first a total misapprehension of the actual state of Christendom; and from not perceiving that it is ripe for judgments, there is no union in the church respecting its hopes and fears. From the second error, namely, that there are to be great blessings expected immediately, there arises an exWith all this we have no fault aggeration of the favour which God is ас shewing to the church. This is the leading error of all our Bible and Missionary Societies, &c. This is the secret of all that expediency work which is so prevalent, so lavishly applauded, in these societies, although so contrary to all godly simplicity, honesty, and scriptural injunction."-p. 54. "Philalethes.-Do you also, Aristo, agree with our brother Anastasius in the importance of the Jews' and Continental Societies ? "Aristo.-Most assuredly I do, and if I have any hope derived from Scripture, that England will fare better than the other toes of the image, when the stone begins to smite them, as indeed it seems already to have begun, it is on account of her being made the witness to the Jews and to Babylon.”—p. 117. The Continental and the Jews Society are represented as " unquestionably the great duties of the Christian Church at the present time."—"There cannot be a more important duty than to encourage the mission of Wolff. He seems to be the very embodying of the beau ideal of a missionary, which was supposed to be the creation of Mr. Irving's imagination, in the sermon preached before the London Missionary Society."-"I never heard this word (Prudence) made use of at any of the meetings, nor in the committees, but to express one of two ideas; either the withholding of some portion of divine truth, or the turning the profession of it into a source of profit." Then as the religious societies are trying to bring about a millennium without a personal coming of Christ, so are the philosophers and radicals trying to bring about a perfect state of rule and government before Christ comes to set up his kingdom. In the same way the whole doctrine of toleration, as now generally broached, is off its hinges, and is nothing but a fruitless attempt to make Satan harmless, and to bind him before his time." The British constitution has become like the brazen serpent; as it was Christ, in the serpent, which healed the bitten Israelites, so it was Christ in the British constitution, who was preached at the Reformation, which preserved the English people. But now Christ is left out and forgotten, and the constitution without him is become the object of idolatry, from Panamá to Kamschatka, and N. S. No. 31. which the Lord will break and bruise to powder.”—“ Indeed, the church is so full of prejudice upon the subject of the second coming of our Lord, that it would be more easy to convince a bench of infidels, than a bench of modern divines, that such was the doctrine contained in the Bible. But I am perfectly assured, that to preach the fulfilment of prophecy, and the speedy coming of Christ in glory to set up his kingdom in the earth, is the only subject which can arrest the tide of infidelity, or call in men of the present day to the fold of Christ."-p. 252. The preliminary dissertation to Ben Ezra, which extends to about 200 closely printed pages, contains still stronger complaints and prognostications against the Christian church for not adopting the doctrines of the Millenarians; and Mr. Irving, simple man, has taken the trouble to translate from Spanish, and even to learn the Spanish language for the sake of translating the work of a learned Catholic, for the purpose of proving, in detail, the views of himself and friends. To this we would not for a moment object; and though the parties bring forward little that is new, we could have read their productions with pleasure, had they not all erred, both in making the adoption of their interpretation a matter of sacred duty, and in insisting that to deny the Millenarian scheme is to deny the glory of God, and prove ourselves wanting in faith. These worthy men are simple enough to expect that the whole Christian church is to swallow their speculations about the personal reign of Christ, the return of the Jews to Jerusalem, and various other crudities of merely human authority; and what is still more extravagant and fanatical, the whole church is threatened with God's judgment for its disbelief of these doctrines, and all efforts, and all institutions, and all agents, who are not confidently looking for the personal appearance of the Saviour, are denounced, and told they are blind and destitute of faith, 3 C and are but labouring in the fire. Now this is too much to swallow. Mr. Irving, and Mr. Frere, and Mr. Drummond, &c. are doubtless very worthy, very zealous, and very well-meaning advocates of Christianity; but has not the great head of the church a multitude of men as devoted and as devotional: men, whose zeal and services in the cause of Christianity have been honoured with at least as large a share of the divine sanction, and who are satisfied, after the most careful study of the Holy Scriptures, that no personal appearance of Christ is to be looked for, and that though judgments may be expected, yet that we are on the eve of a great revival, and a great extension, of Christianity; and that the command to preach the gospel to every creature, marks out the specific duty of the church to the utmost extent of its ability, without any distinction of Jew or Gentile. That is indeed a singular line of argument, which would make a very questionable delineation of the prophetic hieroglyphics the rule for Christian exertion, and which would even call off that measure of zeal which is at present so successfully directed to the Gentile nations for the purpose of concentrating it upon the Continental Society and the Jews. These may be both very excellent institutions, but the proportion of success which has attended their labours is not to be compared for a moment with what has been effected by exertions in other directions. This importance, we would not say is magnified too much, because any society that has the promotion of spiritual religion for its object, cannot be too much magnified; but invidious distinction is given to them, adventitious and false importance is added to them, derived not from the legitimate and general principle of the duty to spread the Gospel in every possible way, but from the parti cular interpretations adopted by these authors of unfulfilled prophecy. So that the duty, instead of being placed, as it ought to be, on the clear and unquestionable commands of the Saviour, instead of being laid on the simple and universally intelligible basis of all Christian duty, is made to result from a specific interpretation, a peculiarity of view, which a few authors have taken, and which is substituted for that enlargement of vision, which St. Paul exercised, when he said, "There is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free, &c. but Christ is all, and in all." Why then should the labours of societies, which the Lord has evidently honoured, be depreciated? Why should some slight failings and errors in the administration be sounded through the land by professed friends? Why should those means, hitherto employed so successfully, be branded with odious names of worldly prudence, mammon resources, and self importance, and all the other unkindly names applied to them by Messrs. Irving and Co.? Why should the Christian church be required to believe implicitly in any interpretation of unfulfilled prophecy, when Messrs. Faber and Cunninghame, men distinguished alike for piety and learning, have been battling these twenty years for their respective theories, and have both been proved erroneous in their calculations, by the events of Providence? The result to which the sober part of the Christian church has come is this;-that prophecy will not be anticipated was not written to be applied, but believed, till the time of its fulfilment. As to the study of the prophecies, we have no objection to a modest and limited argument upon them; but it ought to be conducted altogether upon sounder and broader principles than appear to have been adopted in the recent discussions. The whole style and system of these dialogues appear to us defective and unsound. Scriptures are applied to the theory of these authors in a laxity of interpretation, which cannot be vindicated. The task of exposing the critical mistakes contained in these works would be Herculean, for, in our opinion, the whole is a tissue of misapplication and special pleading. Mr. Irving's long and most ponderous discourse is as complete an agere nihil as ever came under our notice. It is declamatory and loose in the highest degree, and displays a total incapacity for argumentation, and an entire absence of all that coolness and discrimination of judgment which could alone carry our convictions to the end at which the author aims. The work of Ben Ezra, which Mr. Irving has translated, has far higher pretensions as to reasoning than any thing which Mr. I. has written on the subject. But it appears to us to be full of errors and false applications of the sacred text, and at best shows only a tolerable plausibility for the scheme of the Millenarians. The general theory is, that Christ will soon appear, that he will raise the bodies of the saints, and reign with them a long period, perhaps a thousand years, that then the Gospel will spread, first by the conversion and then by the restoration of the Jews to Judea, and that after many heavy judgments upon Christendom, the fulness of the Geutiles will be brought in. We have abstained altogether, and purposely, from implicating ourselves with the one side or the other of the argument, because we think it has nothing to do with faith in the inspiration of Scripture prophecy, nor with the duty of the church. We do not imagine that an efficient rule of duty can ever be extracted from this argument, and we believe our faith in the fulfilment of prophecy is quite as strong while we leave it to develop itself by the events of Providence, none of which can be foreseen by us, as if we had formed with Faber or Cunninghame precise apprehensions of the forthcoming disclosures. Nothing would be more disastrous to our societies than the adoption of Mr. Irving's views. Mr. J. A. Brown's publication is opposed in several material points to Mr. Irving and Mr. Frere. He imagines that the Jew is to make a much greater figure in the fulfilment of the Apocalypse than is assigned to him by Mr. Irving and Mr. Frere. He too has much to say in favour of his own theory, and in reprobation of theirs; but the inference we have drawn is, that neither the one nor the other can show any thing so certainly as to deserve the faith of the church. Let us go forward in the career of Christian benevolence, embracing every fair opportunity of doing good, whether to Jew or Gentile; and what has been wrong in the administration of any of our great public institutions, let us proceed to correct, not in the spirit of rancorous condemnation which characterizes so many of their reprovers, but in the spirit of love and candour. We have dealt thus freely with our worthy friends, unawed by all those contemptuous sneers, and all those sweeping anathemas which Mr. Irving has levelled against the "Magazines" and "Magazine writers." The causes of his bitter animosity to the periodical press are not unobvious. It has condemned his dogmatism, and refused sanction to the nostrums of his party. But the spiritual part of that press has done more to promote the cause of true religion and the spread of the Gospel, than will ever be effected by all the dissertations, and all the discourses, and all the " speeches, and all the dialogues himself has ever published, or is likely to publish. He is sore to exasperation at the obstinacy which will not bow to his authority, nor turn at the rebukes of his eloquence. But there is too much good sense in the British churches, and too much deference to the obvious dictates of inspiration, to embark itself in questionable theories, and follow the dictu of a crude and untaught fanaticism. He may preach and write under the conceit that he is the John Knox of the age, against the prudence," "the "the expediency," the secularizing spirit," the "mammon-resources,' and the money-importance" of our public institutions, but while the costly architecture, and splendid decorations, and fashionable garniture of the National Scotch Church, at the expense of 17 or 18,000 pounds, drawn from the public benevolence, bespeak his taste and his practice, his reproofs will have little weight, and he will be liable to the friendly hint, that it ill becomes him to cast the first stone. We speak in brotherly love. He is a patron of faithfulness and faithful men, and and we would suggest, in parting, that had any of the Christian institutions of England evinced the extravagance, and display, and worldly conformity, which himself has patronized, they would more richly have deserved, and more keenly felt the reproofs which he has addressed to them. We ad the natural result of Established Churches, whether in England or Scotland. Divorce the whole interests of Christ's kingdom from the superintendence of the state, and we shall have a rapid improvement in all the items of Mr. Irving's indictment. The church will never be free from corruption of the grossest kind, churchmen will never be at liberty to act an independent part, and societies, combining a large number of stateservants, will never be released from the temptations to bow to the dictates and court the patronage of the world, till the first of all principles in the administration of Christ's kingdom is more generally admitted, "My kingdom is not of this world." Mr. Irving himself is not pure, either in his writings or his practice, from that propensity which inclines men to think that the truth receives lustre or acquires force from the concurrence of human authority, and the trappings of human pomp. He himself patronizes and upholds the subjugation of Christ's spiritual kingdom to the god of this world. Aim your blow at the root of the tree, and seek not to prune a few of the distant and uppermost shoots. The evil lies much deeper than he has ever dreamed. mire many things in his character, much in his writings, and we hope the societies will profit by his services. There is something in them to amend. There has been too much sacrificed on all hands to gain the concurrence of worldly Elements of the History of Philo- |