of the incumbent, Mr. Hollis preseated this gentleman to the living in a most handsome manner.

Perhaps the following epitaph (extracted from Memoirs of Hollis, p. 784) in honour of Algernon Sidney, may please some of the readers of your Repository:

“Algernon Sidney fills this tomb,
An atheist, for disclaiming Rome;
A rebel bold, for striving still
To keep the law above the will.

Crimes damned by Church government :
Oh! whither must his ghost be sent?
Of heaven it cannot but despair,
If holy Pope be turnkey there :
And hell will ne'er it entertain,

For there is all tyrannic reign.

more ingenious correspondents, and produce from them some profound disquisitions. I am,

Yours, &c.

W. H.

P.S. All your readers must have been sensibly affected with the account of the premature death of Mr. Buckminster. This account, though I do not by any means compare them together, brought the great Crichton to my recollection, who, when he sat for his degree and the question was put to him, Quem librum profiteretur? answered Quem non? And, after the professors had tired him with every book which they thought puzzling, to no sort of

Dr. Chauncey, after some others who went before him, has given us an inviting description of the new heavens and the new earth, in which the righteous will dwell, when they shall have obtained the applauses of their Judge, supposing this habitation to mean a renovated state of the earth, assimilated to paradise. But, why may we not here, look forward to a new and more glorious world? We must presume that this present world existed thousands of ages before it became a Chaos, from which it was restored and fitted up as a receptacle for the posterity of Adam, and that in its former state, it was the habitation of rational beings, who, after having approved themselves the devoted servants of God, and finished their probationary course, were not annihilated, but translated to some other world, more congenial to their exalted characters, where they might be advancing in perfection and dignity for ever. Why may not this be the case, then, with all the upright children of men? And, as each must be exercised in contemplating the wonders of creation, and be always increasing in divine knowledge, who can say, that the comets are not the habitations of all such, which are so admirably calculated, for animating them with this most sublime knowedge, whilst they are conveying them through millions of worlds? These thoughts may possibly amuse your

illegible book, on which he said, Tu legito domine, et ego exponam. But, the sermons which I reported to you in one of your former numbers, (ix. 401.) as published at Boston almost three years ago, were not written by Mr. B. but were published by Mr. Freeman: some of them, I am persuaded, are his own, though I am not authorized to say that they all or the greatest part of them are really his.

I have been lately reading Dr. Chauncey's book on Universal Salvation. I must confess his arguments to be very ingenious, though I cannot yet say, that I think he has altogether proved his doctrine. His introduction, however, of the pre-existence and incarnation of Jesus Christ, have involved him in great obscurity.

I have also been reading an excellent pamphlet on repentance, by the late Mr. Mole, and think that he has proved his point, as far as he goes. But, there are some difficulties, to which he has not adverted. A man, for instance, may be influenced by certain predominant passions, until that period of his life, when these passions cease, and may suffer so much from reflecting on what he has done, as to be truly sorry that he had ever transgressed. But, how can such a one be accounted a true penitent, on the supposition that if his passions had not forsaken him he would have proceeded in still indulging them? And, hence the young should be taught to practice all purity and goodness in the prime of life, lest what they may at last be led to consider as true penitence, should be found to be no repentance, but only a bodily infirmity or decrepitude.

solemn and imposing lights, in which their nearness to the rising sun of Christianity places them; yet, that the time of their authority over conscience and opinion was gone by; that they were no longer to be regarded as guides either in faith or in morals; and that we should be quite within the pale of orthodoxy in say ing that, though admirable martyrs and saints, they were, after all, but indifferent Christians. In point of style, too, we had supposed that criticism was no longer dazzled by their sanctity; that few would now agree with the learned jèsuit, Garasse, that a chapter of St. Augustine on the Trinity is worth all the Odes of Pindar; that, in short, they had taken their due rank among those affected and rhetorical writers, who flourished in the decline of ancient literature, and were now, like many worthy authors we could mention, very much respected and never read.

We had supposed all this; but we find we were mistaken. An eminent dignitary of the Church of England has lately shewn that in his opinion at least, these veterans are by no means invalided in the warfare of theology; for he has brought more than seventy volumes of them into the field against the Calvinists. And here is Mr. Boyd, a gentleman of much Greek, who assures us that the Homilies of St. Chrysostom, the Orations of St. Gregory Nazianzen, and -proh pudor!-the Amours of Daphnis and Chloe are models of eloquence, atticism, and fine writing.

Mr. Boyd has certainly chosen the safer, as well as pleasanter path, through the neglected field of learning; for, tasteless as the metaphors of the fathers are in general, they are much more innocent and digestible than their arguments; as the learned bishop we have just alluded to may, perhaps, by this time acknowledge; having found, we suspect, that his seventy folios are, like elephants in battle, not only ponderous, but dangerous auxiliaries, which, when once let loose, may be at least as formidable to friends as to foes. This, indeed, has always been a characteristic of the writings of the fathers. This ambidextrous faculty-this sort of Swiss versatility in fighting equally well on both sides of the question, has dis

tinguished them through the whole history of theological controversy:the same authors, the same passages have been quoted with equal confidence, by Arians and Athanasians, Jesuits and Jansenists, Transubstantiators and Typifiers. Nor is it only the dull and bigoted who have had recourse to these self-refuted authorities for their purpose; we often find the same anxiety for their support, the same disposition to account them, as Chillingworth says, 'Fathers when for, and children when against,' in quarters where a greater degree of good sense and fairness might be expected. Even Middleton himself, who makes so light of the opinions of the fathers, in his learned and manly inquiry into miracles, yet courts their sanction with much assiduity for his favourite system of allegorizing the Mosaic history of the creation; a point on which, of all others, their alliance is most dangerous, as there is no subject upon which their Pagan imaginations have rioted more ungovernably.

The errors of the primitive doctors of the church; their Christian heathenism and heathen Christianity, which led them to look for the Trinity among those shadowy forms that peopled the twilight groves of the academy, and to array the meek, self-humbling Christian in the proud and iron armour of the Portico; their bigoted rejection of the most obvious truths in natural science; the bewildering vibration of their moral doctrines, never resting between the extremes of laxity and rigour; their credulity, their inconsistencies of conduct and opinion, and worst of all, their forgeries and falsehoods, have already been so often and so ably exposed by divines of all countries, religions and sects; the Dupins, Mosheims, Middletons, Clarkes, Jortins, &c. that it seems superfluous to add another line upon the subject: though we are not quite sure that, in the present state of Europe, a discussion of the merits of the fathers is not as seasonable and even fashionable a topic as we could select. At a time when the Inquisition is re-established by our beloved Ferdinand; when the Pope again brandishes the keys of St. Peter with an air worthy of a successor of the Hildebrands and

Perettis; when canonization is about to be inflicted on another Louis, and little silver models of embryo princes are gravely vowed at the shrine of the virgin in times like these it is not too much to expect that such enlightened authors as St. Jerome and Tertullian may soon become the classics of most of the continental courts. We shall therefore make no further apo logy, for prefacing our remarks upon Mr. Boyd's translation with a few brief and desultory notices of some of the most distinguished fathers and their works.

St. Justin, the martyr, is usually considered as the well-spring of most of those strange errors which flowed so abundantly through the early ages of the Church, and spread around them in their course such luxuriance of absurdity. The most amiable, and therefore the least contagious of his heterodoxies, was that which led him to patronize the souls of Socrates and other Pagans, in consideration of those glimmerings of the divine Logos which his fancy discovered through the dark night of heathenism. The absurd part of this opinion remained, while its tolerant spirit evaporated. And while these Pagans were still allowed to have known something of the Trinity, they were yet damned for not knowing more, with most unrelenting orthodoxy.

The belief of an intercourse between angels and women, founded upon a false version of a text in Genesis, and of an abundant progeny of demons in consequence, is one of those monstrous notions of St. Justin, and other fathers, which show how little they had yet purged off the grossness of heathen mythology, and in how many respects their heaven was but Olympus with other names :--Yet we can hardly be angry with them for this error, when we recol lect, that possibly to their enamoured angels we owe the beautiful world of

• Still more benevolent was Origen's never-to-be-forgiven dissent from the doctrine of eternal damnation. To this amiable weakness, more than any thing else, this father seems to have owed the forfeiture of his rank in the Calendar; and in return for his anxiety to rescue the human race from hell, he has been sent thither bimself by more than one Catholic theologian.

VOL. X

Sylphs and Gnomes, and that, perhaps, at this moment, we might have wanted Pope's most excellent Poem, if the Septuagint Version had translated the book of Genesis correctly. This doctrine, as far as it concerned angelic natures, was at length indig nantly disavowed by St. Chrysostom. But dæmons were much too useful a race to be so easily surrendered to reasoning or ridicule; there was no getting up a decent miracle without them, exorcists would have been out of employ, and saints at a loss for temptation ---Accordingly, the writings of these holy doctors abound with such stories of dæmoniacal possession, as make us alternately smile at their weakness, and blush for their dishonesty. Nor are they chargeable only with the impostures of their own times; the sanction they gave to this petty diabolism has made them responsible for whole centuries of juggling. Indeed, whoever is anxious to contemplate a picture of human folly and human knavery, at the same time ludicrous and melancholy, may find it in a history of the exploits of dæmons, from the days of the Fathers down to modern times; from about the date of that theatrical little devil of Tertullian, (so triumphantly referred to by Jeremy Collier), who claimed a right to take possession of a woman in the theatre (because he there found her on his own ground'), to the gallant dæmons commemorated by Bodin and Remigius, and such tragical farces as the possession of the Nuns of Loudon. The same features of craft and dupery are discoverable through the whole from beginning to end; and when we have read of that miraculous person, Gregory Thaumaturgus, writing a familiar epistle to Satan, and then turn to the story of the young Nun, in Bodin, in whose box was found a love-lettera son cher dæmon,' we need not ask more perfect specimens of the two wretched extremes of imposture and credulity, than these two very different letterwriters afford.

The only class of dæmons whose loss we regret, and whose visitations we would gladly have restored to us, are

those ·

seducing sprites, who,' as Theophilus of Antioch tells us, confessed themselves to be the same that had inspired the heathen poets.' The

learned Father has not favoured us with any particulars of these interesting spirits; has said nothing of the ample wings of fire, which, we doubt not, the dæmons of Homer and Pindar spread out, nor described the laughing eyes of Horace's Familiar, nor even the pointed tail of the short devil of Martial; but we own we should like to see such cases of possession in our days; and though we Reviewers are a kind of exorcists, employed to cast out the eivil dæmon of scribbling, and even pride ourselves upon having performed some notable cures; from such demoniacs we would refrain with reverence; nay, so anxiously dread the escape of the spirit, that, for fear of accidents, we would not suffer a saint to come near them.

The belief of a millenium or temporal reign of Christ, during which the faithful were to be indulged in all sorts of sensual gratifications, may be reckoned among those gross errors, for which neither the porch nor the academy are accountable, but which grew up in the rank soil of oriental fanaticism, and were nursed into doctrines of Christianity by the Fathers. Though the world's best religion comes from the East, its very worst superstitions have sprung thence also; as in the same quarter of the heavens arises the sun-beam that gives life to the flower, and the withering gale that blasts it. There is scarcely one of these fantastic opinions of the Fathers that may not be traced among the fables of the antient Persians and Arabians, The voluptuous Jerusalem of St. Justin and Irenæus may be found in those glorious gardens of Iram, which were afterwards converted into the Paradise of the Faithful by Mahomet; and their enamoured Sons of God' may be paralleled in the angels Harut and Marut of Eastern story, who, bewildered by the influence of wine and beauty, forfeited their high celestial rank, and were degraded into teachers of magic upon earth. The mischievous absurdity of some of the moral doctrines of the Fathers; the state of apathy to which they would reduce their Gnostic or perfect Christian; their condemnation of marriage and their Monkish fancies about celibacy; the extreme to which they carried their notions of patience, even to the prohibition of all resistance to aggression, though the aggressor

aimed at life itself; the strange doctrine of St. Augustine, that the Saints are the only lawful proprietors of the things of this world, and that the wicked have no right whatever to their possessions, however human laws may decree to the contrary; the indecencies in which too many of them have indulged in their writings; the profane frivolity of Tertullian, in making God himself prescribe the length and measure of women's veils, in a special revelation to some ecstatic spinster; and the moral indignation with which Clemens Alexandrinus inveighs against white bread, periwigs, coloured stuffs and lap-dogs! all these, and many more such puerile and pernicious absurdities open a wide field of weedy fancies, for ridicule to skim, and good sense to trample upon:

But we must content ourselves with referring to the works that have been written upon this subject; particularly to the treatise de la Morale des Pères' of Barbeyrac; which, though as dull and tiresome as could reasonably be expected from the joint efforts of the Fathers of the Church and a Law professor of Groningen, abundantly proves that the moral tenets of these holy men are for the most part unnatural, fanatical and dangerous; founded upon false interpretations of holy writ, and the most gross and anile ignorance of human nature; and that a community of Christians, formed upon their plan, is the very Utopia of monkery, idleness and fanaticism.

Luckily, the impracticability of these wretched doctrines was in general a sufficient antidote to their mischief: But there were two maxims, adopted and enforced by many of the Fathers, which deserve to be branded with particular reprobation, not only because they acted upon them continually themselves, to the disgrace of the holy cause in which they were engaged, but because they have transmitted their contamination to posterity, and left the features of Christianity to this day disfigured by their taint. The first of these maxims-we give it in the words of Mosheim-was,

that it is an act of virtue to deceive and lie, when by such means the interests of the church may be promoted.' To this profligate principle the world owes, not only the fables and forgeries of these primitive times, but and are **