question. The most formidable evils then existing were a scoffing infidelity, drunkenness, profane swearing, Sabbath-breaking, the neglect of public worship, and scandalous misbehaviour during the time of Divine service in the parish churches. On all these points we might accumulate evidence without end; but we will confine ourselves at present to the open ungodliness of many regular church-goers. Bishop Atterbury, in his Sermon on the Death of Lady Cutts, describes that young gentlewoman as an attentive hearer of God's word, and a devout worshipper in His house. This, of course, was her duty, and what everyone would now expect in all who frequent public religious assemblies. But in the time of that lady so unusual was this conduct, that it excited general surprise; and a considerable part of the congregation used to fix their eyes upon her, not to imitate her example, but as if wondering what such behaviour meant. His Lordship adds, "She often expressed her dissatisfaction at that INDECENCY OF CARRIAGE WHICH UNIVERSALLY PREVAILS IN OUR CHURCHES; and wondered that they should be most careless in their behaviour towards God, who are most scrupulously nice in exacting and paying all the little decencies that are in use among men." What a statement to be made by a Bishop, in a professedly Christian country, respecting the higher classes of people! He does not go into particulars as to the "indecency" of which he complains; but the information which he withholds is given by an honest-minded and eloquent Irish clergyman,Philip Skelton,-who published two volumes of sermons, most of which he states that he had preached in the churches of London. "The truth is," says he, "they who call themselves the polite people of the world, and have indeed some delicacy in matters of ceremony and external civility, are, generally speaking, so grossly corrupt and wicked, so foul in their affections, so outrageous in their passions, so enormous in their actions, that hell, opened in the most heightened descriptions, seems to be the very doctrine of all Christianity that is peculiarly adapted to them. But if they will not bear such descriptions, let them stay away from the house of God; and then we shall have less foppery and vanity, less bowing and grimace, less whispering and ogling, less inattention, in the house of prayer; less pride, pomp, and parade, in the house of humiliation; we shall, in a word, have again congregations of Christians in our churches, instead of our present very genteel assemblies; which want nothing else but wine, dancing, and cards, to turn them into ridottos. Then the plain, wellmeaning people who come hither to confess their sins, and deprecate the judgments of an offended God, will not be perpetually called off from that solemn work by every new idol that enters to flaunt it in silk and jewels."+ If persons belonging to the more respectable classes of society, and attendants on public worship, were so destitute of even the appearance of * Atterbury's Sermons, vol. i., p. 213. Edit. 1730. + Skelton's Discourses, vol. i., pp. 303, 304. Edit. 1755. VOL. IX.-FIFTH SERIES. religion, what must nave been the character and habits of the people generally? "Libertinism," says Atterbury, "hath erected its standard, hath declared war against religion, and openly listed men of its side and party. A general looseness of principles and manners hath seized on us like a pestilence; a pestilence that walketh not in darkness, but wasteth at noonday; the contagion of which hath spread itself through all ranks and degrees of men, hath infected both the camp and the congregation." "Will anyone presume to say," asks Doddridge, "that religion has a universal reign among us?" "Alas, the avowed infidelity, the profanation of the name and day of God, the drunkenness, the lewdness, the injustice, the falsehood, the pride, the prodigality, the base selfishness, the stupid insensibility of the spiritual and eternal interests of themselves and others, which so generally appear among us, loudly proclaim the contrary: so that one would imagine, upon this view, that thousands and tens of thousands thought the neglect and even contempt of religion were a glory, rather than a reproach."+ These profligate masses the Methodist preachers could not address as mere formalists, who needed simply to be convinced that God requires a spiritual worship, and that true religion has its seat in the heart; but as people that were in the direct road to perdition, and every moment exposed to the damnation of hell. They therefore lifted up the voice of earnest warning, and entreated the unthinking crowds to flee from the wrath to come. Those whom they saw to be alarmed and penitent they invited to break off their sins, and come to Christ for full and free forgiveness through the blood of the cross; and they declared that the vilest and worst, thus coming to Him, would be at once accepted. They did, indeed, preach the new birth; but they preached it not as an isolated blessing, but as directly consequent upon personal justification, from which it can never be separated. In the order of thought justification precedes the new birth ; for we cannot conceive that the Holy Spirit will make any man a partaker of the Divine nature while he remains under the guilt and curse of sin : but let that guilt be taken away, and that curse removed, and there is no longer any charge against the man, and therefore nothing to hinder the blessed Spirit from taking possession of his heart, and effecting its renewal in righteousness and true holiness. Such has been the Methodist doctrine from the beginning; such it is at this day; and therefore to say that the Methodists at any period preached the new birth, and either denied or overlooked the doctrine of justification by faith, is to charge upon them a direct and palpable contradiction of their own solemnly-recognised principles. As well might it be said that the Wesleys and Whitefield denied every article of the Apostles' Creed. They acknowledged no new birth but that which is connected with justification, and is consequent upon it; and no justification but that which is obtained p. 107. *Sermons, vol. ii., Rise and Progress of Religion, pp. 2, 3. Edit. 1745. by faith in the blood of the cross. From the time of his conversion, in the year 1738, till the day of his death, in 1791, John Wesley held the doctrine of justification by faith with as firm a grasp as did the great German Reformer, and preached it with undeviating consistency, fidelity, and zeal; and in the formularies which he prepared for the body of Christian people that bear his name, and to which they steadily adhere, the doctrine of justification by faith is more prominent than is even that of the new birth. Had he and his fellow-labourers confined their attention in the pulpit to the new birth, to the exclusion of the kindred tenet of justification by faith, as they are said to have done, they might perhaps have succeeded in raising up a small body of dreamy ascetics; but they would not have seen, as the fruit of their ministry, a body of cheerful and happy Christians, such as the Wesleyans now are, and have been from the beginning; nor would their Societies have been one tenth so numerous as they now are. The doctrine of free justification through faith in Christ crucified, which was the first subject of conversation in the first Methodist Conference, is still one of the most prominent topics of discourse in all Wesleyan-Methodist pulpits throughout the world, and we trust ever will be, until the end of time. Without this vital element of the Gospel, neither "formalism" nor open vice can ever be successfully encountered. With all deference to the author whose statement has called forth these remarks, justification by faith, as well as the new birth which is consequent upon it, is not only a "present truth," but a truth for all time; a truth which never was and never will be overlooked by men who found their teaching upon the New Testament. On this vital point the doctrine of the Reformers and that of the Methodists are perfectly identical. (To be continued.) SELECT LITERARY NOTICES. [The insertion of any article in this list is not to be considered as pledging us to the approbation of its contents, unless it be accompanied by some express notice of our favourable opinion. Nor is the omission of any such notice to be regarded as indicating a contrary opinion; as our limits, and other reasons, impose on us the necessity of selection and brevity.] The Congregational Lecture for 1859.-Christian Faith: its Nature, Object, Causes, and Effects. By John H. Godwin, Jackson, Walford, and Hodder. 1862. A Reply to the Strictures of the Rev. J. H. Hinton, M.A., on some Passages in Lectures on Christian The lecturer shows, in a line of valuable argument, that "Christian faith" is "trust in Christ," and, therefore, " more than any kind of belief:" (pp. 13–38 :) *—all which * The following note, occurring in the Appendix, p. 324, deserves the philologer's attention: "TO BELIEVE IN, AND ON. “The use of the preposition eis, if it were alone, might be ambiguous. It might possibly be explained by supposing it to correspond with; but it is never so used - goes against the theory, that the passion on the Cross is to be viewed as a suasive addressed to mankind, or as, primarily and directly, the means of their renewal in holiness. St. Peter's words might seem almost pleonastic, so amply, though briefly, do they expound the true doctrine: "WHO HIS OWN SELF BARE OUR SINS IN HIS OWN BODY ON THE TREE." (1 Epist. ii. 24.) And St. Paul affirms that God hath set forth Christ Jesus who propitiates by His blood, as A DEMONSTRATION OF HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS in remitting past sins; "that He might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus;" (Rom. iii. 25, 26;)that He might extend pardon to the guilty, His rectoral honour being unstained, and His unchanging law magnified, since the sword of justice falls on an all-sufficient Substitute, picts our original wound, or our innumerable stains of actual transgression. Such views as these have been held, by many, in close alliance with other views known by the term Calvinistic. Among divines of this school, the first step is to admit the events of the spiritual world, like those of the material, to be linked in sure and predestined concatenation. Then, happy enough to deem themselves and a few choice friends of theirs the special favourites of Heaven, (though careful to disclaim everything like merit of their own,) they leave all the rest of mankind to the condemnation due on account of the general sin. As the disciples of Islam boast of the illiteracy of their Prophet, so these worthy people decry reasoning, and seem to love their creed the more for its direct opposition to the logical “The sinner's Friend, and sin's eternal faculty which God has given to His Foe." So that now God justifies the unjust. The just would not need to be justified, in the Gospel sense of the word,—that is, to be absolved, and thus set right with the great Sovereign. To be set right, therefore, does not convey the sense, to be an upright man; though we know what at once follows the great relative change, while not of its essence: namely, regeneration, procured by the sacrifice of Jesus, and wrought by the power of the Holy Ghost. The doctrine of atonement assumes that man is guilty, utterly lost, and helpless. Accordingly, we find no terms to rival those of holy Scripture in declaring his fall, corruption, and liability to suffer. No theological Rembrandt can lay on too deep a colouring, when he de immortal offspring. On the other hand, many of the most acute minds, and some (at least) of the most reverent also, have felt that the characters graven on the universal conscience of man cannot be fallacious; that the liberality of Divine providence, in making the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sending rain on the just and on the unjust, is a strong presumption of love to all; that such conception of the moral attributes of the Highest as we draw from His own word cannot be in its nature untrue to the glorious archetypes, since we are required, though at an immeasurable distance, to take them for our example; that the Bible cannot be an enigma,-which it must be, alike in its warnings and in its promises, if its readers are bound in chains of in the Septuagint. There are many passages in which the particle in Hebrew is joined to the noun, to indicate the object of trust, or belief. But in the Greek translation there is no similar usage; the dative case of the noun being used alone. Moreover, the use of eis must be connected with that of ev and èrì. [ί πιστεύειν εἰς might possibly mean to believe respecting, motevei év, or ènì, could not bear any such meaning. They must mean to trust in, and to trust on.' fate and necessity;-in fine, that, if an atonement for the whole race is not set forth in the sacred pages, no words could possibly set it forth: since, while there is not a text which limits the gracious provision, there are a hundred which plainly affirm its universality. Now, the way to meet the manybranching error of the Predestinarians is not to deny any part of the vital truth on which it hangs; not to wound the tree, in attempting to cut away the luxuriant parasite. It is not to minify the relation which Adam bears to his race, by account ing him a mere specimen of a transgressor; nor to render the dread words of Scripture, such as shapen in iniquity, conceived in sin, children of wrath, τὸ φρόνημα τῆς σαρκὸς, by feeble, or seductive, or inaccurate phrases, like "the absence of good principles," "deficiency," and "knowing neither good nor evil;" -nor to call in question the demand of justice for the punishment of offenders, even apart from any good end to be gained by the infliction; -nor, at any time, to throw into the shade the strictly piacular value of Christ's offering ;-nor, yet once more, to describe justifying faith as more than the trust of the heart in that Divine Sacrifice. These things have too often come of a natural reaction, when intelligence was bursting the fetters of an iron creed. Geneva is not the only beacon. But, while we mark the warning lights on the one side, let us avoid the dangers on the other. The evil inflicted by our first father is countervailed by the work of "the Lord from heaven;" who is described as "the second Man," we take it, for this very reason. Extensive as is the injury, so is the remedial plan. A Saviour was promised before the parents of mankind were driven from Eden, and in terms plainly embracing their descendants at large. In this strong light the mystery of our case vanishes. We shrink no more from the admission, that original sin finds its proof in all history, and in every awakened conscience; that the best men are most deeply convinced of the need of an almighty Saviour,— yea, of that one Saviour who died not merely for their benefit, but IN THEIR STEAD. This doctrine runs through the Bible-is inscribed on every ancient altar-is again and again asserted in terms-is needful for the elucidation of a thousand texts in which it is not formally stated. So full of it is the sacred page, that we read without surprise that remarkable passage in which an elegant writer, innocent of all bias from systems of divinity, speaks of the effect produced on his mind by the study of the holy books alone :-"That Christ suffered and died as an atonement for the sins of mankind," writes Mr. Soame Jenyns, "is a doctrine so constantly and so strongly enforced through every part of the New Testament, that whoever will seriously peruse those writings, and deny that it is there, may, with as much reason and truth, after reading the works of Thucydides and Livy, assert that in them no mention is made of any facts relative to the histories of Greece and Rome."* In speaking of "satisfaction to Divine justice," or the like, care must be taken lest analogical terms draw us off, either to the right hand or to the left. Analogy ineans no more than limited and imperfect resemblance. Nothing like retaliation, nothing like delight in exacting pain, must ever be ascribed to the adorable Ruler of all worlds. This were to lower, even to degrade, the subject; and to contradict infallible witness: for, it is written, "He doth * View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion. |