had arisen to a height which was no longer tolerable. Reformation was indispensable, and it was only where reformation was refused or where retention of the form was retaining the abuses also, and this necessarily and inevitably, this the episcopal and clerical institutions were by them deliberately set aside they did it not of choice, but were driven to it by necessity.

Fortunately for England-for it resulted rather from our position and circumstances than from deeds of which we have any reason to be proud-fortunately for us, the episcopal order was retained in the Church of England: and thus, by the happy but fortuitous concurrence of events, some of which reflect little credit upon the agents or their motives, England was able, in reforming her Church, to fall back upon those purer ages, and the earliest historical records of the organization of the body of Christ, to which the whole of Christendom and the Greek as well as the Roman Church were wont to appeal, as furnishing the best, the only sufficient models of ecclesiastical institutions and practices-upon the third and fourth centuries-upon the writings of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, or Cyprian. We say the only sufficient models, inasmuch as the Church had not acquired its present standing, and could not assume its present form of organization, till after the time when the canon of Scripture closed. The Church was nowhere established, nowhere publicly recognized, and apostles still remained who were not only the highest order in the Church, but themselves alone possessed in fulness the powers and exercised the functions of all the inferior orders. In the age when apostles were themselves ordering all things in the Church, it would be idle to expect precedents for the acts or a model for the organization which would become necessary when the Church should be under the government, not of the apostles, but of the successors of the apostles, as was the case at the Reformation.

Luther's whole conduct manifests, and his writings abundantly testify, that he would gladly have retained, had it been possible, episcopacy and all the other institutions of the primitive Church. But the trials which the reformers of Germany had to pass through deterred all but the boldest-all but those who had nothing to lose, or valued nothing in comparison with the truth. The Lutheran Church was deprived of the episcopal order; but it retained as much of the clerical order and form as was possible in a Church where there were no bishops. Our English reformers felt the difficulties under which the followers of Luther had laboured; and our bishops

respected the inperfect ordination which the Lutheran clergy had received, and licensed them to preach in the English dioceses when they came hither, endeavouring on all occasions to evince a willingness to hold out towards them the right hand of fellowship. The Swiss reformers, in their yet severer struggles, were still more denuded than the Lutherans, and were reduced to bare Presbyterianism. But even in this naked form, the Church of England does not wholly renounce brotherhood with the reformers, and in some sense has recognized the Presbyterian form, both as a Church and an Establishment, in our brethren north of the Tweed; who, receiving the doctrine of the reformers principally from Switzerland; where it had been leavened with Presbyterianism, and embittered by the controversies in which Zwingle had been perpetually engaged, and in which he at length fell; themselves drank largely into the same spirit. And the Reformation in France was not able, by the learning and zeal of Lefevre, Farrel, and the other enlightened men who embraced its truths, to obtain any kind of public footing or any ministerial standing; but they and their followers were obliged to meet in secret-were hunted from place to place like wild beasts-and constrained to hide themselves in dens and caves of the earth.

But although, at the time of the Reformation, and in all the earliest instances, the various forms of Church polity were mainly owing to the uncontroulable circumstances of the parties and so may be regarded as the result rather of accident or necessity than of deliberation and choice, yet there can be no doubt that a system, which might have had a fortuitous and involuntary origin, may become, in course of time, a real and deliberate preference and choice, through convictions brought about by our having frequently defended and justified the position in which we find ourselves. Men find reasons for things that are, which seem to them more cogent than those they can find for things that might have been. Real preponderate over imaginary existences-the practical in religion carries all before it: our religion must be a reality, or it is nothing-forms and modes are secondary and subsidiary to this: where God and eternity are the themes, and where salvation is felt to be at stake, speculation is mere trifling. Under this impression we cannot easily believe that all our fathers have been wrong, or that all our friends are in fatal error: we can hardly think that system to be wrong, and that body to be no true Church, in the midst of which we have been brought up and by whose fostering care we have been nou

rished-through whose institutions we have learned all that we know concerning the way of peace, and the worship of God, and our eternal destinies. We must take these things into our account in judging of the differences of opinion which exist among the various denominations of Christians and different national Churches at the present time: and, in thinking of the reformers, we should remember what a tearing of their very heart-strings it must have been to break away from ties and sever associations such as these. The anguish they suffered, no doubt, maddened them into fury against a system by which the world had been so long enslaved, and the renouncing of which occasioned them such bitter pangs and yet they clearly saw that they must renounce that system in order to save their souls, as being one tissue of corruption and falsehood-inconsistent with its own professions and its own laws-and above all as being in direct contravention of the word of God, and of the practices of the Church in its earlier and purer ages.

We do not render full justice to the reformers unless we fully acknowledge the necessity which was laid upon them of carrying out their antagonism to corrupt Rome, which necessity not to acknowledge argues an entire ignorance of the condition of the Roman Church: yet that was the only Church of the west at that time, and it was unlike any presently existing or any former Church-unlike Rome itself as it exists at the present time. The reformers had no choice-no alternative but resistance; and they were driven into more palpable antagonism and more determined opposition by the fierce uncompromising hostility of Rome, and her refusal at that time to reform notorious abuses, out of which she has since that time been shamed. Not even Luther himself contemplated beforehand the lengths of opposition and distance of separation to which he was ultimately driven. To present such a firm front of resistance as to be thus repelled required a very strong character, and on so strong a character the blows given could not fail to produce great exasperation, and provoke blow for blow in return.

But, at the present day, our great endeavour should be to produce such a mutual good understanding of each other, between contending parties, as may lead to a reconciliation of seeming differences, and leave such as are real and incapable of reconciliation open and palpable to all. It is vain to seek after unity by compromise, or by stifling the conscience and warping the judgment of man: more, incalculably more, is lost than gained by such a false and hollow semblance of unity.

Better far to tolerate disagreement and call it idiosyncrasy than have recourse to such means of unity as these. Idiosynerasy may be charitably borne with where it cannot be overcome; but we doubt whether the true way of surmounting it is often put in practice. To surmount a difficulty we must get above it, and we doubt whether the Church is set high enough, and is made sufficiently broad and comprehensive to overrule, cover, and embrace all the good things which these contending parties seek after, and may legitimately require and obtain. The natural man has some heavenward affec tions and desires, which the best of the heathen endeavour to express and satisfy in their religious rites; and these the Church may meet and supply, without allowing the supposi tion that there is any analogy between Christianity and the religion of nature, and regarding all such instances as fragments of patriarchal tradition. The Church does meet the best desires of the heart, but it is too low a view if we make this its chief characteristic: the Church is not the mere exponent or receptacle of the natural desires of man-she is not merely the handmaid to wait upon our affections, even the holiest and best of them: the Church is far other, far higher, than this-it is the mighty instrument, in the hand of God, for remoulding the heart of man, and for implanting, in an ungenial soil, emotions and affections which were not there before spiritual affections to which the natural man is a stranger-nay, to which he is opposed. We may not put the heathen and their religion into the same category with ours, as though they possessed a less perfect form of the same faith, or as though Christianity had been either elicited from, or adapted to, the reason and natural instincts of man. We may not place even the Jews in the same high standing with the Church, though they had a revelation from God and faith in that revelation, and prepared the way of the Church, as John the Baptist prepared the way of the Lord. Among them that were born of women, there had not one greater arisen than John the Baptist, but he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. All was dark among the heathen before the coming of Christ-the Jews only dimly, and as from afar, discerned a glimmering of light through the types and shadows of the law: but Christ brought life and immortality to lightwas himself the completion of the types-in his death both gave a meaning to sacrifice and rendered it possible that a Church could be: and then, having finished his work on earth; and being made both Lord and Christ at the right hand of the Father, he shed forth the Holy Ghost upon the gathered

disciples (Acts ii.); and then, and not till then, was the Church constituted, and the Comforter promised before the departure of the Lord (John xiv., xvi.) bestowed. The special and peculiar characteristic of the Church is that, to those within its pale, the Holy Spirit is promised in a sense which is exclusively Christian, as proceeding from THE RISEN CHRIST; and, as a necessary consequence, that the sacraments and other Christian ordinances are so many means of grace or channels of divine life: they bring, and they continue, the presence of God in the Church, being the links which unite the body to its risen head.

It is necessary to clear up this point on the present occasion; for the work before us begins with a very low, and, as we believe, a very false view of the Christian Church and its priesthood: and, as the subject under discussion is the constitution of the "Church of the Future," we cannot write or think to any good purpose without first determining, in a satisfactory manner, what the Church really is or ought to be; and to be satisfactory it must not be determined by human suffrages, or by the variable and fallible reason of man; but we must learn what God hath declared it to be, and bend our reason to the mind of Christ and open our hearts to the teaching of the Holy Spirit.

In nearly all the instances which have come under our notice, the mistakes concerning the true standing of the Church have arisen from the various senses in which the words priest and priesthood are capable of being understood. In the New Testament the presbyters or elders are in one sense the only priests, but in another sense the whole Church is called "an holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ" (1 Pet. ii. 5). It is in this latter sense that the word " priesthood" is taken in the volume before us: but then there were priests among the Jews and priests among the heathen who were a separate class-who were privileged to mediate in various ways between God and the people and with none of whose functions the people could intermeddle: yet these privileged classes are spoken of as though they were analogous to the Christian priesthood which has been already regarded as universal, and common to all the members of the Christian Church. All Jews were not priests-not even all of the tribe of Levi: still less could all the worshippers among the heathen be regarded as priests, and, therefore, the analogy does not hold; but we object to it on a still stronger ground-namely, the difference of the standing and functions of the Christian priesthood