another of the first preachers of the cross, speaks of sinners who had, "like the dog, turned to their own vomit again, and like the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire." But the apostle of the circumcision never stooped to picture the loathsome detail, and thus in effect to partake of the banquet of the one, and share the bath of the other. Modern literature, ay, elegant literature, amid all the vaunted refinement of the nineteenth century, has done both, in order to enlarge our knowledge of nature and life, and to teach us superiority to the exclusiveness of vulgar prejudices. With such forms of liberalism the cross and its preachers have no sympathy.

*

In

The cross repudiates the demon pride of this false liberalism. In Eden, Satan but ventured to promise, "Ye shall be as gods," hinting a distant likeness to God as the reward of sin. Modern Pantheism has renounced the qualifying terms, laid aside all hesitation, and converting the promise of future good into an assertion of present privilege, it exclaims audaciously, "Ye are God." Hence, at the funeral, a few years since, of a great metaphysician of Germany, one of the leaders of this philosophy, it is said that some of his admirers spoke of him reverently as a singular incarnation of God. But bring such dreams of pride to the atoning cross. He who hung there tasted death for every man. And why? We had all sinned: he died the just for the unjust; and without the shedding of blood there is no remission. And there I learn my desert. the fate of the second Adam I read the character of the first Adam, whose place he took, and whose doom he averted. I am a doomed sinner, by nature a child of wrath. The taint of an endless curse is on my soul. The blood of a Divine atonement was necessary to purge me from fatal blots. Do they tell me of the innate innocence of man's nature? I point them to virtue, perfect, peerless, and divine, as it was incarnate in Christ Jesus. But that excellence was not welcomed in the world it came to redeem; but on the contrary, it seemed to be the more fiercely hated, the more brightly it shone; and it was revealed before the eyes of the race only to be maligned, persecuted, and slaughtered. At the cross of Christ I learn then, that I must come down into the dust of lowly penitence, or I perish. His kingdom is for the poor in spirit; and his most diligent followers are to confess themselves but unprofitable servants. Is it in such scenes, and under the eyes of such a Teacher, I am to claim equality and oneness with God? No! such thoughts, every where absurdly impious, are there most offensively absurd and most unpardonably impious. And, as with a battle-axe, does the cross of Christ cleave and annihi

* Hegel.

late these arrogant fictions of that liberalism cherished by some who yet call themselves Christians.

Yet, on the other hand, the gospel meets all those just claims of the soul, to which this liberalism has addressed its flatteries. The doctrine of the cross, with a true liberality, allows all national peculiarities not in themselves sinful. It welcomes the savage and the slave into the brotherhood of the race, and is prepared, in the most degraded and forlorn of all the tribes of the earth, to eject the brute, acknowledge the man, and develop the saint. It lays the basis of a true, universal, Catholic church;-not the local, arrogant, and usurping church of Rome, which, to make plausible its poor claim to universality, must anathematize the myriads of the Greek and Syrian churches, and all Protestant Christendom; but that one church, real though invisible, which comprises the multitudes no man can number, and no man can name-the Christians of every land, age, and sect, that hold the Head, and love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity.* The idea of unity, so dear to the liberalist, the cross alone truly reveals. It shows a unity of Providence in the whole history of the world—a unity of piety in all dispensations, from those days ere yet the ark

It was one of the grave offences in the excellent commentary of that devout Jansenist, Father Quesnel, on the New Testament, which brought down upon him and his work the fulminations of the Vatican in the famous Bull Unigenitus, that he had wrongly defined the catholicity of the church. Two of the one hundred and one heretical propositions selected from his Exposition, the 72d and 76th, are these:

"It is a mark of the Christian church that it is catholic, embracing both all the angels of heaven, and all the elect and righteous of the earth, and these of all times." And again," Nothing is more expansive than the church of God, for all the elect, and all the righteous of all times make it up.”—(Magn. Bullarium Rom., Luxemb. 1727, tom. viii.)

It can, we think, be shown that this true invisible church, comprising the truly righteous, the elect of all times, lands, and kindreds, is the only Catholic church known to the Scriptures; the only Catholic church, of which Christ will acknowledge the Headship; or membership in which ensures salvation. Romanism could not, however, hold her power, if such a theory of catholicism were to prevail. The 72d Prop. is taken, apparently, from Quesnel's remarks upon Heb. xii. 24: as is the 76th from his Commentary at the 20-22d v. of Ephes. ii. His observations on the latter passage, by their beauty, tempt us to a longer quotation :-"" And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone; in whom all the building, fitly framed together, groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: in whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.' How majestic and how admirable, my God, is thy church! How worthy the work of its Builder! Nothing can be so august, for it is thy palace. Nothing so holy, for it is thy temple. Nothing inspire such reverence, for it is thine abode. Nothing is so ancient, for patriarchs and prophets have laboured upon it. Nothing is so immovable, for Christ is its foundation. Nothing is more compact and indivisible, for He is its corner-stone. Nothing more lofty, for it lifts itself to the skies, and even into the very bosom of God. Nothing is better in its proportions, or better in arrangement, for the Holy Spirit is the architect here. Nothing is more beauteous or more variegated, for precious stones of all kinds are built into it, the Jew and the Gentile, those of all ages and countries, of either sex, and of all conditions. Nothing is so expansive, for all the elect, and all the righteous of all ages make it up. Nothing is more inviolable, since it is a sanctuary consecrated to the Lord. Nothing is so divine, since it is a living structure, in which the Holy Ghost has his dwelling, which He vivifies-which He sanctifies. There is but one God, one Christ, one Church. None is to be adored besides the God whom we adore in three Persons. None worships Him but as he loves Him, and none worships and loves Him as he should, but by the Spirit of Jesus Christ, and but in his body, which is the church."

was launched, to those of a new heaven and a new earth, when there shall be no more sea-a unity of origin, in the common descent of our race-a unity of transgression in our common sin—a unity of account in our gathering before Christ's bar, and a unity of brotherhood in our one ransom paid at Christ's cross.

Let but our literature be saturated with this doctrine of the cross, and it will conquer all miscalled liberalism, by showing the source of its errors, and meeting its just claims. It will set up the truth, and require the renunciation of every error. But it will set up the truth in love; and there will be ultimately one Lord, and his name One; and He will not be the material and sinful God of Pantheism, but the Everlasting One, uncreated, impassible, spiritual, sinless, and supreme, distinct from the universe he made and governs-the Creator, and not the creature.

5. And lastly, would we say, the cross thus mighty to demolish liberalism, has also equal energy as the antagonist of superstition, which was spoken of as the last of the evil influences besetting our youthful literature.

Instead of forms and rites, the great resource of superstition, the gospel of the cross requires a spiritual worship, and an inward conversion. It has no regard for mere penances and austerities, as practised for their own sake, or from a belief in their intrinsic merit. The doctrine of self-torture, so dear to the saints of Romish legends, is unknown to the gospel. Christ did not hew his own cross, nor was he his own scourger, as have been many saints that shine in the Papal calendar. Instead of that antiquity of ten, or twelve, or fifteen centuries, of which Antichrist vaunts so much, the cross reveals a more ancient antiquity of eighteen centuries; instead of its hazy and dubious traditions, Scripture verity; and, instead of its councils and fathers, and a long succession of sinners wearing tiaras, and claiming names of blasphemy, a primitive apostolic church, and Christ "for the chief Apostle and Bishop of our profession," whose priesthood is the unchangeable priesthood of Melchisedec, and whose dominion is an everlasting dominion. It acknowledges no religion that is merely a religion of the senses or the imagination. The feelings that stirred Paul at Athens, as he stood amid its altars and gazed on lines of images crowding its every street, would have sprung up as naturally within him, had he stood beneath the vaults of many a cathedral, with its "dim religious light," and rich with the trophies of the pencil and the chisel. Against the idolatry of the material image of the cross and its sculptured burden, as seen in the Romish reverence of the crucifix-against the idolatry of the material emblems of bread and wine in the sacra

ment, as they are deified in the Romish doctrine of Transubstantiation-against the popular idol of all Romish countries, the earthly parent of our Saviour, the human and sinful mother, to whom they have transferred the mediatorial office of her divine and sinless Son,-against all these aspects of the worship of the creature, there is no better remedy than the faithful and full presentation of the true doctrine of Christ and Him crucified, the world's Creator, Redeemer, and Lord. As Christ gave it, and as Paul dispensed it, the gospel of the cross is the grand Iconoclast principle of the age. And as of old it routed the gods from the summit of shadowy Olympus, and in later days drove into darkness all the deities of the Valhalla, so will it ultimately abolish all the idols out of the earth. And not the graven image only of wood and of stone, but the idols also of which Bacon has spoken, the idols of the forum and the cavern, the prejudices of the busy, and the errors of the studious.

To bring out the great truth to the cross, in one of its twofold aspects, as the principle of sanctification no less than of justification, Protestantism may

learn some not useless lessons even from the Romish church. That abnegation of self, that deadness to the world, and those heroic sacrifices, in which some of her confessors have excelled, have served to the staunchest Protestants as the incentives of a holy emulation. Leighton in one age, and Zinzendorf in another, were supposed to have enkindled their piety, and formed in part their religious character, amid the Jansenist Catholics of France, with whom each had mingled. Wesley, in his admiration of the character and graces of some of that communion, and in his endeavours to bring the light of their example before his own societies, by his publication of the lives of Xavier, De Renti, and Gregory Lopez, incurred from some heedless Protestants of his age the imputation of covert Romanism. He complains that he had thus been represented by one of our own Stennetts, as but a disguised Papist. David Brainerd, too, in the earlier years of his heroic mission, found himself followed by a like rumour, that he was but a concealed Romanist. We do well to remember in our conflict with error, that a prevalent worldliness is, in God's eyes, as great a practical heresy as is the tenet of justification by works. And a worldly orthodoxy in Protestantism will never avail to subdue a devout superstition in Romanism, because it is not in the nature of Beelzebub to cast out Beelzebub, as our Saviour has told us.

In the collision, not only impending, but already begun, at so many points of the foreign missionary field, between the Church of Rome and the churches of a purer faith, God is

making a merciful provision to strip the churches of the Reformation of their remaining worldliness and errors, to crush in them all self-dependence and all vain-glorying, and, shutting them up to a simpler faith and a more heroic ardour, to nail them more closely, as by a blessed necessity, to his own cross as their one refuge and exemplar. Rome may, from the very amount of superstition she brings with her, find her missionary labours in the lands of Pagan superstition more rapidly crowned with success than those of her rivals, in the adhesion of nominal proselytes to her standard. But her victories will be less solid and enduring than the slower conquests of Protestantism. Where resorting, as she has ever so often done, to worldly intrigue, and calling to her aid the arm of the secular power, she will often find her advantages but short-lived, from the original sin that gave their first seeming prosperity. The Sandwich Islander, for instance, is not likely soon to forget that the missionary of the chair of St Peter came to his islands with the cannon of Catholic France forming the vanguard, whilst the crucifix and the brandy-flask filled, as it were, the two hands of the intrusive missionary church.

As to the ultimate influence this ambitious and versatile church is to win on our own shores, the statesman may well have his doubts. Never let Protestantism, even in resisting Rome, be driven to adopt measures of proscription and persecution. If for the time, here and in other lands, Rome may attempt a union with the free tendencies of the age, and seek to identify herself with the cause of social progress, it yet seems but little likely that she will be able to maintain a very firm and lasting alliance with our "fierce democracy." That democracy is bent upon change and impatient of control, whilst this church proclaims change incompatible with truth, and demands control as necessary to unity. M. de Tocqueville has supposed that the love of our people for unity will naturally, and most powerfully, commend to them the church holding out so wide-spread and magnificent an exhibition of it. But, on the other hand, there is, as yet, rife amongst us a passion for independence, and our institutions generally foster a free and early development of individual character which will work in a contrary direction. And Rome, again, whatever she may claim to be abroad, is essentially a secular power at her own proper home. By her own hearth, she is an autocrat the most absolute. In her forms of government there, in her European alliances, and in wellnigh all the recollections of her history, she is essentially a petrifaction of despotism. It will, therefore, be difficult, even for her ingenuity, to weld together the old tyrannies of the East and the new liberties of