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with acting on the defensive, but must take up a new position, and attack in our turn, those whose assaults we have hitherto thought it sufficient to repel. We must tell the adversaries of the Church, that their artful devices are seen through, their real motives understood, and the secret objects at which they aim, revealed to the light of day. We must tell them that when they clamour against a church-rate, their motive is not, as they allege, merely to remove a payment which offends their scruples of conscience, or sits heavily upon them in a pecuniary light, but in reality to obtain a new vantage-ground, from whence they may annoy and weaken the Church, separate her from the State, and finally succeed in effecting her destruction, and in making plunder of her revenues. We must tell them that they wish to abridge the privileges and revenues of the Church, and to destroy the independent character which her clergy now possess, and which places them above the reach of the injurious influence to which the minister of a voluntary Church must ever be exposed, in order that the respect with which their exhortations are listened to by the people, may be diminished, and the good effects resulting from their lessons of loyalty and order, may be weakened and impaired by the loss of all that undefined yet important authority derived from the sanctions of old association, superiority of station, a highly cultivated mind, and an official character. We must tell them that they endeavour to overthrow the Church, because she enjoins peace and order to her followers; because she preaches obedience to the laws, submission and reverence to the throne,-precepts which, so long as they are observed, offer the most invincible obstacle to the lovers of change, and the disturbers of public tranquillity; because, in a word, she forms the best safeguard of the throne, the peerage, and of every other ancient institution of the land; and that therefore, when her destruction is once brought to pass, they hope to be able to accomplish the objects of their long and ardent desire the overthrow of the monarchy, the abolition of the peerage, the destruction of every thing which is old and venerable, and honoured and loved amongst us, and to establish a democratical form of government, in which the needy adventurer, the wild enthusiast, the visionary schemer, the bankrupt in character and fortune, shall bear sway, and indulge with impunity their plans of confiscation, plunder, and despotism.

Finally, we must not be disappointed or surprised, should the fruit of our exertions not appear so soon as we expect. The good seed is dropped into the ground, and will doubtless spring up in due season. At any rate, we shall have done our duty. We must leave the rest with the supreme Disposer of human events. He, we are bound to believe, will in his own good time vindicate from reproach his pure and apostolical Church; and, whilst she continues to administer his holy sacraments, and to

preach the truths of his inspired word, will never suffer her to be dismayed or cast down by any devices or snares of the enemy. "The gates of hell shall not prevail against her," are the words of the Lord of life; and his words, we know, shall never pass away. Let us then go on, undoubting, in the straight path of duty, looking forward to better times and better days; humbly trusting, through the promise of him who is before all things, and by whom all things consist, that our most holy Church, that faithful witness of God, and depository of his truth, shall continue to endure until time shall have passed into eternity, and the church militant here on earth shall become the church triumphant in heaven.

ART. IX.-Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, viewed relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism. By J. H. NEWMAN, B. D. Fellow of Oriel College, and Vicar of St. Mary the Virgin's, Oxford. London: J. G. and J. Rivington; and J. H. Parker, Oxford.

MANIFOLD are the obligations which bind the members of the Anglican Church to the University of Oxford. We might refer our readers to the period when that ancient and religious incorporation maintained, almost single-handed, through evil report and good report, the holy warfare against the rebels and schismatics who dragged their sovereign to the scaffold, whereon, as a blessed martyr, he fell by impious. and accursed hands, testifying by his death an uncompromising devotion to the catholic and apostolic Church, in whose communion he had faithfully lived, and to whose communion he had steadfastly adhered, amidst temptations and perplexities of no ordinary description or character. Or we might recall to their minds the time when the unfortunate and ill-advised son of that martyred prince attempted to impose the yoke of popery and chain of superstition upon necks and bodies accustomed to a service which was perfect freedom, a service to that Master whose word is unerring and all-powerful truth. How critical, how fearful that moment! The religion and liberties of England all but prostrate at the feet of tyranny, her people paralysed, her king the betrayer of his trust;-Oxford fearlessly stood forth! the conflict was sharp, but short; the Church, the nation were saved. How beautiful, how touching the sequel! Foremost in a resolute maintenance of religious principle, Oxford neither could nor would shake off her allegiance to the exiled prince, and, utterly regardless of worldly or temporal advantages, encountered a chilling neglect,nay, but too often worse treatment, from the immediate successors of the Stuart dynasty,-treatment conformable indeed to the precepts and examples of politicians of this world, but, by the blessing of Providence, unproductive of the slightest deviation

from the even and consistent path of duty steadily pursued by the university, which has been the theme of our humble but hearty praise and admiration. These topics are, however, comparatively political, and enter but partially into the scope of our present undertaking; we therefore proceed to a more exalted view of the obligations imposed on the members of our Church by the University of Oxford,-obligations which no pen can adequately describe, no tongue sufficiently declare;—we mean the determined maintenance of catholic and apostolic truth, against the numerous heresies which even within her bosom afflict-would we could say afflicted-the Anglican branch of the universal church. The honoured names of the great and good Hooker, of the pious Jewell, in the sixteenth century of Laud, Juxon, Ken, and Hammond, in the seventeenth century, require no commentary; their lives and works proclaim their praise. But let us not be misunderstood;-we deny not that the sister university has produced shining lights of the Anglican Church. Who can in truth pass over, without a tribute of admiration, the names, consecrated to religion and learning, of Bramhall, Cosin, Beveridge, Sancroft, and Brett? While Dublin enforces her valid claim upon our gratitude, in the production of the loved and revered Wilson. It is indeed to the sufferings and forbearance of Oxford, in behalf and for the sake of the Anglican Church, that we point with peculiar gratitude and thankfulness, her practical adherence to those blessed truths whose witnesses endured the contempt and persecution of man with resignation and cheerfulness, considering it a subject of rejoicing, "that they were accounted worthy to suffer shame" for the name of the blessed Corner-stone of the Church, whose ordained and appointed bishops and presbyters they were ;-nor have their sons degenerated from the piety and learning of their sainted sires. For a period, indeed, the giant strength of the catholic Church in England appeared to slumber and sleep: a continued course of temporal prosperity,-kings her nursing-fathers, and queens her nursing-mothers, appeared to enervate the hardy daughter of Zion, principles well nigh abandoned, or at any rate overlookedsectarian fancies substituted for catholic truth: Latitudinarianism on the one, Zuinglianism or Calvinism on the other hand, seemed to threaten the very fabric of our apostolic Church. We had nearly forgotten whose children we were, nursed in the lap of luxury and effeminacy, when the inscrutable decrees of Providence interposed: the natural guardians of the Church, the statesmen, or we should rather say, the politicians of the day, showed a willingness, nay, an alacrity to sacrifice the temporal privileges of the Church at the altar of expediency; and then we began to look around us and to ask, How can these things be? Meanwhile a small but holy band in the University of Oxford, were gradually collecting materials for awakening the dormant

energy of the Anglican Church, and arousing her sons to a sense of those spiritual dangers, whose extent and fearfulness had been overlooked in the sunshine of prosperity-dangers in comparison with which the overthrow of the temporal power of the Church was but as the minutest atom of dust in the balance. Nor was it long before the first-fruits of these pious labours were brought forth in the form of a periodical publication entitled "Tracts for the Times." The bold, uncompromising truths developed in the successive numbers of this invaluable work, awakened, as may be easily imagined, no ordinary share of attention: even the thoughtless were startled by expositions of catholic truth, which, to their uninstructed and inconsiderate minds, presented the appearance of novelty or innovation; while the more serious portion of the community were variously affected, according to their various degrees of zeal and knowledge. Misrepresentation, misunderstanding, and misconstruction, were eagerly at work, combining their irregular and ill-assorted forces in a desperate attack upon the citadel of truth. To such a point, indeed, was hostility carried, that in an abortive attempt at satire and pleasantry, entitled a "Pastoral Letter from the Pope to some Members of the University of Oxford," the pious desire expressed by the author of the tract, No. 20, for unity in the catholic church,-that unity for which we offer up our daily supplications, in the noble prayer for "all conditions of men," is, by a clumsy omission of the context, made to appear an earnest desire on the part of the writer of the tract, that the Anglican Church should surrender her catholicity, and acknowledge the supremacy of the see of Rome.* The war-whoop was soon raised,-the great doctrines of baptismal regeneration, and of the apostolical succession, testified to by the holy fathers of catholic antiquity, and recognised by the learned Doctors of our own Church, were treated as remnants of popish superstitions, while the duty of maintaining the canon, "Quod semper quod ubique quod ab omnibus traditum est," was treated as a fantasy and delusion unworthy of serious notice. The professed churchman and avowed sectarian united for the purpose of combating truth. Periodical publications, in the interest of dissenters, were not more fiercely hostile to the doctrines of the primitive church, than the professed organs of a certain party within the pale of her communion. Still the pious defenders of the principles of the great Reformers, principles which embodied the essential part of the teaching of the apostles and their successors, proceeded in their course of well-doing. Unmoved to anger, for they taught His religion whose precepts were universal charity, unprovoked to bitterness, for their

* We refer the reader to Dr. Pusey's powerful answer to the Pastoral Letter: it is called " An earnest Remonstrance to the Author of the Pope's Letter."

instruction was one of universal love; no sharp retort, no biting jest, disfigured the pages of earnest and anxious exhortation and argument. The task was holy and arduous, the execution conformable to an undertaking of vast and vital importance. But the work thus begun was not to be easily or lightly accomplished. The limits of a periodical did not allow the full and complete discussion of certain topics essential to the perfecting of the great business in hand. Mr. Newman, of Oriel College, to whose pen a considerable portion of the tracts were attributed, and whose admirable and beautiful sermons demand and deserve separate and particular notice,-sermons of which it might be with truth said, that they possess a simplicity which renders them intelligible to the humblest capacity, and learning whence even the most highly gifted and best informed among us might acquire a vast fund of invaluable information,-Mr. Newman, who, in conjunction with Dr. Pusey, Professor Keble, and other distinguished members of the University of Oxford, had been foremost in promulgating and enforcing the great truths of the church catholic, applied his powerful intellect, unobtrusive piety, and deep learning to the holy and blessed work; and, in furtherance of the admirable designs dwelt upon in the former part of this paper, has issued the volume which stands at the head of this article, and to a review of which, as far as our limited abilities and capacity admit, we are now about, by the blessing of Providence, earnestly and impartially to apply ourselves; with the feeling, that however imperfect our execution of the task, the anxiety to fulfil it to the utmost of our power, is, at any rate, not wanting,-an anxiety which will, we trust, atone for the defects in its execution.

Mr. Newman's volume is inscribed to Dr. Martin Joseph Routh, the pious and profoundly learned president of Magdalen College, in a dedication beautiful from its simplicity and earnestness; and well does that bright ornament, not merely of the university which owns him as one of her noblest sons, but of the Anglican Church, whose pure and primitive doctrines he has faithfully taught, deserve the honour accorded to him in this dedication. The successor of the uncompromising Hough, in times of well nigh equal difficulty,-in times when an outraged university has been compelled to pass upon the writings and published doctrines of one of her most exalted functionaries, a severe but well-merited censure, he has maintained the faith once delivered to the saints, fearlessly and faithfully,-" Reserved," to use the language of the dedication, "to report to a forgetful generation what was the theology of their fathers," may his valuable life yet, by God's blessing, be prolonged! A brief and modest advertisement, stating the origin of the volume, and explaining the meaning of the words "Popular Protestantism," in the title-page, is followed by an introduction, detailing the

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