ingenious subterfuges, evade the force of even an appropriate and personal argument. Now what one individual, is doing in this case, a large part of a whole congregation are doing in the other; and if it be so difficult to fix conviction where there is such full opportunity for the closest and most particular discrimination, how much more dif ficult must it be where the application is necessarily constructed, as in the case of a sermon, on a less finely graduated scale, and is there-. fore less capable of applying to the moral peculiarities of individual character?

Were a minister to enter the sick chamber of a person ignorant of religion, with merely the heads of such a vague "application" as I am now supposing, he would soon find its total insufficiency to effect his purpose. Imagine him to be gin," Well, my friend, let us ask the important question, Are you a sinner or a believer?"-who does, not know that the answer would immediately be, "Ob, sir, I have always been a believer in religion; I constantly say the Creed and prayers and God forbid that I should be a sinner; for though I have had my faults, like others, yet I am sure I bear no malice to any body; I had always a good heart," &c. &c. Now would not the minister here instantly perceive that the words sinner, and believer, were wholly misunderstood by the person whom he wished to instruct? And is it not very probable that a similar misunderstanding prevailed among a large class of his hearers, when the same general and unexplained expressions were employed in his public discourse on the preceding Sunday? The sick person evidently understood by the term "sinner," an openly flagitious character; and by the term "believer," one who does not deny the truth of Christianity: and if, for want of due explanation, the same mistake occurred amongst the bearers at church, would not the intended effect of the whole

discourse, or at least of the ap. plication, be entirely destroyed?

In order, therefore, to convince such a person, as has been, described, of his real state before God; a, more minute reference to the discriminating marks of his character would be essentially required. This would naturally occur in the ordinary mode of conversation, as the sentiments, the temper, the opinions, the conduct of the individual became unfolded to his pastor's mind. Theres would be an attempt to grapples with the conscience. Sweeping and indiscriminate charges would be. superseded by others of a more personal and modified, and therefore more convincing and affecting, nature. The general indictment, that awful charge in which we are all included, would indeed run as before; namely, that the individual was, in the full import of the term,

a sinner;" but it would be prov ed and brought home by those characteristic marks which might apply directly to his peculiar case, and which, therefore, he could not generalize or evade. It is not by indiscriminately denominating a person a "pharisee," and then uttering all the woes denounced against pharisees, that a minister can hope to be the happy means of bringing him to repentance. But if he can prove him, in his own eyes, to be a pharisee, though he may possibly. never use the term, he will, by the blessing of God, have prepared him for the genuine admission of all that is to follow. The human heart is too fine and intricate a machine to be handled to any advantage in a coarse and unskilful manner. We must wisely pursue self-love, and pride, and unbelief, through all their windings; we must detect every sin, in all its Protean forms; we must make use of judgment and discrimination, as well as honesty and zeal, if we would really con vince men of their transgressions, and bring them, by God's blessing, to a fervent desire after salvation. The minister who combines a due

insert the whole) is in the following words: "God promises (chapter xxxvi. 26.) to give them a new heart, and to put within them a new spirit: here he exhorts them to make themselves a new heart and a new spirit: which difference of expression is thus to be reconciled; that although God works in us to will and to do, and is the first Mover in our REFORMATION, yet we must work together with his grace, at least willingly receive it, and not quench or resist its motions."

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Now, sir, if you have not already made the discovery, you will, I am sure, hear with surprise, (I will not add a stronger word), that in the original commentary of W. Lowth, which now lies before me, there is no such word as "reformation" to be found; but that, without any hint or intimation to that effect, without any thing which can lead the reader to suppose that he is presented with a misquotation, the term "refor mation" is substituted in the Family Bible, for that of "regeneration." God," in the commentary of W. Lowth, is represented as "the first Mover in our REGENERATION."- Upon this substitution of one word for another, and especially a word so cold, so ethical, so unmeaning, as reformation, I shall not trouble you with any remark. The act will, I think, speak for itself, in the judgment of every candid and impartial person, whatever may be the system to which he is attached. I can hardly conceive it possible that the most devoted supporters of Dr. Mant's views of regeneration can approve this mode of circulating and recommending them; or that they would sanction the practice of garbling and mutilating the works of deceased authors, and then bringing them forward, patched and disfigured by a modern hand, in confirmation of opinions which in their genuine form they would probably have, had a ten

To the Editor of the Christian Observer. I HAPPENED lately to take up an old book, entitled " Europæ Speculum; or, a View or Survey of the State of Religion in the Western Parts of the World. Anno 1599." It is addressed to Archbishop Whitgift, and is ascribed to the pen of the celebrated Sir Edwin Sandys, as the result of his travels, and containing the chief of his observations made in them. My edition is printed "Hagæ-Comitis, 1629." I will transcribe a passage, which, I fear, is but too applicable to practices creeping in amongst ourselves; and which, in whatever quarter they may occur, I conceive it is a debt due to Christian sincerity to expose.

"It is to be thought," the author says, "that their prosperous success (that of the Romanists) in pruning and pluming those latter writers, effected with good ease and no very great clamour, as having some reason, and doing really some good; was it that did breed in them an higher conceit, that it was possible to worke the like conclusion in writers of elder times, yea in the Fathers themselves, and in all other monuments of reverend antiquitie: and the opinion of possibilitie redoubling their desire, brought forth in fine those indices expurgatorii, whereof I suppose they are now not a little ashamed, they having by misfortune lighted into their adversaries' hands, from whom they

desired by all meanes to conceale them; where they remaine as a monument to the judgement of the world of their everlasting reproach and ignominie. These purging indices are of divers sorts: some worke not above eight hundred yeers upwards: other venture much higher, even to the prime of the church. The effect is, that for as much as there were so many passages in the fathers, and other auncient ecclesiasticall writers, which theyr adversaries producing in averment of their opinions, they were not able but by nicks and shifts of wit to reply to;...some assemblies of their divines, with consent no doubt of their redoubted superiours and sovereignes, have delivered expresse order, that in the impressions of those authours which hereafter should be made, the scandalous places there named should be cleane left out,"....and thus "the mouth of antiquity should be throughly shut up from uttering any syllable or sound against them. Then lastly by adding words where opportunity and pretence might serve, and by drawing in the marginall notes and glosses of their friers into the text of the fathers, as in some of them they have very handsomely begun, the mouth of antiquity should be also opened

for them. There remained then only the rectifying of St. Paul, and other places of Scripture," &c.

Such alterations as your correspondent J. N. C. has pointed out, in works distributed by the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge, are a plain confession that the original authors did not speak in conformity with the present received doctrines of their distributors. Indeed, the alterations must be carried to a considerable extent, be fore our old writers can be reduced to the wished-for conformity with modernized Christianity; as may be evinced, to name no other proofs, by a simple reference to the index of Jeremy Taylor's Treatise on Repentance, an author whom I mention because he has been much quoted in an existing controversy. I have marked about one hundred instances, in one chapter, in which he uses the terms regenerate and unregenerate; and in no one of them, I believe, with any reference to baptism. He, like Bishop Wilson, makes "VICTORY" over sin "the only certain criterion of REGENERATION." "A regenerate person," and "a Christian RENEWED by the Spirit of grace," are, in his vocabulary, and I presume in your's also, synonimous terms.

J.'S-, H.

For the Christian Observer. ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE LITERATURE OF FICTION.

(Concluded from p. 375.) WERE it proposed to those professedly religious families who allow themselves the perusal of what are considered harmless novels, and that species of modern poetry which usually accompanies them, to draw up a catalogue of the books admitted into the domestic circle, and to compare it with the corresponding list of avowedly worldly families, CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 187.

how would the balance stand? Not so much, I fear, as might be wished, to the credit of the former as devoted and self-denying followers of their acknowledged Lord. If it be said, that the grosser poems and novels are not admitted into the families in question; it may be rejoined, Neither are they read in the more regular circles of worldly society. Therefore no visible difference as yet exists. It is true, a few works may gain admittance to the one which are not

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allowed in the other; but the distinction between the lighter reading of the two divisions of the public should surely be positive and evident, and not made up of a few sickly comparatives.

Putting out of the question, for the present, higher considerations, the members of religious families are losing intellectual ground by the system now in vogue. Standard works of history and biography, of critical and ethidal disquisition, the earlier poets, treatises on general taste, with many other departments of established literature, are not and cannot be studied and wrought into the texture of the mind during the reign of ephemeral publications. Have the readers, I mean the younger readers of the works in question gained any familiarity with the Rambler and Adventurer, or grappled with Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric? I almost blush to ask next, which are their favourite stanzas in Beattie's Minstrel; and then, what parts of Cowper come full upon their memories in a solitary walk. To the last-named poet I refer as to a genuine moral classic; and his writings may be adduced as the ériterion of a mind unsophisticated and well acquainted with itself.

Among the readers interested in these widely extending subjects, let me particularize such as are placed in situations where they may command their time, select their associates, and consequently model their own characters. Possessed of this envied but insecure independence, our juniors, and especially when not settled in the world, will be powerfully tempted to abuse the high privileges of their leisure; and, unless they are conscious of the responsibility attached to it, will fly to light reading as a refuge from themselves. Among the inmates of the Castle of Indolence, slumbered a class which the manners-painting historian of that fortress might perhaps have identified with certain graceful triflers on the Grecian couches of a succeeding age, "Oh

And court the vapoury god soft-breathing in the wind.

According to the fantastic mythothology of the æra when Thomson composed his matchless poem, the god of vapours or of spleen led on the host of imaginative diseases. On the expiration of his powerfor the very deities of fashionable life are deposed with the reigning shape of a sandal, or the tint of a

vesture

arose the dynasty of nerves; and that has since resigned the throne to the demon of ennui, now wielding an iron mace over his subject world of passion, idleness, or unproductive activity.

In contemplating the aspect of the religious world, I am somewhat confounded by feeling as though even the reproofs uttered by such secondary divines and moralists as Blair, Soame Jenyns, Lord Lyttelton, Johnson, Hawkesworth, and Paley (for instructors of this order are secondary in the estimate of the spiritually-minded Christian), against what they call the foibles of persons, whom they nevertheless designate as still reputable and exemplary members of society, were in