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religion of these fathers was not of the shape and type now usually known as evangelical, and paraded commonly as the best style of Protestantism. They knew nothing of the view which makes the Bible and Private Judgment the principle of Christianity or the only rule of faith. They took Christianity to be a supernatural system, propounded by the Saviour to his Apostles, and handed down from them as a living tradition (including the Bible) by the Church. The order of doctrine for them was the Apostles' Creed. They looked upon the sacra ments as mysteries; taking baptism to be for the remission of sins, and seeing in the "tremendous sacrament of the altar" the real presence of the Redeemer's glorified body, and a new exhibition continually of the one sacrifice that takes away sin. All was reality, not merely shadow and type. They acknowledged the divine character of the Christian priesthood, the necessity of confession, the grace of ministerial absolution. They believed in purgatory, and considered it "a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins." They held that the intercession of saints is salutary for the liv ing in the other world, as well as in the present; and they made it a part of their piety accordingly to seek the aid of departed saints, as well as of angels, by addressing to them direct invocations for this purpose. They counted it a part of their religion. also to venerate and cherish the monuments and relics of departed saints and martyrs, and were firmly persuaded that miracles were often performed through the instrumentality of such relics, as well as on fit occasions also in other ways; for of the continuance of miracles in the church, they never dreamed of making any question. They set a high value on the merit of celibacy and voluntary poverty, chosen in the service of the kingdom of God; and both by doctrine and example did what they could to recommend the monastic life, as at once honorable to religion and eminently suited to promote the spiritual welfare of men. All these things too went together, in their view, as so many parts and constituents of a single religious system; and the only voices that ventured here and there to make them the subject of doubt or contradiction, as in the case of Aerius, Jovinian and Vigilantius, were quickly cried down from every side as absolutely heretical and profane.

In the bosom of this system stood, not outwardly and by accident only, but as true representatives of its very soul and life, such men as Athanasius, Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa, Ephraim the Syrian, Hilary of Poictiers, Jerome, Ambrose, and

Augustine. They held the fundamentals certainly of the Gospel; but they held them in connexion with a vast deal that modern evangelical Protestantism is in the habit of denouncing as the worst Roman corruption, and what is most stumbling of all they made it a fundamental point to hold the supposed better parts of their faith just in this bad connection and no other. The piety even of Ambrose and Augustine is steeped in what this modern school sets down as rank heathenish superstition. The slightest inspection of historical documents is sufficient to convince any unprejudiced mind of this fact. No one can read attentively even the Confessions of Augustine, the work in which Milner and others affect to find a full parallel to the experience of true religion in the modern unchurchly style, without being made to feel that there is no room in truth for any such imagination. The two orders of thought are materially different. The very crisis of conversion in the case of the African father, turns on the principle of absolute and unconditional submission to the supernatural authority of the Church, in a form that would be considered anything but evangelical with the Pietistic or Methodistic tendency of the present time.

The ground taken here then by Bishop Wilson, and by the whole low church or no church so called evangelical interest, still bent on claiming some sort of genealogical affinity with the orthodoxy and piety of the fourth and fifth centuries, is clearly and palpably false. But how is it with Puseyism or Anglicanism in the high view, pretending to find in this early period its own pattern of Episcopacy, as distinguished from what it conceives to be those later innovations of the Papacy which it pompously condemns and rejects? Alas, the whole theory is brittle as glass, and falls to pieces with the first tap of the critic's hammer. Nothing can well be more arbitrary, than the way in which this system proceeds with church antiquity, choosing this feature and refusing that, just as it may happen to square or not square with the previously settled accident of its own constitution. It is stiff for the episcopate, without being able to see that the idea of its divine right rests from the start in a view of the church, which involves with equal force and often asserts the same necessity for the primacy. It builds a doctrine here and a practice there on the universal tradition of this classic time, this golden era of sound church feeling and faith; but without any reason, other than its own pleasure and whim, thrusts out of the way other doctrines and practices embraced in the same universal tradition with even greater clearness and force. The whole hypothesis is

untrue.

There is no such chasm between this classic period

and the time following as it pretends, and least of all in the form of any such discrimination of doctrines and practices as it needs to prop up its own cause. The fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries were not Protestants of either the Anglican or the Puritan school. They would have felt themselves lost, and away from home altogether, in the arms of English Episcopalianism, as well as in the more bony and stern embrace of Scotch Presbyterianism.'

New England Puritanism of course, as represented by Dr. Bacon, is quite willing to admit the general truth of what has now been said in relation to the age of Ambrose and Augustine; though at times ready enough still to talk of these fathers and their fellows, as though it took them to be in the main of its own communion and faith. Much even that Episcopalian Protestantism finds to be good here, this more unchurchly system has no hesitation in treating as part and parcel of the "great apostacy," which so soon turned the whole truth of Christianity into a strange lie. The fourth century was miserably corrupt. Even the third carries in many respects a very questionable face. But still we are not to give up entirely the idea of a truly golden age, representing for a time at least, however short, the true original simplicity of the Gospel, as the same has been happily resuscitated once again in these last days, particularly among the churches of New England. In the second century somewhere, or even reaching over this a little here and there into the third, back of popery and prelacy, the theory ventures to assume what

"Did St. Athanasius or St. Ambrose come suddenly to life, it cannot be doubted what communion they would mistake for their own. All surely will agree that these fathers, with whatever difference of opinion, whatever protests if we will, would find themselves more at home with such men as St. Bernard or St. Ignatius Loyola, or with the lonely priest in his lodgings, or the holy sisterhood of mercy, or the unlettered crowd before the altar, than with the rulers or the members of any other religious community. And may we not add, that were the two saints, who once sojourned, in exile or on embassage, at Treves, to come more northward still, and to travel until they reached another fair city, seated among groves, green meadows, and calm streams, the holy brothers would turn from many a high aisle and solemn cloister which they found there, and ask the way to some small chapel where mass was said in the populous alley or forlorn suburb? And, on the other hand, can any one who has but heard his name, and cursorily read his history, doubt for one instant how the people of England in turn, we, our princes, our priests, and our prophets,' Lords and Commons, Universities, Ecclesiastical Courts, marts of commerce, great towns, country parishes, would deal with Athanasius-Athanasius who spent his long years in fighting against kings for a theological term?"-Newman, Essay on Development.

all historical documents fail to make clear, the existence namely of a strictly evangelical church, founded on Protestant principles, (the Bible the only rule of doctrine, justification by faith, the clergy of one order, the people the fountain of all church power,) breathing a Protestant spirit, and carrying men to heaven without sacramental mummery or mysticism in the common sense Puritan way of the present time. So we have seen Dr. Bacon pleasing himself with the imagination, that the Christianity of Lyons in the second century, in the days of Pothinus and Irenæus, and of course also the faith and piety of the church generally in a still earlier part of the same century, in the days of Ignatius and Polycarp, corresponded in all material respects with the modern ecclesiastical life of Connecticut and Massachusetts. Is there any more ground for this fancy, than can be urged in favor of the one we have just now dismissed? We believe not. It rests throughout on a mere hypothesis, which involves in the end a purely arbitrary construction of history, just as wild and bold, to our view, as any that has been offered to us, from a different standpoint, by Strauss or Baur. Into this part of the subject however, the limits necessarily imposed on us at present will not permit us to enter. We hope to be able to return to it, in a second article, some time hereafter.

J. W. N.

ZACHARIAS URSINUS.'

AMONG the reformers of the second generation, the race of distinguished men, who, though themselves the children of the reformation, were yet in a certain sense joined with the proper original apostles of that great work, in carrying it out to its final settlement and conclusion, no one can be named who is more worthy of honorable recollection, than the learned and amiable author of the far-famed Heidelberg Catechism. In some re

In the preparation of this article, use has been made of the following works: ALTING'S Historia de Ecclesiis Palatinis; VAN ALPEN'S Geschichte und Literatur des Heidelberg'schen Kuechismus; PLANCK's Geschichte der protestantischen Theologie; BAYLE's Dict. hist. et crit. art. Ursin; SEISEN's Geschichte der Reformation zu Heidelberg; K. F. VIERORDT's Geschichte der Refor mation im Grossherzogthum B..den; EBRARD's Das Dogma vom heil. Abendmahl und seine Geschichte Reference may be made also to the writer's own work on the History and Genius of the Heidelberg Catichism.

spects, indeed, the authorship of this symbol must be referred, we know, to different hands. But in its main plan, and reigning spirit, it is the genial product, plainly, of a single mind, and to the end of time, accordingly, it will be known and revered as a monument, sacred to the memory of Zacharias Ursinus.

In one view we may say of the Catechism, that it forms the best history, and clearest picture of the man himself; for the materials of his biography, outwardly considered, are comparatively scanty, and of no very striking interest. He had neither taste nor talent for the field of outward adventure and exploit. His whole nature shrank rather from the arena of public life. In its noise and tumult, he took, comparatively speaking, but little part. The world in which he moved and acted mainly, was that of the spirit; and here, his proper home, was the sphere of religion. To understand his history and character, we need not so much to be familiar with the events of his life outwardly taken, as to know the principles and facts which go to make up its constitution in an inward view; and of this, we can have no more true or honorable representation, perhaps, than the likeness that is still preserved of him in his own Catechism. Here, most emphatically may it be said, that "he being dead, yet speaketh."

Ursinus was a native of Bresslau, the capital of Silesia. He was born on the 18th of July, in the year 1534, of respectable parents, whose circumstances, however, in a worldly view, appear to have been of the most common and moderate order. The proper family name was Beer, (Bear) which, according to the fashion of the learned world in that period, was exchanged subsequently, in his case, for the more sonorous corresponding Latin title, Ursinus. He discovered at a very early period, a more than usual talent and disposition for acquiring knowledge, and was sent in his sixteenth year accordingly, to Wittemberg, for the prosecution of his studies in the celebrated University of that place, then under the auspices mainly of the amiable and excellent Melancthon. Here he was supported, in part it seems, for a time at least, by foreign assistance, and particularly by an allowance from the Senate of his native city; while he was enabled soon to help himself also, in part, by a certain amount of service in teaching.

He remained in connection with this University, altogether, seven years, though not without some interruption. The breaking out of the plague in Wittemberg, was the occasion of his spending a winter, in company with Melancthon, at Torgaw; and for some other reason, the threatening aspect, perhaps, of the political heavens, he left the institution again in 1552, and

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