God may lead to repentance, his judgments to that holy fear of offending against his Divine Majesty ; that may bring us as humble suitors to his throne of grace-put an end to the open profanation of the Sabbath, to "making gold our trust," to depending upon an arm of flesh," or otherwise provoking him who is “a jealous God, and will not give his glory to another." 66 Let us then, my Christian brethren, as with one heart and soul, approach the mercy-seat, entreating that He with whom "is the residue of the Spirit," will pour out of his Holy Spirit for these important purposes. A second striking circumstance which is presented to us at the opening of the new year, is the assembling of the new parliament. Her Majesty has indeed summoned the great council of the nation to meet before this invitation will have reached you; but this, it is considered, is only for a more special purpose. The great subjects which concern the general welfare of the British Empire will remain for legislation when the new year arrives. At such a crisis, what language can express the importance of Her Majesty's Counsellors, and of all the assembled members of parliament, being under the special guidance and direction of the Lord: of his granting to them that wisdom which comes from above, prospering all their consultations "for the advancement of his glory, the good of his church, the safety, honour, and welfare of our sovereign and her dominions." This is more especially called for from the peculiar activity of the church of Rome, and from the favour she has obtained in some quarters. Surely we who rejoice in our deliverance from her yoke, and count it among our highest privileges to possess the faith of our Protestant forefathers-surely we are called to earnest prayer for our rulers, that God would raise up a body of faithful men from among them, and grant to them, by the gift of his Holy Spirit, that firm faith in his written word, that holy boldness in maintaining our Protestant principles, and that power of argument in the senate, that none shall be able to gainsay or resist; making them, by his blessing, the honoured instruments of handing down to our posterity the unsullied faith of our forefathers, without exposing us to those judgments which God has denounced "upon Babylon," and upon those who have her mark.* A third remarkable circumstance which is presented to us at the approach of the New Year, is the disturbed state of Christendom-the present movements in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the Roman Catholic Cantons of Switzerland. Upon this subject, however, I can only glance; brevity allowing me no more space than to mention how urgently these commotions call for prayer, that "the Lord who sits upon the flood" would overrule them to hasten on that glorious season when the kingdoms of this world shall be the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.' The last circumstance which I notice as demanding earnest prayer for the outpouring of the Spirit, is the paramount importance in the present day of cultivating a high and holy standard of personal religion. 66 Without entering into any detail respecting "the signs of the times," all who have attended to the instruction given by many of the Lord's faithful ministers for some years past, will have heard the cry, Behold the Bridegroom cometh, go ye out to meet him;" that is, they have been warned that "the coming of the Lord draws nigh." It is at such a season that those who "have slumbered and slept" are said to "awake, and to trim their lamps." This "the wise virgins” did so effectually that the foolish said to them "Give us of your oil." For although their own lamps were gone out, having no oil in them, they saw the bright shining of the lamps of their companions, and were attracted by it. Does not this convey to us this important instruction, that as the coming of the Lord draws nigh, the religion of his true followers will be of so attractive a nature, that others will desire to possess the same? It is clear also that this attractiveness proceeds from *See Revelations xiv. xviii. xix. their having the active power of the Holy Spirit granted to them. For the request is, "Give of your OIL;" -the frequent emblem used in the Scriptures to express the Holy Spirit. At a season, then, beloved in the Lord, when the judgments of God are in the earth, how desirable it is for us to be seeking after this attractiveness; this carrying out into ordinary life those graces which are "the fruit of the Spirit." How important, not for our own glory, but for the glory of God, and the promotion of the eternal blessedness of our fellowmen, that these graces should, in a measure at least, be seen in usdivine confidence, holy boldness; truth, wisdom, knowledge, godliness; faith, hope, joy, peace, love; goodness, meekness, humility; temperance, patience, forbearance, brotherly kindness. These are all the gifts of the Spirit, aud can only be expected if earnest prayer is made for a large measure of His sanctifying grace. Let us, then, my beloved friends, "forgetting the things which are behind and reaching forth to those that are before," commence the New Year by uniting in this general concert for prayer; that, though our bodies may be distant from each other, our spirits may be in perfect union, our desires one; that God may be glorified, His Son our Lord Jesus Christ universally honoured, and that happy season soon arrive when the new song of the redeemed shall be sung, and the courts of heaven resound with unceasing hallelujahs "to God and to the Lamb." Bearing in mind, then, the reasons for a general concert for prayer, mentioned in former Invitations, let me request you to ponder upon the circumstances adverted to in this address, and with the affection of a brother earnestly desiring your present peace and everlasting felicity, invite all who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, TO COMMENCE THE NEW YEAR, SATURDAY, JANUARY 1ST, 1848, BY UNITING IN THE GENERAL CONCERT FOR PRAYER FOR THE OUTPOURING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. The following suggestions are re spectfully offered, to assist those who are desirous of this union : 1st. Let Christians follow the example of our blessed Lord, (Mark i. 25.) who rose up a great while before day for secret prayer. Let them thus secure the blessing of Him who says, "Pray to thy Father which seeth in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." 2nd. Let them call upon the Lord in their families, for his Spirit to be poured upon themselves and their households, their neighbours, their country, including Great Britain and Ireland, and our Colonies, the mi nisters of the Lord, the Churches of Christ, the remnant of scattered Judah and outcast Israel, and upon the Gentile world. 3rd. Where circumstances will admit of a morning service, let the congregation be assembled, and, in addition to the appointed prayers and a suitable sermon, let all who are devoutly disposed partake together of the Supper of the Lord *-or, as may be more convenient, let the whole congregation meet in the evening for public worship, and let an appropriate discourse be preached. 4th. Let the ministers of the Lord meet on the following Monday, with their brethren of their own communion, in earnest prayer for themselves, their flocks, the whole body of Christ, and the world at large, and then especially consult together upon the most effectual means for hastening the coming of the Lord's kingdom, and particularly for the continuance of such a general concert for prayer, that the year may proceed according to this devout commence ment. May the Lord accompany these means of grace, or such others as may be adopted, with his abundant blessing! Oh! may it indeed be a season of special refreshment from the presence of the Lord! * Such a service will, D. V., take place at Limpsfield Church, on Saturday, January 1st, 1848, at 11 o'clock, A.M. Let this be the prayer of all who read this paper; and as the new year is now approaching, it would be a great kindness if those who approve the object, and have influence over the press, would republish and circulate this invitation; which any one into whose hands it may fall, HAS FULL PERMISSION TO DO. Peace be with all who love the Lord Jesus in sincerity! Thus prays their affectionate brother, and servant in the Lord, JAMES HALDANE STEWART. Limpsfield Rectory, Godstone, Surrey, November 2nd, 1847. Review. APOSTACY: A SERMON in reference to a late event at St. Paul's, Knightsbridge. By the Rev. W. J. E. BENNETT, M.A. THE event referred to is the secession of one of Mr. Bennett's curates to Popery-a Mr. Alexander Chirol ; rather a queer name. We doubt whether it is an English one; and would really like to know where the gentleman comes from, who has obtained such an unenviable notoriety. This we do know, that the last place he came from, before he gave the Puseyite church at Knightsbridge the benefit of what Mr. Bennett calls "his purposed hypocrisy," was that church in St. Pancras, which has already parted with two or three curates on the same journey; and we understand that Mr. Chirol was ready enough for the move when he took the cure of St. Barnabas under Mr. Bennett. It seems, therefore, somewhat incumbent on Mr. Dodsworth to tell us where he gets these gentlemen, what is their previous history, and how it is that his church seems such a convenient "station" for a railroad course to Rome. Mr. Bennett has written in very great wrath, and in unmeasured language. And we confess it reminds us of the trite remark, that the smaller the theological difference between parties, the more bitter is their strife about it. Look to the Evangelical school, whose abhorrence of papistry is proverbial, and you find sincere but decent lamentation, over those who are perverted. But look to the perpetual curate of Knightsbridge, and 66 you find this last step of apostacy, this finishing flourish of the harlequinade, visited by the whole vocabulary of virulent abuse: and this too, while the substance of the sermon in question, as far as it is doctrinal at all, implies an accordance with Roman opinions in a great degree. It speaks of marriage as a "mystery;" of the priesthood as of the taking a wife; and indirectly recommends celibacy. It makes holy orders a sacrament;" and it speaks of the communion table as "the altar of the living God," and of the sacrament as "eating with the mouth the body, and drinking with the lips the blood, of the Crucified Redeemer." This is not Church-of-England doctrine or language. language. An incipient Romanist might readily and pardonably seek a temporary lodging with such a teacher till " a convenient season offered,"- —or an ignorant person, whose views were not established, might easily be led, by such teaching, confirmed by all the trumpery paraphernalia of the Knightsbridge worship, to the verge of the precipice; and if he fall we do think, that the venerable senior would not be justified in the violent wrath he has indulged on the occasion, except in accordance with the ancient story of most cathedrals, that the apprentice has outstripped his master. We must be allowed to express our surprise on one point of the case; and that is, the entire ignorance on the part of Mr. Bennett and his curates, of this Mr. Chirol's doctrinal opinions: "he never opened his lips to any of his brethren, the clergy of St. Paul's, four of us, though meeting daily in the public prayers and other offices of the church." Why, what was the nature of their intercourse? Did they never speak but rubrically in the words of the offices? We remember Mr. Dodsworth visiting a sick friend at our personal request; and he walked into the bedroom, knelt down at the bedside, read the Visitation to the Sick, and walked out again. The individual was a woman of superior sense, whose mind had been much exercised by anxieties; poured ou with brotherly confidence into each others bosom, was there nothing that could indicate the veering of the wind-the coming in of the delusion of transubstantiationthe leaning towards the worship of the Virgin, and of images? Surely it would ooze out somewhere! Surely the workings of an honest mind, undergoing a change, would be quickened to something like the expression of a contradiction, by that frequent reference to leading truths which constitutes one of the great features of intercourse among sinedcerely believing ministers. If not, we are driven to one point or other of this dilemma. Either Mr. Chirol moled his lips to the very last under most hypocritically and wickedly the pressure of such Christian converse; or, which seems the more probable opinion, the doctrinal speculations of the two parties, and the way in which they express them, are so nearly identical, that they would go along what seemed to be the same road, without any apparent call for contradiction or controversy; and although the surprise may be somewhat to Mr. Bennett that Mr. Chirol went to Rome, the surprise of Mr. Chirol may be as great that Mr. Bennet is not already gone with him! but this was all the ministration her necessities; and either might have been a Papist unknown to the other. Was this the nature of the intercourse between the pastor and the 'curate? Then was it not what it should be. The Church of England has distinct features which, if sincerely adopted, characterize the man, and bring him out as a determined Protestant against Popish error. Surely the previous conversations necessary to satisfy a rector in receiving a curate, should have led to some discovery of Mr. Chirol's tendencies. Was he asked if he believed the Sixth Article, the Eleventh, the Seventeenth? Were these grand topics of Protestant truth placed before him fully and affectionately, as the points especially required in a fellow-labourer? And supposing that at that time Mr. Chirol had no Romish leanings, but that, up to that time, he was sound in the faith, and had satisfied Mr. Bennett's anxious search for these great features of Reformation doctrine; and that in the deep friendly intercourse of two enlightened ministers, they had compared notes on these points again and again, and rejoiced together in the treasures of truth and grace-then, surely, in the continuings of that same intercourse, there would have been, on the one hand, intimations, and on the other, discoveries, of the first leanings to so entirely opposite a doctrine. In family intercourse, in family prayer, where in the special devotion of ministers the soul is DECEMBER-1847. In fact, we would most seriously advise Mr. Bennett to scrutinize his theology by the light of Scripture and the formularies of his Church. It seems to need reform. It would be well for him to get back again to what he once was. He is not in a good state. It is on the unhealthy plant and the sickly animal that the parasite insect finds its home; and if there were not something congenial in the theatrical innovations of Knightsbridge which invited and fostered these semi-Papists, they would not come. You find no such men in the society of Mr. Sutton of Sheffield, Mr. Close of Cheltenham, or Mr. Wilson of Islington. Why! a single half-hour would break through their guard. They and compelled to would be checked at "the passages, sibilate their sibboleth" and be off. It may be, and it is a very painful thing, evidently, to Mr. Bennett to be thus inopportunely shewn up in 2 N the tendencies of his system by one of Mr. Dodsworth's cast-offs. It may well make him start at the idea of "the imputation of a generally erroneous teaching." It may well make him put forth, as his advertising preface, a very convenient puff, like the accompanying letters to a quack pillbox-"We have reason to bless God that he found all so anti-popish amongst our pastors, that he could not remain longer"-but it does not at all follow, that because a convenient friend says this, in a critical moment, it is true. It may be that Mr. Chirol left St. Paul's, because it was just the last round of the ladder in his downward course. He came from somewhere (who knows where?) to Christchurch; from thence to Knightsbridge; and from thence to Rome. The gradations are very much like the divisions in the colours of the spectrum. It would be a nice eye that could draw the line between them. But sure we are, that on the report of most persons who have been in the precincts of Mr. Bennett's ministrations, he could not have much reason to be hurt, if the mysterious Romish yearnings of the present day found satisfaction and repose in his choral and ornamental services, and joined him readily in the attempt to unprotestantize the Church of England. It is a very distinctive feature of his present position, that in speaking of the works in which they are in future to be engaged, as a safeguard against "turning another victim into the meshes of the Romish net," he never names the preaching of the Gospel. This is quite in character with the Laudean or Puseyistic school. It is a powerful indication that there is something wrong. "He that doeth truth, cometh to the light." It is impossible to have too much light. Painful preaching-elaborate exposition" comparing spiritual things with spiritual”—“letting the word of Christ dwell richly in us"this is Protestant and Church-ofEngland: but in the new school nothing of the kind. Entangle the mind with forms and ceremoniesbusy it with mummeries-subdue it by superstitious notions of its awful inferiority to the priesthood-and then rule over the enslaved mind with the tyranny of a master. But if this is to be all, we believe that no striking results will follow these busy and ostensive ministrations, except an occasional emigration towards Rome. And if Mr. Bennett, offended and grieved at the unpleasant notoriety which this perversion of his curate has given him, really desires to be a champion of the Church of England, he had better, as the sailors say, "Take a fresh departure." Let him look higher than the fog bank of superstition, and start from a renewed observation of that great luminary who is "the light of the world." Intelligence. FOREIGN. MANUMISSION OF SLAVES IN THE UNITED STATES. We gladly copy the following from The Church and State Gazette; but we long to see some confirmation of the welcome tidings. We have received intimation, from a resident in the United States, of a singular and unexpected move on the part of some of the great slave-holders in the southern portions of the union. It refers to nothing less than the emancipation of the slaves in the United States. The emancipation, we are told, is to be gradual, but uninterrupted and certain; and, indeed, we believe that by this time it is already in progress. It is no conviction of the heinousness of the offence that has induced the offenders to rid themselves of a |