previously believed on the evidence of their own consciences, of Moses and the Prophets, they are assured by the great Founder and Object of Christianity, that neither will they believe it, in any spiritual and profitable sense, though a man should rise from the dead.

For myself, I cannot resist the conviction, built on particular and general history, that the extravagancies of Antinomianism and Solifidianism are little more than the counteractions to this Christian paganism ;—the play, as it were, of antagonist muscles. The feelings will set up their standard against the understanding, whenever the understanding has renounced its allegiance to the reason: and what is faith, but the personal realization of the reason by its union with the will? If we would drive out the demons of fanaticism from the people, we must begin by exorcising the spirit of Epicureanism in the higher ranks, and restore to their teachers the true Christian enthusiasm,* the vivifying influences of the altar, the censer, and the sacrifice. They must neither be ashamed of, nor disposed to explain away, the articles of prevenient and auxiliary grace, nor the necessity of being born again to the life from which our nature

* The original meaning of the Greek, veovoιaoμòç is,— the influence of the divinity such as was supposed to take possession of the priest during the performance of the services at the altar.

had become apostate.* They must administer indeed the necessary medicines to the sick, the motives of fear as well as of hope; but they must not withhold from them the idea of health, or conceal from them that the medicines for the sick are not the diet of the healthy. Nay, they must make it a part of the curative process to induce the patient, on the first symptoms of recovery, to look forward with prayer and aspiration to that state, in which perfect love shutteth out fear. Above all, they must not seek to make the mysteries of faith what the world calls rational by theories of original sin and redemption borrowed analogically from the imperfection of human lawcourts and the coarse contrivances of state expedience.

Among the numerous examples with which I might enforce this warning, I refer, not without reluctance, to the most eloquent and one of the most learned of our divines; a rigorist, indeed, concerning the authority of the Church, but a Latitudinarian in the articles of its faith; who stretched the latter almost to the advanced posts of Socinianism, and strained the former to a hazardous conformity with the assumptions of the Roman hierarchy. With what emotions must not a pious

* Δίζει σὺ ψυχῆς ὀχετὸν, ὅθεν ἢ τίνι τάξει Σώματι θητεύσας, ἐπὶ τάξιν ἀφ' ἧς ἐῤῥύσθης Αὖθις ἀνασήσεις, ἱερῷ λόγῳ ἔργον ἑνώσας.

Zoroastr. Oracula initio. Edit. Opsopæi. 1599.-Ed.

mind peruse such passages as the following:"It (death) reigned upon them whose sins therefore would not be so imputed as Adam's was; because there was no law with an express threatening given to them as was to Adam; but although it was not wholly imputed upon their own account, yet it was imputed upon theirs and Adam's. For God was so exasperated with mankind, that being angry he would still continue that punishment to lesser sins and sinners, which he only had first threatened to Adam; and so Adam brought it upon them. ***** The case is this. Jonathan and Michal were Saul's children. It came to pass, that seven of Saul's issue were to be hanged; all equally innocent, equally culpable. David took the five sons of Michal, for she had left him unhandsomely. Jonathan was his friend, and therefore he spared his son Mephibosheth. Here it

*

was indifferent as to the guilt of the persons" (observe, no guilt was attached to either of them) "whether David should take the sons of Michal or of Jonathan; but it is likely that, as upon the kindness which David had to Jonathan, he spared his son, so upon the just provocation of Michal, he made that evil to fall upon them, of which they were otherwise capable; which, it may be, they

* These two words are added without the least ground in Scripture, according to which (2 Samuel, xxi.) no charge was laid to them but that they were the children of Saul, and sacrificed to a point of state expedience.

should not have suffered, if their mother had been kind. Adam was to God, as Michal to David. And this, with many passages equally gross, occurs in a refutation of the doctrine of original sin, on the ground of its incongruity with reason, and its incompatibility with God's justice! "Exasperated" with those whom the Bishop has elsewhere, in the same treatise, declared to have been "innocent and most unfortunate"-the two things that most conciliate love and pity! Or, if they did not remain innocent, yet, those whose abandonment to a mere nature, while they were subjected to a law above nature, he affirms to be the irresistible cause that they, one and all, did sin;-and this at once illustrated and justified by one of the worst actions of an imperfect mortal! So far could the resolve to coerce all doctrines within the limits of the individual's power of comprehension, and the prejudices of an Arminian against the Calvinist preachers, carry a highly-gifted and exemplary divine. Let us be on our guard, lest similar effects should result from the zeal, however well-grounded in some respects, against the Church Calvinists of our days. My own belief is, perhaps, equi-distant from that of both parties, the Grotian and the Genevan. But, confining my remark exclusively to the doctrines and the practical deductions from

* Jeremy Taylor's Doctrine and Practice of Repentance. c. vi. s. 1.-Ed.

them, I could never read Bishop Taylor's Tract on the doctrine and practice of Repentance, without being tempted to characterize high Calvinism as (comparatively) a lamb in wolf's skin, and strict Arminianism as approaching to the reverse.

Actuated by these motives, I have devoted the following essay to a brief history of the rise and occasion of the Latitudinarian system in its birthplace in Greece, and to a faithful exhibition both of its parentage and its offspring. The reader will find it strictly correspondent to the motto of both essays, ή ὅδος κάτω-the way downwards.