of shoulder, pleading conscience for or against anything or practice, you should forthwith ask them, What word of God they have to bottom that judgment of their conscience upon?

. . . And if they can produce no such thing (as they never can) then rest assured that they are arrant cheats and hypocrites, and that, for all their big words, the conscience of such men is so far from being able to give them any true 'confidence towards God' that it cannot so much as give them any true confidence towards a wise and good man; no, nor yet towards themselves, who are far from being either."

Racy and idiomatic as is our author's English, it is too often debased by slang. In the same way, his wit not rarely degenerates to ribaldry, and the temptation of a keen or humorous remark is always too powerful for his reverence. Thus: "With two or three popular, empty words, such as 'Popery and superstition, right of the subject,' 'liberty of conscience,' 'Lord Jesus Christ,' well tuned and humoured, a skilful manager of the rabble may whistle them backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards, till he is weary, and get up upon their backs when he is so." Again: "The truth is, they [the Jews] were all along a cross, odd, untoward sort of people, and such as God seems to have chosen, and (as the prophets sometimes phrase it) to have espoused to Himself, upon the very same account that Socrates espoused Xantippe, only for her extreme ill conditions above all that he could find or pick out of that sex; and so the fittest argument both to exercise and declare His admirable patience to the world." And in the outset of his sermon on "The Christian Pentecost" there is a hit at the Protector of a nature so profane that it is better to leave it where we found it.

ARCHBISHOP TILLOTSON.

Of a very different type from Dr South was another of the royal chaplains of whom we must now give a few particulars.

JOHN TILLOTSON was a native of Sowerby in Yorkshire, where he was born in 1630. His father, a clothier, was a man of superior understanding, eminent for his piety, mighty in the Scriptures, and a zealous Calvinist. John, being destined for the ministry, was sent to college in his seventeenth year, and was admitted a pensioner of Clare Hall, Cambridge, where he had for his tutor the Rev. David Clarkson. It can, therefore, occasion no surprise that the son of such a father, and the pupil of such a master, should have commenced his ministry a Presbyterian like themselves, and the first sermon which he published was one delivered at the famous morning exercise in Cripplegate, in conjunction with associates afterwards distinguished for their nonconformity.

At the same time, it is only candid to acknowledge that influences had been at work on his mind which prevented him from coming out the zealous partisan of any denomination. Amongst his earlier associates the tendency was towards exact definition and a rigid symbolic orthodoxy; and not only was it heresy to look over the wall which skirted the theologian's path, but it was dangerous to quit the iron rail along which it was ruled that Christian experience, if genuine, ought always to travel. But the perusal of Chillingworth's masterly treatise recalled the young student to the only infallible standard, and taught him that, howsoever epitomised in the creed or confession, "the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants." Coincident with this, he enjoyed the friendship or the instructions. of men who brought to the service of Christianity rare treasures of learning and intellects of unusual elevation and power, as well as lives of unwonted winsomeness; and a mind so candid and eclectic as Tillotson's could hardly fail to be influenced by the scientific expansiveness of Wilkins, the metaphysical boldness of Cudworth, the majestic moral symmetry of Whichcote, the consecrated learning and charming philosophy of John Smith and Henry More, who, in the middle of the seventeenth

century, formed at Cambridge the Broad Church, or, as it then was called, the Latitudinarian party. In the society of these gifted men, who professed to call no man master, but who all felt more or less the exegetical influence of Grotius, and the doctrinal ascendency of Episcopius, and who read their Bibles in the light of Plato and Plotinus, Tillotson was gradually withdrawn from the school in which his own earlier piety had been moulded and developed. Without losing his respect or affection for that more fervid type of Christianity, represented by Puritanism, his calm and unimpassioned nature could not sympathise with its intense emotions; and, on the other hand, the ritualism of his high-church brethren was as distasteful to his zeal for the active virtues as their exclusiveness was abhorrent to his mild and indulgent charity. The result was, that Tillotson came forth with more of Arminianism than Calvinism in his creed, and without much of either in his sermons; hoping that without party complications he might be allowed to be the lover of all good men, and, without systematic shibboleths, praying that he might be allowed to occupy a post for which there were few competitors, and minister to the English people not so much "doctrine" as "instruction in righteousness."

One extreme leads to another; and, in a free and inquiring community like Protestant Christendom, error is often a reaction against truth overstrained-a revolt from some orthodox tenet which, waxing obese and arrogant, treats other truths with disdain. Thus, the Unitarianism of Boston was a natural recoil from that high-pitched New England spiritualism which almost ignored the Saviour's humanity, and which, in its constant brooding over actual depravity, forgot those noble powers and susceptibilities with which our nature was originally endowed, and consequently assigned it to the regenerating Spirit as His work to produce, not a perfect manhood, but a sort of imperfect angelhood. And in our own day it may be

THE NEW THEOLOGY.

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feared that a meagre and monotonous evangelism-shunning to declare the whole counsel of God, or reiterating a few favourite phrases till they grow as trite and unarresting as a cuckoo-song-has provoked that fatal falsehood which, by expunging from the Saviour's sacrifice the piacular element, leaves little meaning in the Cross, and no Mediator in Christianity. For the theology of the Puritans we confess a fond and admiring affection; but, as Puritanism was itself a protest against the ceremonies substituted for spiritual worship, and against the "opus operatum" substituted for the Saviour in the Church of Rome, so it is possible that spiritual-mindedness, or an inward experience, may have sometimes been pressed to the seeming neglect of outward conduct, and that so much time may have been spent in telling men what and how to believe, that they went their way without feeling that they had faults to cure and a work to do. Nor can we wonder that, wearied with theological wrangling and hollow profession, some sincere and conscientious men should have embraced the Arminian system as the plausible antidote. We believe that a few legitimate grafts on the good old stock would have answered the purpose better than ever so many clusters nailed to a lifeless pole; in other words, we believe that from the free grace of the gospel, proclaimed as frankly as ever, but brought to bear in more minute detail on the whole of man, it would have been easier to educe the completeness of the Christian character, than from the mercenary motives and legal compulsitors which Pelagianism borrowed from Paganism; but we can also see how amiable and virtuous men like Tillotson were led to try the new specific, and how, under the sanction of his respected name, a kind of preaching was introduced and continued for a hundred years, which, with two tables of stone covered over the cross of Christ, and which, teaching many useful lessons, at last forgot to tell sinners the new and living way to heaven.

At the Restoration, Tillotson conformed to the Church of England, and became curate of Cheshunt, near London. In 1663 he was elected preacher at Lincoln's Inn, and in the following year he obtained the Camden lectureship in the city, and thereafter every Tuesday brought to St Lawrence Jewry a concourse of distinguished personages from the remotest quarters of the town, to hear one who now began to be recognised as a model of pulpit eloquence.

As early as his first settlement in London, Tillotson found the floodgates already open, and in mingled torrent Atheism, Popery, and profligacy rushing in. Released from the stern grasp of the Puritan, and encouraged by the worst example in the highest places, the libertine was running to all excess in riot, and in literature and on the stage, as well as in taverns and low haunts of vice, the boldest licence was sure to win the loudest plaudits; whilst, as the inevitable consequence of abounding debauchery, things sacred as well as things decent became a subject of ridicule, and, sitting in the chair of Hobbes, the scorner was supplied with a song by "Hudibras." Amidst the abounding relaxation of morals and contempt of religion there could be discerned in corners of streets and college cloisters an old inhabitant who had come again, and who, all oaths and protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, did not despair of reconciling to Mother Church the jovial monarch, and who, on the principle that "the child is father to the man," in the young rakes and debauchees of London descried the progenitors of many a devout ascetic—many a hopeful Anglo-Papist in the first stage of his progress towards a penitent old age, with its beads, and its crucifix, and its father confessor.

To the ominous prospects of his Church and country Tillotson was painfully alive; and, like a patriot and a man of God, he bent all the strength of his mind and all the advantages of his position to the resistance of the incoming evil. By