disgust. Short-sighted legislators! Overawed by the rabble fury, and legislating for these your masters, you must basely sacrifice the policy of the State to their capricious whims: in place of ruling as deliberating legislators, you must approve yourselves the docile, pliant bondsmen to the tyranny of the deliberating and commanding crowd: instead of performing the services of the country with honour, efficiency, power, and independence, you must vary and shuffle as the daily breeze-or dastardly skulk from office-or ingloriously sleep as renegades from the Legislaturedriven away by the loud clamours, and "pitiless, pelting they have been taught" (Tit. i. 9.). All the above citations fully convey to us the import of that other direction of St. Paul-" O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings" (1 Tim. vi. 20.). Timothy was thus exhorted by Paul, in both of his Epistles, to guard most religiously the "fides depositum" as St. Jerome expounds the last quotation, "that sound Faith which was committed in trust to him;" and besides is here directed to abstain from the profane emptiness of words, or as the Latin Fathers generally render it, from the "profane novelties of words." (The Latin Fathers of course read καινοφωνίας, instead of κενοφωνίας. The Vulgate has the same reading-" Devitaris profanas vocum novitates." Augustin, Chrysostom, Ambrose, &c. so quote it. Several MSS. have this reading. See Poli Synop. in locum.). In whichever way the passage is understood, an important lesson is conveyed to all believers. Macknight in his Commentary on the Epistles, has judiciously remarked on 2 Tim. i. 13. - " False teachers had proudly and impiously introduced into their discourses, a variety of high-sounding, mysterious words and phrases of their own invention, (called "foolish talking" or "vain jangling," 1 Tim. i. 6.) on pretence that they expressed the Christian doctrines better than those used by the Apostles." And we are constrained to quote the sentiment of the pious Bp. Beveridge on the same subject, from his most excellent Discourse on 2 Tim. i. 13 : -a Sermon that ought to be thoroughly known at least by every Divine; an ignorance of which is indeed almost inexcusable. "All new ways," says the Bishop, "of speaking in Divinity, especially in our age, is at the best but vain babbling, and commonly prophane, possessing men's minds with such notions and conceptions of things, as will infallibly lead them into error and heresy. Read but the wild extravagant opinions of the first heretics and schismatics, that disturbed the Church; and afterwards take a view of those which after ages produced; together with such as have been either revived or invented in our days, and you will find them all made up of new words, strange phrases, and odd expressions, which please the ears, and then de storm" of insolence, ignorance, envy, license, turpitude, and venality. Sapient statesmen! Not to be so discriminating, as to distinguish between a public opinion, the offspring of reason and right, born in full time, and an outcry, the abortion of treason and folly, and thus destroying the adamantine rock, upon which all Government is based, and substituting in its place an ingulfing bed of shifting sand. Profound masters of human nature! To allow the laws to be so insulted, and so trampled upon, -by your professions of maintaining the people's liberty, and by your indulgence of the popular appetites, -as to be obliged in Ireland bauch the minds of them which hearken to them. We need not go far for instances; every sect amongst us, will supply us with too many, insomuch, that they may be all known from one another, merely by their words, and new modes of speaking; whereby they would seem to interpret, when indeed they pervert, the Scriptures, and wrest them to their own destruction. Hence therefore, it will be our interest and wisdom, as it is our duty, to avoid those new words and phrases, which have been lately started in the Church, as well as the opinions which are couched under them; and to look upon them at the best but superfluous and unnecessary, upon that very account, because they are new." We shall have more in elucidation of this hereafter. From all that we have now said, it is no difficult matter to detect the unscriptural, unreasonable, and preposterous absurdity of our modern Sectaries; who in utter contradiction to Revelation, excogitate new systems of faith and discipline, contrary to the express letter of Revelation, which insists on a full and perfect rule of faith and discipline, having been once committed to the pillar of all truththe Church; and this based on the written word. No, say these irreverent Sectaries, this promised witness and keeper of the truth, was not until our times, in any one age, favoured with the Spirit's influences, though the specially inspired messengers of heaven did profess to plant, and found Churches-conducted and governed though they may have been by Apostolic directions-and enriched by the oracles of God, as by them also interpreted! It is for us only -who, in proud defiance of this Apostolic Body, disregard its high authority, whether of its promised divine privileges, or of its unbroken link of succession, or of its lofty declarations of Apostolic foundation -to impose on mankind our notions of the Faith and Discipline, which the Apostles either forgot, or cared not for, or failed in establishing; or if established, passed out of the minds of men, until in contradiction to all former notions of God's promises, to primitive and apostolic teaching, the Spirit at last has aroused us, by an internal light, to reconstruct the Faith upon our own terms, -overwhelm in dishonour God's own candlestick and external light, and not only to suspend the true freedom of the Constitution, that you may be enabled to govern them, and all this too with but little effect!!! Nay, nor is this all. In consequence of your magnificent plans, the most popular Ministry that ever basked in the smiles of the people's favour, cannot from the increasing preponderance and present precariousness of Mob influence, flatter themselves, with the enjoyment of but one day's Administration, aye, or even the re-possession of their seats for all their trouble; whilst from the absolute extinction, and loss of the counterpoise of Aristocratic power, when you yourselves shall have reached the make our Church, the true Church, but as we have the dominion over God's Spirit, hurl to perdition every other as Spiritless, Lifeless, Ancient, and Unmodernized!!! The impious arrogance, and imperious and groundless pretensions, of such arrant rebels to the first and ancient faith, and apostolic government, and primitive discipline,all of which were "once" and " altogether" committed in trust to the chosen faithful of God--by them to be delivered and preached throughout "all nations" and to endure to the end of time, even every day" (Matt. xx. 20. πάσας τὰς ἡμέρας.), against the combined assaults of all the powers of Hell, -require, we presume, no other comment than a bare exposure. Notwithstanding all their exclusive and ridiculous professions, we must confess, with every respect to the humility (!) of these self-willed brawlers, that we, for our part, are quite as disposed to "hear the Church" of God, as to sit at the feet of their fine inventions; and unquestionably we are as certain of the fulfilment of those promises, which God made to the first propagators of Christianity, and to their successors, and to their labours, and to their doctrines, and to their establishment of the Church, as we are of those who are pleased to say, that they have in their own prolific brains armoury, to fit on every point, and suit every occasion, and expedients for accomplishing every stratagem. Most unceremoniously we say to them all-let each and all of them be liars, but "let God be true" (Rom. iii. 4.). From all this, our readers can decide on the position we have been maintaining, namely, that Revelation itself refers us continually to Antiquity, Universality, and Concurrent Testimony, as the only safe, aye, infallible tests, for ascertaining sound and wholesome doctrine. For in the very firstage of Christianity, we have seen, the "faith of Jesus" was published and defined: thus the doctrines of the Gospel were embosomed, as it were, in the Antiquity of the Church; whilst branching off to the utmost bounds of the earth, by the immediate interposition of the Holy Ghost, an almost innumerable number of shoots abundantly fructified, deriving all their sap and nourishment from the one parent stock-the Universal Church. Still, however diversified these branches may lowest point of your approaching infamy and degradation, not all your sobs, and sighs, and solicitations, will be heeded, nor even receive the sympathy of unavailing pity, from your unrelenting taskmasters. And who are these? The occurrences of every day point them out. They are the congregated cobblers, the odoriferous tanners, and profligate hordes of Westminster, whose trade is now converted into the fumigating, and patching up of Administrations: they are the smutty tinkers in Council, assembled at Coldbath Fields, who are now hammering out Constitutions : they are the brilliant financiers of Tothill Fields and have apparently been, yet did they all converge thus to the same origin; as St. Cyprian beautifully expresses himself--" As there are many rays of the Sun, yet there is but one light; and as there are many branches of the tree, yet there is but one stock, fastened in the earth by a tenacious root. And though innumerable rivulets flow from the same spring, spreading on all sides an overflowing quantity of diverse waters, yet a Unity is preserved at the source" (Cypr. de Unitate Eccl.). Now of all these emblems, considered as representative of particular churches, there is, as the same Father declares, but "One God and one Christ. His Church is one. His Faith one. And the people is joined into the solid unity of a body, by the glue of concord" (Cypr. Ibidem. "Plebs in solidam corporis unitatem concordiæ glutine copulata."). Thus in short is explained the sentence of the Apostle, that in the Church, there were to be but "One body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, and one baptism" (Eph. iv. 4-5. Tertullian in the second Century, it is well known, delivered the sense of the Catholic Church in language, corresponding to that of Cyprian, and St. Paul:- "Una nobis et illis fides, unus Deus, idem Christus, eadem spes, eadem lavacri sacramenta, semel dixerim, una ecclesia sumus." De Virgin. Veland. chap. ii. "Corpus sumus de conscientia religionis et disciplinæ unitate et spei fædere." -Apolog. chap. xxxix.). Thus as we have found that the Faith was enshrined in the Antiquity, so we here are led to conclude, that this same faith is to be found among the Universal, as well as among the Ancient members, of the Church. Both these tests, then, are the simple deductions of Holy Writ. And since this Faith cannot but be unique, inasmuch as it is the enditing of the Holy Spirit, so wherever it is to be found, such as it was once delivered unto the saints," the concurrent, *Unanimous testimony of all believers will accompany it. In the Word of God, therefore, is to be seen the complete rule of Faith, Government, and Practice; referring however to the Catholic Church all succeeding ages, where only is to be had the sound interpretation of evangelical doctrines: and this because that the very elements of the Church Universal are Antiquity, Universality, and the Unanimous Bethnal Green, who now are to decide if Bank Charters are to become waste paper: they are the low-born feasters at the Crown and Anchor, who are now to decide on Royal Prerogatives and privileges of both the Houses: they are the blacksmiths of Birmingham, illumined by the coruscations that so vividly, and so genteelly flash from the cultivated genius of Hunts, Cobbetts, Atwoods, Humes, O'Connells, Shiels, and other such illustrious fry of accomplished legislators, who so beautifully grace St. Stephen's, and labour so unremittingly to perpetuate that noble dignity, which the Walpoles, the Carterets, the Newcastles, and the consent of the faithful: elements, also, that claim an undoubted sanction and force from a due application of Holy Scripture. We have thus, we trust, fully established the soundness, rationality, and validity of the maxim of Vincentius Lirinensis, that such doctrines must necessarily be received for true, as we find to have been believed at all times, (semper)-in all places (ubique) --and by all the faithful (et ab omnibus). In our last Number, we applied these tests, among other matters, to the Divine Institution of the Sabbath, and of Episcopal jurisdiction and ordination. Both of which, as they must rise or fall together, their basis being the same, are being daily outraged even by those, who upon the very same authority, as there is for the observance of these two institutions, are privileged to "wait at the Altar." And in respect of these Divine ordinances, catholicity and antiquity are of special service. For, as it may be said, that there is but a generally conceived explication of these two institutions in the Scriptures; or rather the germs of Apostolic teaching are given only as a monitor to the faithful; so the Unanimous voice and Universal practice of all Antiquity fully instructs us, on this head, even from that moment, when upon the fulfilment of the promise of Christ, his Messengers as directed by the Holy Spirit, first formed the Church, subject to both these Institutions; the records of that early age confirming, and handing down to us, without doubt, the Apostolic practice, and the prevailing, and corroborative tradition of the very first era of the Christian Church. It is thus that the Divine obligations of the Sabbath, and the Order of Bishops, are confirmed by the same evidence, that substantiates the truth of Christianity itself. Let it not be said, that more detailed instructions ought to have been given about them, in the Word of God. They who were deputed and inspired to model and regulate the Church were satisfied, as well they might, with the permanently enduring fabric of those institutions, that they founded by their precept and example; and which appertained to a Society, that enjoyed so many Divine promises, and against which" they knew, "the gates of hell should not prevail (Matt. xvi. 18.). The imperishable monuments of their |