On the whole there is a refreshing fairness in the statements herein made in re

gard to the Puritans and Puritanism, although Canon Barry is evidently unaware of the real motive which lay at the

basis, and became the mainspring, of Brownism, and Barrowism, and Independency. He is quite right in declaring that the Puritan movement was, "before all, and after all else, Calviuistic," but he is wrong in fancying that it was the iberty of self-government that those men were in search of. It has always been represented that Robert Browne went out of all existing organisms into separatism, that he might realize some dream of denocracy in church. There was never a creater mistake. What he went out into he wilderness to see was not a free church, hut å pure church. He had vainly tried, til he was in utter despair of success, secure purity in the church, on the Church of England system. Nor could he discern the slightest hope of relief from. Cartwright, with his Presbyterian plan,

ght all the way from Geneva, but retaining the old fatal State church eature. Browne felt that a State church, into which all the people should be born, w. uld offer just as real impediment to the pure gospel, if it were Presbyterian in form, as if it were Episcopalian in form; and so he saw no way or hope of proggress by waiting for others, and therefore cut the knot by declaring that any Ittle company of regenerate people anywhere can make themselves a church by covenanting together (in accordance with God's laws) to be one-whether others will hear or forbear. He never dreamed of democracy as being involved in his system. In his conception each local church is under the absolute monarchy of its great Head, Jesus Christ; and if the fact that that monarchy brings itself into contact with church affairs through each believer's being the channel for the down-flowing power of God. in point

of fact renders the system indistinguishable in its practical workings from a pure democracy, it never seems to have so suggested itself to its founder, nor did he ever advocate or teach it on that basis. What he was seeking for, first of all, last of all, in all, through all, and over all, was a thorough reformation of church life in the interests of vital godliness. And he and his system are entitled in fairness to claim that this be remembered by all who,

undertaking to instruct their fellow-men, do not wish to bear false witness against their neighbors. [E. P. Dutton & Co.

$2.00.] 1878