Won, is well known. See Schleusner." So, because the simple verb and its compound are sometimes used in the sense of acknowledging, our learned author conceived that the words un ovx iya Ioganλ, could mean, hath Israel acknowledged? no doubt imagining that un ex were two negatives, and equivalent with an affirmative. It is almost superfluous to remark, that the real meaning of the passage is, hath not Israel had notice? i. e. of the consequence of their rejection of the gospel. We have a perfectly similar instance of this use of the verb, in Rom. i. 21. SOT, YOTES TOY AFOV, "because that when they knew God," i. e. had sufficient notification of his "eternal power and Godhead." We might prove Mr. Belsham's ignorance of the common force of the interrogative μn, from his improved version of Rom. xi. 1. Λεγω ἐν μη άπωσατο ὁ Θεος τον λαον auт8; which our foolish old translators render, "I say then, hath God cast away his people?" but Mr. Belsham so much more accurately, "Do I say, then, that God has rejected his people?" But really, the task of exposing his ignorance becomes quite disgusting. His ignorance would be blameless, if it were not equalled by the presumption and affectation of learning which accompany it.

Our author often manifests as classical a proficiency in English as in Greek. Rom. viii. 13. "If ye live after the flesh, you will die.” xi. 26. "And so all Israel will be saved." xi. 34, 35. "For who hath known, &c. Or who has first given to him," &c. 1 Cor. viii. 1. " Knowledge puffeth up, but love edifies," &c. &c. &c. Such is the improved version of Paul's Epistles with which the Reverend gentleman, after the labour of thirty years, obliges the Unitarian Society and the public.

If we be asked, whether the work does not contain instances of really amended version, we readily reply, several; not one indeed new, but adopted from preceding interpreters: though Mr. Belsham frequently fails of assigning them to their proper authors, and sometimes ludicrously mistakes the meaning of the right translation that he adopts. So much has long since been done in the field of biblical criticism, that it was scarcely possible he should not light upon something good. If we had room, we should gladly quote him with commendation, in Rom. ix. 3. xiv. 23. 1 Cor. i. 26. iii. 9. vi. 4. 2 Cor. v. 3. et al. But we must add, that along with all his wilful corruptions and perversions of the text, and along with all his most puerile and ignorant alterations of the received version, he frequently leaves that version unaltered where it calls for amendment, and where the amendment is most obvious. E. gr. in 1 Tim. vi. 10. he retains, For the love of money is the root of all evil," instead of "a root." He throughout retains " bishops," for overseers ;" "ministers" and "deacons," for "servants," &c. But we must conclude this article, which we have been obliged to extend to an unusual length; though the criminations of our author, which we have brought forward, form a very small portion indeed, of what we are ready to substantiate. We think it not improbable, that we shall have occasion to return to the subject; and we shall be forward to meet Mr. Belsham again, if he should attempt any defence, even in a sixpenny pamphlet.

REVIEW

OF

"THOUGHTS ON THE ANGLICAN AND ANGLO-AMERICAN CHURCHES.

BY

JOHN BRISTED,

COUNSELLOR AT LAW.

New York, printed: London, reprinted. Holdsworth, 1823."

[This Article was printed for The New Edinburgh Review, but never published.]

We are always well pleased, as reviewers, when an author gives us some account of himself. We understand a work the better for having some acquaintance with the writer; and when he introduces himself to our acquaintance, we sometimes come to know him better than he designed we should,—perhaps better than he knows himself. The auto-biography with which Mr. Bristed favours us, is dispersed through his Introduction, and is interrupted almost as often as the renowned "Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles." But the following is a summary of it :

His father was a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England, as his grandfather and great-grandfather had been, and his elder brother is now. He was sent, while yet a child, (as we collect, between eleven and twelve years old.) to Winchester College, of which Dr. Joseph Warton was then head master. (P. 6.) He had been there little more than three years, and was near the head of the senior part of the fifth form, when a rebellion broke out against the authority of Dr. Huntingford, the warden of the college, and now combining with that office the bishopric of Hereford. He describes the rebellion as "headed, and the oath of universal conspiracy administered, by Richard Mant, then one of the prefects in the sixth form, and now a Protestant champion of the Popish doctrine of baptismal regeneration, and one of the editors of Mant's and Doyley's Family Bible." (P. 10.) We must observe, en passant, that this same Right Rev. Dr. RICHARD MANT seems an object of our author's peculiar spleen and acrimony: whether on grounds exclu

sively theological, we shall not now inquire. This boyish rebellion issued in the expulsion of the first forty boys, who stood senior on the college rolls; among whom was young Bristed. We hope our author is inaccurate when he charges the Warden and Fellows with a direct breach of faith in exercising this severe discipline.

Returning for a few years to his parental roof, he informs us that, until he was seventeen, his steps were steadily directed towards an entrance into the vestibule of the Church of England;" that is, in English, he designed to follow his father's profession of a clergyman in the Establishment. We next find our author at Oxford (p. 15,) where he is dissuaded from taking orders by the Rev. Dr. Septimus Collinson, Provost of Queen's College; the Doctor urging that a man's preferment in the national church is determined, not by his personal merit, but by interest, &c. and that the clerical market is overstocked. He is thus induced to " relinquish all thoughts of the Church, and embrace the calling of a physician."-We must pause a little here, to animadvert briefly on our author's inconsistency in the following sentence :—

"My objections to the Church of England were then, and are now, confined exclusively to her political position; her close alliance with the state; her system of patronage, whether lay or clerical, excluding the congregations altogether from any choice of the clerk who is to minister to them spiritually; and her provision of tithes. Her liturgy, articles, and homilies, are all strictly spiritual," &c. &c.

Fair and softly! Mr. Bristed. Your objections to the Church of England, according to your own showing, were then, certainly, neither more nor less than this: that you apprehended she did not afford you a sufficient prospect of preferment adequate to your merit; and we do not say that it was not a very suitable consideration to decide a young man in his choice of a profession for earning his bread. But why should you endeavour to disguise this motive? Whether you have now any objection to the Church of England, essentially different from what you had then, we shall perhaps be better able to decide, as we proceed in the examination of your work. Our author tells us, p. 34, that in his eighteenth year he applied himself to the study of medicine; "first in the country, then in London, then in Edinburgh, with the characteristic ardour of a sanguine temperament." Whether he ever graduated at Oxford, we are not informed; nor how long he remained at Edinburgh. But on his return to London he soon relinquished all thoughts of the practice of medicine; enrolled himself a member of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple: and continued for two years in the office of Mr. Chitty, cultivating "the melancholy science of special pleading," p. 37. However, before he was called to the English bar, [Qu. Has he ever been called to it?] he describes himself as bitten with the imagination, that they order matters better in America than in Great Britain; and in the spring of 1806, (when, we conceive, he was about the age of twenty-four,) he emigrated to the United States, with sanguine expectations, which appear from his language not to have been realized. At this we are not at all surprised. Many emigrate to America under great mistakes about

the country to which they go, and possessing little of the qualifications requisite for succeeding in it.

On his arrival in New York, our author renewed an acquaintance which he had formed in Edinburgh, with the Rev. Dr. Mason, a Presbyterian minister of the Associate Reformed Church, p. 41, and this acquaintance "soon ripened into an intimacy truly fraternal, that lasted about six years, when it was broken up, and for ever scattered to the wild winds, by the systematic sycophancy and incessant intrigue of a very reverend brother." This is very sad: but our readers must receive Mr. Bristed's invectives and panegyrics cum grano salis. He lays on both with a trowel. Of Dr. Mason, he tells us, that "if his, &c." he “might have brightened the remotest recesses of Christendom with the blaze of his intellectual glory—might have been what Chalmers is"!!! We think we might venture to draw a craniological map of Mr. Bristed's organs. The sentence which immediately follows the words last quoted, and which concludes his personal narrative, affords a curious and awful spectacle of a popular religionist. It runs thus :

"When the breach between Dr. Mason and myself had been rendered sufficiently deep and deadly to admit of no possible cure on this side of the grave, I returned into the bosom of that mother church which had nourished me, and my brethren, and my father, and my father's father, for many preceding generations."

It is with a feeling very different from anything hostile towards Mr. Bristed, that we advise him, before he resumes his pen upon such subjects, to think what kind of religion it can be, with which the sentiment he has deliberately penned is consistent. A breach between two men, bearing the Christian name, so deadly, as to admit of no possible cure on this side of the grave! and this after a truly fraternal intimacy of six years! Supposing that Christian brotherhood had subsisted between them during that period, whatever might be the trespass of either against the other, (and we have not the least curiosity to inquire into the particulars of the breach,) there was a plain and decisive rule, prescribing, on divine authority, a healing course, which, even in the last stage of it, is utterly inconsistent with the sentiment which Mr. Bristed has thought himself warranted to express. We do allude to the precept in Matt. xviii. 15—17. though we are aware that it is commonly considered as antiquated, even by those who make the most ado about evangelical religion; as well as that most of the religious communities called churches are so constituted, as to render the observance of the precept impossible in them. But we confess that we think little, or think very ill, of any religious system, which sets aside such a divine command. Every thing under the Christian name, which stands opposed to the word of Christ, we regard as antichristian.

One more remark we must offer on the passage which we have last quoted from Mr. Bristed. It strikingly exemplifies the light way in which many professors change their religious connexion as they would change a suit of clothes. Our author was bred up a staunch Episcopalian. Settling in America, he formed an intimacy with a Presbyterian minister, and, (as he tells us,) "was prodigiously struck

with the force, and vigour, and range of intellect, exhibited in his conversation." He also "never heard a greater preacher," not excepting the mighty Horsley himself." He, therefore," during six years, sat under the ministry" of this Presbyterian divine. But a deadly breach takes place between them: upon which our author lays aside his Presbyterianism, and returns to the bosom of his mother church. Mr. Bristed has multitudes to keep him in countenance; multitudes who are similarly determined in their selection of a soi-disant church, not by any scriptural consideration, not by the slightest regard to divine authority, but by their taste and fancy, and especially by their admiration of one preacher, or their quarrelling with another. A favourite clergyman is the factotum of their religious connexion; and to sit under his ministry is the phrase constantly employed for expressing their church-fellowship. We only sav, at present, that if any thing like this now constitute the fellowship of a Christian church, if any conduct like this be now allowable to Christians, Christianity must have indeed greatly changed in its nature and principles since the apostolic day. But if "the word of God liveth and abideth for ever," (1 Pet. i. 23. 25.) all such nominal Christianity, as we have exhibited, is but nominal.

It may be needful to apprize our readers, that by "The Anglican and Anglo-American Churches," Mr. Bristed means that part only of the religious system in both countries which is termed Episcopalian; and that while he boasts, at the outset of his work, that he has a kind of hereditary and family claim to be enrolled among the advocates of the Protestant Episcopal Church, whether it be that established in England, or its legitimate offspring located in these United States;" he at times appears to combine with this attachment to Episcopacy what, we believe, is rarely connected with it, a decided hostility to the close alliance between church and state. We say that he at times appears hostile to this alliance: for he really seems to us to have no fixed principles upon the subject. As to his attachment to Episcopacy, we cannot discover throughout his work any reason that he assigns for it, but his hereditary and family connexion with that system; and we must submit it to Mr. Bristed's consideration, whether that would not have been fully as cogent a reason why his ancestors should have remained in connexion with the see of Rome. He quotes, indeed, the following from Mr. Granville Sharp, with apparent approbation, p. 22. "If I am prejudiced at all, I am sure it is in favour of Episcopacy : for... I am even descended from one of the same holy function, . . . and above all, I am thoroughly convinced by the holy Scriptures, that the institution of that order in the Christian church is of God." Indeed! convinced of this from the Scriptures! Really, we should have thought this impossible, had not Mr. Sharp assured us of it. As far as we know, the other advocates for the divine right of episcopacy bring us, not to the Scriptures, but to the so-called Fathers; whose authority in these matters we utterly deny. But that the Scriptures of the New Testament speak of the emoxomol, the bishops or overseers of a Christian church, as identical with its elders or mferBurgou, we have thought and think indisputably evident. (Acts xx. 17. 28; Phill.