authority, independent of Bible authority. Now the proof of the two dispensations is shown in their relative position to the world at large. Germany, Sweden, and England are in a greater state of worldly splendour, and of intellectual might than any countries opposed to them. The monarchy of one German state, Prussia, has gone through a severe struggle, but the ultimate triumph of the Agenda principle is safe. The feeling also throughout that country, and the wish to secure a clear apostolical succession is extremely strong. Amid all the conflicting notions of theology, this principle has been adding growth to growth. Sweden may be fairly adduced also as a nation in a high commercial prosperity, and with a nobility of strain about all her acts, that indicates the glorious untrammelled liberty transmitted by the great Gustavus. England had always her ancient British Church of the remotest antiquity, and the catholicity of that Church begins, as we have stated, to deeply influence the world.

It will be urged she is dividing, and that the Oxford Tract party is an approach to Rome. But Rome herself does not labour under this impression; nor do the Oxford Tract men themselves at all participate in this sentiment: men of high acquirements as they are, though they have credit for vastly more extensive resources than they possess, evincing a tendency to learning beyond piety, to rites beyond their object, to saints obscuring a Saviour, to substitute religiousness for Religion. Many of their practices are worthy of no graver censure than laughter, but their affected follies in acts of devotion, of which the following anecdote may serve as a specimen, deserve something graver. "A short time since the minister of a large parish in town accepted the offer of the services of a gentleman of this religious tendency to read the prayers: To his astonishment and dismay, instead of reading the prayers as usual with his face to the congregation, as directed in the Rubric, this individual turned his back on them, and no person save the minister of the church, seated at the altar, could in consequence hear the service. At the conclusion the minister of the church stated, that the congregation, he regretted to say, were not greatly benefited by the exertions of the reverend gentleman." To which the reply was, "It was very unimportant; they performed the act of worship." "I hope, sir," was the retort, "you will at least allow they did not render a reasonable service." The same Oxford Tract gentleman had on various occasions given his diocesan no small trouble; and at the

* "He that readeth so standing and turning himself, as he may best be heard of all such as are present."

ordinary visitation of the diocese, the Bishop reproved him strongly for his general conduct: to which he replied by requesting that his lordship would name some particular cause of offence. To this the diocesan replied, that his whole conduct was an offence; but that if he were asked off-hand to name something at the instant that struck him, the method in which the scarf was worn by him, totally different from the practice of all his surrounding brethren, was sufficient. "St. Ambrose, my lord, directs the scarf to be worn so." "Sir! don't tell me of St. Ambrose! he was Bishop of Milan, not your Bishop! I am your Bishop!" was the keen and common-sense reply of the diocesan. Now really, follies of this character, and an attempt by the Oxford Tract party to place St. Ambrose and St. Augustin by the side of apostles, must bring upon Protestantism immense scandal. And though no man can approve of the description given, not long since, in a sermon at St. Paul's, which first stated, there was a great man, and his name was Moses; and then a second great man, and his name was Jesus Christ; and then a third great man, and his name was Luther: attempting to show three great revelations under these names; and placing the last as not the least; which statement would drive the mass of Protestants into Romanism rather than embrace such notions; yet is the Oxford abuse of Luther-the most uncalled-for and evilminded to the welfare of Protestantism. That truthful intellect, as he has been called by a writer of great force and power, a constant contributor to this journal, ill deserves this of any Protestant. He won their liberty, their freedom; he wrought their Church-deliverance; he established the Reformation. His moral courage is unequalled-a thing unmated by man; the burner of the Pope's Bull; the daring vindicator of his principles before the diet at Worms; the powerful intellect that threw off the fetters of monachism, and burst into the light of Protestantism, however his mind may be accompanied by some weaknesses the ebb from its giant swell deserves, and has hitherto received from the liberated sons of thought and reason and religion, the fitting meed for his Atlantæan exertions.

Where are the inquisitions, indulgences, excommunications, Latin services, jesuits, monks, monasteries, where are the "peine dure et forte," the rack, the lone cell, the closed Bible, the confessional, and the Breviary? Ask the history of their death or dying throes, and all will tell you they are entombed or entombing fast by Luther and the Protestants. The blows this champion of truth dealt forth, have compelled them either to resign life, or at the best, to protract its mortal struggles only for a brief time.

How eloquently have Luther's merits, his just claims, been stated by a great leading intellect of the present day.

"The monk Tetzel, sent out carelessly in the way of trade, by Leo X., who merely wanted to raise a little money, and for the rest seems to have been a Pagan rather than a Christian, so far as he was any thing, arrived at Wittenberg and drove his scandalous trade there. Luther's flock bought indulgences in the confessional of his church; people pleaded to him that they had already got their sins pardoned. Luther, if he would not be found wanting at his own post, a false sluggard and coward at the very centre of the little space of ground that was his own and no other man's, had to step forth against indulgences, and declare aloud that they were a futility and sorrowful mockery; that no man's sins could be pardoned by them. It was the beginning of the whole reformation. We know how it went forward from this public challenge of Tetzel on the last day of October, 1517, through remonstrance and argument ;-spreading ever wider, rising ever higher, till it became unquenchable, and enveloped all the world. Luther's heart's desire was to have this grief and other griefs amended. His thought was still far from introducing separation in the Church, or revolting against the Pope, Father of Christendom. The elegant Pagan Pope cared little about the monk or his doctrines; he wished however to have done with the noise of him.

"In a space of three years, having tried various softer methods, he thought good to end it by fire. He dooms the monk's writings to be burnt by the common hangman, and his body to be sent bound to Rome probably for a similar purpose. It was the way they had ended with Huss, with Jerome the century before. Poor Huss; he came to that Constance Council with all imaginable promises and safe conducts; an earnest, not rebellious kind of man they laid him instantly in a stone dungeon, three feet wide, six feet high, seven feet long; burnt the true voice out of this world, choked it in smoke and fire. That was not well done."

Genuine Saxon, by the soul of Hengist! Writing like that is the result of an era of the mind that Puseyism wits not of, and Romanists dread to look in the face. But this is not all.

"I for one pardon Luther for now altogether revolting against the Pope. The elegant Pagan by this fire decree of his had kindled into noble, just wrath, the bravest heart then living in this world. The bravest, if also one of the humblest, peaceablest, it was now kindled. These words of truth and soberness, aiming faithfully, as human inability would allow, to promote God's truth on earth and save men's souls, you, God's vicegerent on

earth, answer them by the hangman and fire. You will burn me and them for answer to the God's message they strive to bring you? You are not God's vicegerent; you are another's I think! I take your Bull as an emparchmented lie and burn it. You will do what you see good next; this is what I do.' It was on the 10th December 1520, three years after the beginning of the business, that Luther with a great concourse of people took this indignant step of burning the Pope's fire decree in the market place of Wittenberg, Wittenberg looked on "with shoutings." The whole world was looking on. The Pope should not have provoked that shout! It was the shout of the awakening of nations. *** At bottom, as was said above, we are to consider Luther as a Prophet Idol Breaker, a bringer back of men to reality. Luther said to the Pope, this thing of yours that you call a Pardon of Sins, it is a bit of rag-paper with ink. It is nothing else, and so much like it is nothing else. God alone can pardon sins. Popeship, spiritual Fatherhood of God's Church, is that a vain semblance of cloth and parchment? It is an awful fact God's Church is not a semblance, Heaven and Hell are not semblances. I stand on this since you drive me to it. Standing on this, I a poor German monk am stronger than you all. I stand solitary, friendless, one man on God's Truth; you with your tiaras, triplehats, with your treasuries and armories, thunders spiritual and temporal, stand on the devil's lie, and are not so strong!"

The description of Luther at the diet of Worms is equally vigorous. "The young Emperor, Charles V., with all the princes of Germany, papal nuncios, dignitaries spiritual and temporal, are assembled there. Luther is to appear and answer for himself, whether he will recant or not. The world's pomp and power sits there on this hand: on that stands up for God's truth one man, Hans Luther, the poor miner's son. Friends had reminded him of Huss, and advised him not to go; he would not be advised. A large company of friends rode out to meet him with still more earnest warnings, he answered; 'Were there as many devils in Worms as there are roof tiles, I would on.' The people on the morrow, as he went to the hall of the diet, crowded the windows and house-tops, some of them calling out to him in solemn words, not to recant. Whosoever denieth me before men,' they cried to him,—as in a kind of solemn petition and adjuration. Was it not in reality our petition too, the petition of the whole world lying in dark bondage of soul, paralyzed under a black spectral night-mare and triple hatted chimæra, calling itself Father in God, and what not, 'Free us, it rests with thee; desert us not.' Luther did not desert us. His speech of two hours distinguished itself by its respectful, wise and honest tone; submissive to whatsoever

could lawfully claim submission-not submissive to any more than that—his writings, he said, were partly his own-partly derived from the word of God. As to what was his own, human infirmity entered into it, unguarded anger, blindness, many things doubtless, which it were a blessing for him could he abolish altogether. But as to what stood in sound truth and the word of God he could not recant it. How could he? Confute me,' he concluded, 'by proofs of scripture or else by plain, just arguments. I cannot recant otherwise, for it is neither safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience. Here stand I. I can do no other; God assist me.'

Let the supporters of the cell, the cloister, the indulgence, the Latin service, and the breviary, stand up and answer the man of the Bible, the Protestant champion, the faithful witness of Truth. Let the puny modern revilers of Luther, who won their yet young liberty, stand up and they will sink like the snow drift under the blows of this Malleus Hereticorum, this Son of the pure and unspotted Catholic Church.

No! among the many benefactors to earth Luther certainly ranks among the chiefest, and the "spleeny Lutheran" is the most formidable modern opponent to Rome. Any attempt, however, at the introduction of Lutheranism, Calvinism, or any other appellations simply derived from the systematizing of man on the purposes of God, we think indiscreet; but assuredly to abuse Luther is both ungrateful and ill becoming those whose yet young liberty, we reassert, is an heir loom from the German Professor, and even the House of Guelph owes its seat on the throne of these realms to the house of Luther. He was the giver of a Protestant succession to the throne of these realms. The Oxford party can never be an influential body for any length of time: they will not be without their useful end, they will direct us to much of what is excellent in a different way to the excellency of the age; they will revive a taste for time-honoured antiquity, but they must not imagine that senility is without accompanying disadvantages. Their mortification of the body, as a psychological principle, is ridiculous, and it is reported that the distinguished wife of one of the leaders died through denying herself, in sickness, the requisite comforts to ensure a return of health-from positive bodily discomfort. How many removes from Simon Stylites is this conduct! The character of their leading writer is any thing but amiable-a chilling concentration of university pedantry and ecclesiastical pride. The bishops never can support them, and while on this subject, we do most deeply regret to perceive, in all recent appointments, a total want of piety as a great constituent principle of choice in episcopal sees. The Whigs, of course,