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coming glory of the Church, the bride of Christ, in the day of the resurrection,'* this is not its ultimate or perfect form, and it can never rise to its true dignity until it has sunk to something merely earthly and secular!

Inasmuch as we entirely dissent from these views on the institution of marriage-inasmuch as we are unwilling to come to the conclusion, that, except for the purpose of perpetuating the race, all distinction of sex in human beings is meaningless, and ought to be disregarded, and that in all the affairs of life men and women should be mixed together without distinction or discrimination—to question, in short, the wisdom of the Almighty in having created difference of sex at all, when He might have ordained a means of propagating mankind independently of such a useless institution-inasmuch, lastly, as we look upon an identification of the two sexes as no less practically dangerous than it is theoretically false, we feel constrained to give an emphatic and uncompromising negative to the proposition which Mr. Mill has in his Essay submitted for our acceptance.

In Spirit and in Truth: an Essay on the Ritual of the New

Testament. London: Longmans. 1869. This is a Roman Catholic treatise, written by a pervert. We notice it because the title gives no indication of this, and the book does not issue from the house of any accredited Roman Catholic publisher. Unwary persons, therefore, might be misled. It professes to treat of "Ritualism proper, and the topics immediately connected with it." The author further professes to consider the character, origin, and formation of Catholic ritual; not, however, in their fulness, but in their relation to the New Testament. (p. 25). “Protestants, who are as opposed to Ritualism as the Bereans were to a crucified Messiah,' are ostentatiously invited to search the Scriptures of the New Testament to see whether these things be so;" and the author ventures to assure them that "it has ever been the custom in the Catholic Church to smooth the way towards the acceptance of her teaching by answering from Scripture the arguments

* “ Church and State," p. 283. We commend to our readers some excellent remarks in this recent work of Mr. Birks (pp. 282–285), on the sacred

character of the ordinance of marriage, and the danger of degrading it into a mere secular institution.

which were derived from Scripture against her.” (p. 17.) All this seemed so fair and plausible, that our curiosity was fairly roused, and submitting to the author's guidance, we went upon our search. His mode of conducting it is peculiar. Dismissing Anglican Ritualists with the contempt they usually receive from their Romish brethren, he proceeds to take up the gauntlets thrown down by a number of Dissenters. His chief antagonist is Dr. Vaughan (not he of Doncaster), also a Dr. White, Dr. Cumming, Lola Montez, the Author of “Liber Librorum," and of “ Ecce Homo.” With these curiously selected representatives of Protestantism he carries on a running controversy. Into this we do not care to enter. We turned over his pages eager to find the instances of Ritualism in the New Testament upon which a theory might be grounded. As explained in dictionaries, Ritualism is “custom, or customary observance, customary ceremony." We are afraid our readers will hardly believe us serious when we quote from among his instances our Lord's writing on the ground when the Pharisees wished to stone the adulteress; his cursing and withering up the fruitless fig-tree; his lifting up his hands to bless at the Ascension; the injunction to the disciples to shake the dust off their feet, which we are told they literally did ; our Lord's taking the dead maiden by the hand, and touching the leper, His kneeling in prayer, raising up His eyes to heaven, and so on. We are furthermore told that the scenes at the Nativity, the Transfiguration, and on Mount Calvary, were instances of Ritualism. We have no wish needlessly to say a harsh thing; but when reading such idle stuff, we could not help thinking what poor creatures, intellectually, Rome must now be recruited with.

Even the author, however, seems very soon to have had more than enough of this, and to be in some measure conscious of its absurdity, for the bulk of the volume is devoted to a controversy about Tradition and the Canon of Scripture, which seems a very favourite topic with Romish controversialists, and an attempt to prove that without tradition we could get no satisfactory information about, or authority for, Baptism and the Lord's Supper, with a further explanation why so little is said about Ritualism in the New Testament; so that we could not help coming to the conclusion, that whatever the author may have been in his Protestant state, he is now himself fairly bewildered and muddled, and could only bewilder any one who attempted to read his lucubrations.

There is, in addition to this, the usual amount of declamation and clap-trap about the contrast of Romish and Protestant services. A passage is quoted (p. 77) from Cardinal Wiseman's description of the “Quarant' Ore.” In it we are told:—"Look at the body of the church! No pews, no benches, or other incumbrances are there; but the flood of radiance seems to be poured upon the marble pavement, and to stream along it to the very door. ... Softly and noiselessly is the curtain raised which covers the door, and passed uplifted from hand to hand in silent courtesy as a succession of visitors enter in. Before and around them are scattered, without order or arrangement, persons singly or in groups—in the first open space, upon the same bare stone floor princess and peasant, priest and layman, all equal in the immeasurable distance between them and the eternal object of their adoration." Oddly enough, two or three weeks ago, we found ourselves in the immediate neighbourhood of the Cardinal's Church at Moorfields, and thought we would look in. On approaching the door, we had no chance of raising the curtain, for an official came promptly forward, not to usher us in, but with a wooden bowl full of red and white counters, and very civilly informed us that there was no admission by that door without payment. We did not stop to inquire to what pri. vileges the red or white counters respectively admitted, but made our way to the free entrance, where we found an ingenious arrangement adopted apparently from the neighbouring cattle market. Pens at the furthermost end of the church were erected separating men from women, and most effectually screening the rich from the chance of the poor coming between “the wind and their nobility.” All, it was true, were "on the same bare stone floor;" and the poor man, no doubt, was as near “ in spirit and in truth” as the rich was to “Him who dwelleth not in temples made with hands;" but he was much further from his Priest, and but very little of the radiance of the tabernacle lamp could have fallen upon him as he gazed wistfully at it through a barrier, which might fairly, we think, be termed "an incumbrance.” We have, of course, no right, nor have we the slightest wish, to complain of arrangements made in Romish places of worship; but the contrast between the Cardinal's romantic picture and our own recent experience was ludicrous in the extreme.

In a footnote, page 13, the author fairly warns his readers that he quotes from the Romish version of the New Testament; he says there is no important difference in the passages he quotes between the English version and his; we think there is, and that the fact should be borne in mind if any one cares to be at the trouble of reading a very delusive book full of idle and inconsequential utterances, for we cannot dignify them with the name of argument or reasoning.

Invocation of Saints and Angels. Compiled from Greek, Eng

lish, and Latin Sources ; for the use of Members of the Church of England. Edited by the Rev. Orby Shipley, M.A. Longmans. 1869.

In the Dedication of this book, which we do not scruple to denounce in the strongest terms, to the “ Citizens of the Church Triumphant," Mr. Shipley thus addresses them: “ Secure as to yourselves, ye are yet anxious for us." We lay no claim to that insight into the knowledge and capabilities of the “ Saints” which is involved in the Romish system of Invocation. So far, however, as their cognizance of things on earth may extend, we think that, as regards the volume which lies before us, and other publications of which Mr. Shipley is the Editor, the anxiety to which he refers is not without sufficient foundation. We are in doubt whether to assign the palm to the ignorance or to the impiety which this book betrays. It is quite possible that in “that system of doctrines” (we presume Mr. Shipley means his own) “ of which the Invocation of Saints and Angels forms an integral portion,” the number of Archangels may be neither greater nor less than three, but (independently of the absence of all Scriptural authority, to which, indeed, it would be unreasonable to expect that Mr. Shipley should appeal) we think that he would experience considerable difficulty in establishing his position by reference either to earlier or later Jewish Tradition, or even to that corrupt system of Romish Invocation, of the nature of which the “Hours of Sarum” affords a fair illustration. Whilst apparently conscious, however, of the abuse of even the shadow of Scriptural authority for that system of which the doctrine of Invocation of Saints and Angels is an integral portion, Mr. Shipley appears to claim on its behalf an Apostolic or at least a sub-Apostolic origin in a passage which we shall present to our readers in his own words :-" It is” (he writes in p. 35 of the preface) “a remarkable fact, that whilst many articles of the Apostles' Creed, in the course of ages, and from the spread of heresy, were made longer, less general, and more definite, the Article which briefly defines the doctrine on which Invocation is based, remains unaltered— I believe in the Communion of Saints.""

That Mr. Shipley should interpret this Article of the Creed in accordance with his own system, is a fact which can occasion

no surprise to those who are acquainted with the tactics of the school with which he has chosen to identify himself. It is a somewhat significant illustration, however, of the prevailing standard of theological attainment in that school, that Mr. Shipley should write either in assumed, or, as we are charitably disposed to believe, in real ignorance of the fact that the words in question formed no part of the Aquileian Creed expounded by Ruffinus, that “they were not mentioned by him as being either in the Oriental or the Roman Creed," that they are “not in the old Latin Creed in the Oxford Library ... not in the old Greek Creeds,” in a word, as briefly summed up by Bishop Pearson, from whose learned notes we have already borrowed, that they are “ of a later date.” Our readers will probably be prepared, after this specimen of Mr. Shipley's patristic lore, to estimate at its true value his appeal to “ the teaching of the Primitive Church," and to “the practice of the Early Fathers.” (See Preface, p. 35.) That “the mystery of iniquity, which had begun to “ work" in Apostolic times, was, at a comparatively early period, manifested in a superstitious reverence for real or imaginary saints and martyrs, and in a profane invocation of angels, we do not for a moment deny. But that “ from the beginning it was not so," the following quotations from writers whose theological attainments were of a somewhat different order from those of Mr. Shipley, may suffice to show.

Bishop Bull, in his valuable Treatise on the Corruptions of the Church of Rome, having first observed that " for the worship and invocation of saints deceased there is no ground or foundation in the Holy Scriptures,”-nay more, that it is “by evident consequence forbidden in the prohibition of the worship and invocation of angels,”-proceeds to support his statement by an appeal to the judgment of antiquity which he sums up in these words—" Indeed, against the invocation of Angels and Saints, we have the concurrent testimonies of all the Catholic Fathers of the first three centuries at least.

Archbishop Usher, in like manner, in his “ Answer to a Jesuit's Challenge," speaking of prayer to Saints as a “new worship,” which“ fetches its original neither from the Scriptures of the Old nor of the New Testament," inquires very pertinently how, "if any such novel tradition as this were at first delivered unto the Church by Christ and His Apostles ..... it should come to pass that, for the space of three hundred and sixty years together after the birth of our Saviour, we can find mention nowhere of any such thing ?”

We do not plead guilty to the charge of having wasted time and labour by wading through the heterogeneous mass of ConVol. 68.—No.380.

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