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and shade after shade of deepening gloom to settle down upon the interests of religion like a funeral pall. The four centuries preceding the seventh, present us with any thing, rather than the glory of the church. They form the great laboratory, in which most of those giant evils, that for ages wasted the energies and corrupted the virtue of Christendom, had their origin. They properly form a part of the " Dark Ages" of the church, and furnish us with much of what may very justly be called the' miseries of "the Middle Passage" of Christianity-the painful sufferings and oppressions, which she was compelled to endure in passing from the hands of the apostles, and their immediate successors, through an ocean of darkness to the light and freedom of the Reformation. These the days of the church's glory! When her learning and piety were steadily declining, and the constant increase of rites and ceremonies was crushing her free spirit into the dust and into the lifelessness of a stupid formality when the church was brought into unhallowed union with the civil power, and the whole frame-work of a spiritual hierarchy fashioned and put together, and fixed upon men. Days of the church's glory and strength! When the monastic economy with all its tides of corruption was introduced,-when the waters of the sanctuary, destined for the welfare of the world, were poisoned: and the streams, which were for the healing of the nations, "turned off by a deep cross-cut into monasteries, there to stagnate into a turbid pool, or to sink away through bottomless quicksands." Days of glory and strength! When ascetics-monks, nuns, eremites, pillar-saints, et id omne genus, were the great and good ones of the earth--the objects of universal admiration and applause,-when men were seen travelling to far-distant places, not to carry to the famishing the bread of life-not to tell the story of redeeming love to the heathen-but to see some pretended relic-the bones of some saint -the ashes of some martyr, or, what was much more an object of desire, to see the dunghill on which the pious patriarch of Uz sat, and which Chrysostom says is more venerable than the throne of a king. In the days of the apostles, men worshipped God their Saviour. In the latter part of this period of the church's glory, they paid their homage equally to the wood of the cross, to the images of the dead, and to the bones of dubious saints. In the first century men were either happy or miserable immediately after death; in the fourth and onward, purgatory effected for the wicked what the gospel had been unable to ac

complish. In Paul's day men were saved by grace; in that of Gregory the Great, they were saved by good works. In the New Testament the spirit of piety appears in her simplicity, and breathes easily in the atmosphere of purity and love; in the days of the church's glory, she is oppressed with the costume of heathen attire; and, unable to lift up her head in the attenuated and sickly air of cells and cloisters, she resigns her dominion over mind to the control of ignorance and superstition. There were indeed in those days some in the church of noble character. God has always had a people on earth to praise him, the seven thousand, who bow not the knee to Baal. But these were the excepted few. A wild and fearful fanaticism generally prevailed—a wide-spread and shameful profligacy pervaded the christian community. One tide of corruption rapidly followed another--until, as the author of Ancient Christianity forcibly remarks, the Mahometan deluge came as a cleansing inundation in places where it spread.

The change that has taken place deeply affects the Rector. He is in tears at the thought of it. "Now that the golden chain is broken, which then bound the disciples in one holy brotherhood, the glory and the strength are departed. Primitive piety, primitive zeal, primitive love, primitive self-denial, primitive labors, and primitive missions, with their thousand converts to the faith, where are they now to be found? We ask, but there comes no answer." No: none, if the author is addressing the daughter of the Anglican church in America, that has never broken the unity of the church, with these high questionings. We know not where in the action of "the church of the United States," we can find those several primitives-that zeal-that love-those missions with their thousand converts to the faith. But if his interrogatories have a wider bearing than this, and include those who have broken the unity of the church-those whose ancestors left the Episcopal communion and built conventicles; we can point him to some of these schismatics, some who have been unchurched, and left only to the uncovenanted mercies of God-some who, with the Bible only as their "Guide," have manifested something of the zeal and love of the early Christians-who have sent out their hundreds of missionaries, and have gathered their thousand converts to the faith. But we must not interrupt the Rector. "What is the strong hold of all the opposing powers of the gospel? The disunion and the strife of Christians! Why does the work of the conversion of the heathen advance so

slowly? Because the strength of Christendom is frittered away by division, and because their intestine feuds are transferred, as they must of necessity be while they exist, to distant shores along with those who repair thither to tell the benighted savage of his misery and danger, and of the way of relief and escape which has been provided by the Saviour." There is much truth no doubt in all this, but the difficulty is not exactly what our author imagines it to be. The objection to Christianity does not arise from the mere existence of denominational differences, where they are not allowed to disturb the harmony of intercommunion. It is truly a fearful hinderance, however, when one denomination assumes to be the church, and speaks of all others who do not conform to its forms and ceremonies as separatists and schismatics, and leaves them to the uncovenanted mercies of God. This creates the difficulty. When the world sees Christians making more of the shell than of the nut which it contains,-more of forms and ceremonies than of love to God and good will to man; it will feel that there is nothing in religion-nothing but shell and forms.

And as to those intestine feuds being transferred to distant shores by missionaries, who go there to preach the gospel, we deny the assertion, so far as it respects the men sent out by the American and Presbyterian Boards. We stand between them and such a charge. We admit that these feuds are transferred to distant shores, but by whom is this done? Our missionaries are willing to labour in the same field with those of any other evangelical denomination, and harmoniously too. Who are they that refuse to do this? Who is it at Constantinople, that refuses to recognize the missionaries of the American Board as ministers of Christ? Who is it, in Jerusalem, where once the disciples of Jesus were all of one accord, that stands aloof from those faithful heralds of the gospel who proclaim the truth as it is in Jesus, taking care never to treat them as the ambassadors of Christ? Aye, and who is it, that in his travels of observation in the East, carries with him an "eucharistic apparatus," that he may not be under the necessity of either entirely omitting the sacrament of the Lord's supper, or of receiving its elements from the hands of one, on whose head prelacy has never laid its imposition? And who excited those jealousies, which have ruined the Nestorians? We hope the learned Rector will inform his people and the public on these points in the next edition of "the Guide.' 39 It will not do to say, as he does, that these things must be thus transferred, while they exist at home.

One

wrong cannot be an excuse for another. Denominational exclusiveness here is wicked, and its wickedness here is no reason why it should exist on heathen shores.

But how are things to be righted? How is this lost unity. of the church to be restored? After so much lamentation over the evils of disunion, our readers will expect to see the manifestation of an enlarged charity on the part of the Rector for the sake of this end. In this, however, they are doomed to sad disappointment. Not one jot or tittle does he propose to give up for the sake of this result. No: the change is to be all on the other side. His denomination has never broken the unity of the church; and of course has nothing of which to repent-no change to make-conforms to primitive usage, and interprets the Scriptures according to Primitive Antiquity, contained in all its fulness and purity in that great commentary of the Bible—that Thesaurus of primitive lore--the Book of Common Prayer! All must therefore conform to them. Not a particle of their peculiarities can be laid aside-not even a gown, or a saint's day. We all have got to come back into the bosom of Prelacy unconditionally. To accomplish this several things are recommended by the Rector. The truth on this vital point of unity is to be spoken to us schismatics with the utmost fulness and frankness-missionaries are to be sent out on every side, and churches built, in which the holy sacraments may be truly administered, and the word of God, interpreted according to "Primitive Antiquity," truly preached-schools are to be established, in which the young are to be instructed in their duty to the church and lastly, the press is to be used-books and tracts, such, we suppose, as those "for the Times," are to be prepared and sent everywhere. Thus by boldly advancing the claims of his church, " as contradistinguished from all who have left her communion, or who stand aloof from her pale; and by carrying out her blessed doctrines and rites, with all her glorious privileges, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, ever ready for conciliation, but never for compromise," the Rector thinks that much may be accomplished in bringing back the separatists and schismatics, and thus restoring the golden age of the church! Alas, for those who are not in the Episcopal enclosure! What a work of repentance is there before them! How much have Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians to undo! How we envy the Roman Catholics! Their work will be comparatively easy. They will have to

give up only a few things, such as extreme unction, prayers for the dead, the worship of images and the like, and consent to a transfer of spiritual supremacy from Rome to London, from Gregory to Victoria; they will then be like the English church, and of course not very unlike her American daughter. In their efforts to effect this return of the schismatics, our author would have his people manifest the spirit of the gospel, and thinks that" when churchmen, one and all, shall bring forth the fruits of the Spirit,-when the cross of the Lord, truced on their brow at the laver of regeneration, shall be deeply imbedded in their hearts; and when they shall have the apostolic spirit, as well as the apostolic succession, then will those around them be disposed to receive their views of Christian truth and of the Christian church." Very good! Very good! We have no doubt that when they have the apostolic spirit, that their denominational exclusiveness will be at an end-that primacy in the ministry will be remembered only to be lamented, and the ceremonial of that sect no longer be made a bar to intercommunion. apostolic spirit, whenever it exists, will strip prelacy of its selfconstituted authority, and sweep from the Episcopal church every "Guide" which teaches for doctrines the commandments of men, and gives to primitive antiquity an authority above that of the Bible.

The

The unity of the church! How do men talk about it, as our author does, meaning by it only a conformity of all others to their own individual sect, or denomination! But is this the unity spoken of in the Bible? Not at all. It does not consist in an unbroken uniformity in the externals of worship. Its elements are not sameness of ceremonial-similarity of nameagreement as to the forms witnessed to as apostolic by primitive antiquity-using a liturgy, and singing those ancient hymns of Addison and others, which have glowed on the lips of apostles. No: these things are all outward--concern the shell-the modus in quo of Christianity, not the essence of Christianity itself. The unity of the church, as taught in the New Testament, is a moral oneness, and comes from the connection of each one with Christ. All who profess faith in Jesus are members of one society called the church, whatever may be their difference of opinion about the externals of religion. This was the union for which Christ prayed--a union of love on the basis of a common attachment to him. All who believe in him are one. They have all one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and

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