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Christian character. Of this the puritans had been fully aware; they had enforced the doctrines of Scripture on this subject, and, under their potent ministrations, a serious impression of the importance of sanctifying the Sabbath, had been widely diffused. The profanation of this holy day had been systematically encouraged by Elizabeth, and James, and Charles, and their state bishops, and established clergy; doubtless, another proof of the necessity of a church establishment, to promote piety, and prevent heathenism.

Of the religious effects which followed the strict observance of this blessed day, profane and infidel men were also aware. And they were anxious to counteract its influence; not merely because they were unwilling to worship God themselves, but also, because they hoped to supplant religious principle, by introducing a neglect of religious ordinances. A serious regard to the duties of private worship, was now considered as beneath the character of a man of rank; and a contempt of every public appearance of devotion, was a distinguishing mark of the king's own peculiar friends and favourites; the dispensers of bishoprics and benefices in the established church.

When Charles himself was in the house of God, he seemed to be afraid, lest it should not be sufficiently known that he neither feared God, nor regarded man. And Pharaoh said, who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice? The king's example was followed by the minions of his pleasures; and the conduct of the court, however infamous, will always be followed by multitudes of the people. Religious men, in every age, have seen cause to lament, that so many neglect the duties of the Sabbath; but at this period, when the Anglican Church establishment was in possession of plenary power, and employing that power in persecuting every appearance of piety, the profanation of the Lord's day was open, avowed, audacious, universal. The torrent of infidelity, which

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descended from the throne of Charles, and from the archiepiscopate of Sheldon, was swollen in its progress through the different gradations of society, and deluged all the land. O my people, they who lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.

The attention of Dr. Owen had been often directed with grief to this declining state of religion in England; and he tells us, that to the introduction of a great neglect of the duties of the Sabbath might be ascribed much of the profaneness and impiety which had become so general. While studying the fourth chapter of the epistle to the Hebrews, he carefully examined the Scripture doctrine respecting the Lord's day. The result of this examination is contained in six exercitations, concerning the name, the origin, the nature, the use, and the continuance of a day of sacred rest; and practical directions for the due observance of this day, are subjoined. They were published in 1671, in a detached form, that they might be read more extensively, and without delay. They are now published in the Edinburgh edition, in 1812, of Owen's Exposition of Hebrews.

As might naturally be expected from a formal state church, supported by an infidel, secular government, Charles the second and his established bishops filled Scotland with the blood of her holiest men; covered England with profaneness and profligacy, and laid the axe to the root of all evangelical religion in the national church establishment; and laboured to entail a perpetuity of formalism and ungodliness upon the clergy of the church of England. Pains, penalties, confiscations, imprisonments, tortures, were all put in requisition by this atrocious government of church and state, to prevent the ejected ministers from exercising their most holy functions in a land calling itself Christian.

All vital and experimental religion was decried, ridiculed, calumniated, persecuted; and, so far as the king and his state bishops could effect their pur

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FASHIONABLE THEOLOGY.

pose, England approximated to the condition of the cities of the plain.

In vain did Burnet's philosophical divines in the established church, labour to stem the torrent of infidelity and licentiousness, by studying, and recommending the study of Plato, Tully, and Plotin. Was this the way to promote an intimate knowledge of the Scriptures, and an extensive diffusion of Gospel truth? These men, highly talented, and extensively learned as they undoubtedly were, instead of insisting upon the necessity of the Holy Spirit's influence, to enable us to know the things of God; urged the sufficiency of mere, unassisted human reason, which, of itself, never did and never can either know, or desire to know and love God. They treated the operations of grace upon the renewed heart as cant, and enthusiasm; or, at least, as so inscrutably secret, as to be entirely unknown. But in what does an unknown operation in heart and life, differ from no operation at all?

It is to be apprehended, that from this philosophical source, much of our modern, fashionable, formal divinity is derived; a system of divinity which boasts of reason for its author, and leads to a listless, undevout, unspiritual life and practice, as its legitimate end and object. In the eighth volume of the late Joseph Milner's works, in "Gibbon's account of Christianity considered," this subject is well discussed. The whole tract may be very profitably perused; especially the address to sceptics, formalists, and believers.

What with unscriptural preaching, and encouraged licentiousness, in the reign of Charles the second, religion received a wound in England, which she has not yet recovered. In the established church, the very semblance of piety almost entirely disappeared; family religion was very generally laid aside; and great numbers, particularly of the higher ranks, avowed themselves open infidels.

On the accession of James the second, his foolish violence in favour of popery, drove the churchmen

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and the dissenters into a temporary political alliance, in support of protestantism. And as soon as the danger was over, the state church requited the aid of the dissenters, by refusing to repeal the test and corporation acts, which were, originally, passed with the concurrence of dissenters, as a safeguard against popery, and, certainly, not intended as a perpetual exclusion of conscientious protestants from civil and military offices.

At the revolution, in 1688, the toleration act of William protected the dissenters from the tender mercies of the established church; as expressed in the intelligible tones of the five mile and conventicle acts, of fine, imprisonment, transportation, and death. A reunion of churchmen and dissenters was earnestly endeavoured by William, but frustrated by the state clergy. Indeed, such a desirable event was rendered quite hopeless, not only by a fierce renewal of the dispute about forms of church government, between episcopacy and presbyterianism; but also, by the prevalence of formalism in the establishment, and the very general departure of its clergy from the evangelical doctrines of the articles of the Anglican Church.

In addition to which, the revolution gave birth to *another source of quarrel between the state clergy themselves; namely, the distinction between high and low church; in which religion had little or no share; and which produced a large crop of political and ecclesiastical controversy; and taught multitudes in the establishment to substitute churchmanship for Christianity; a doctrine, in which a great body of bishops, priests and deacons, both in England and in these United States, are, at this hour, full graduates.

The toleration act, indeed, secures the dissenters in England, from the grosser, and more overt acts of persecution; but they still labour under the proscription of political disabilities. And notwithstanding the tolerant and liberal character of William's

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DOCTRINES OF GRACE.

government; and the labours of archbishops Tillotson and Sharpe, and other able and well disposed men, evangelical religion declined, and formalism flourished, in England, almost entirely without let or hindrance, down to the year 1738. The established clergy, if they believed, certainly did not preach the great leading truths of the Gospel, as they are taught in Holy Writ, and expressly embodied in their own articles, homilies and liturgy; for example, the essential doctrines of original sin; justification of the sinner by faith alone in the merits of Christ; spiritual, not baptismal regeneration; communion with the Father, and with his Son, Jesus Christ; the progressive sanctification of the Holy Spirit; the assurance of the favour of God; and all those essential truths, known as the doctrines of grace.

The state clergy continued preaching, living, and acting against, and subscribing, swearing to, and reading the doctrines of the Anglican Church. Evangelism sounded from the desk, and formalism from the pulpit, very generally, throughout the establishment; until about the year 1740, it pleased God to cause a revival of religion in England, by the instrumentality of John Wesley, and George Whitfield, and their coadjutors and followers.

At that time, says Erasmus Middleton, a minister of the church of England, who ventured to maintain her articles and homilies in doctrine, and who sup ported them in fact, by a holy practice, was a kind of prodigy, and met with nothing but censure, persecution, and hard names from all ranks and sorts of men. Our pulpits resounded with morality, deduced from the principles of nature, and the fitness of things, with no relation to Christ, or the Holy Ghost; all which the heathen philosophers have insisted on, and perhaps with more than modern ingenuity; and, in consequence of this, our streets have resounded with immorality.

Dark, in very deed, and gloomy, was the condition of England, at the commencement of this revival.