they are from the importance of their subjects, their depth of discussion, the ingenuity displayed in the illustration of difficult passages, and the high tone of orthodoxy which prevails throughout, we cannot except from our remark: we actually believe, that there are few congregations, of whom one-tenth part would be capable of following the preacher through such discourses, while to every individual of the congregations which usually assemble in our village churches, they would be altogether unintelligible. In truth, religious instruction seems not to differ from any other kind in the method which it should employ; to be useful, it must be brought down to a level with the capacity and attainments of the learner. With this view, we should recommend that the Clergy should in all cases place themselves as much as possible in the situation of their hearers; and those whose province it is to preach to the lowly and illiterate, we should advise rather to dogmatize on the authority of Scripture than to deduce their conclusions circuitously by disquisition; the unlearned will not so readily apprehend any other proof of doctrine, or any other ground of duty, as the express declaration of the Word of God faithfully propounded and fully explained. In offering these suggestions, we would not be thought to derogate from the value of those acquirements, to which the early studies of the Clergy are usually directed; on the contrary, we believe that the proposed method of instruc tion will be most successful in the hands of those, whose minds have been most effectually disciplined by exercise and study: it supposes, indeed, some considerable qualifications both natural and acquired; a fund of good sense and observation; a plain yet nervous style; information on all subjects theological and moral; and that arrangement of ideas which rarely exists, except in those who have been habituated to think and examine: for such a purpose a divine possibly may not need the minute, ness of criticism indispensable to an Editor of the original Scriptures; but we conceive that he cannot be too deeply versed in dogmatic theology, or in the doctrines, the discipline, and the formularies of our Church. It is, indeed, easy to write or to talk slightly and superficially; but to analyse that which is com plex, to condense the multifarious, and to exhibit the result in a clear and commanding point of view, is the exclusive privilege of him who has thought profoundly, and has digested his reflexions.

We hasten, however, to notice the matter of the instruction which is intended for uneducated congregations; and on this head, not only in the present, but in all circumstances of the established Church, we entirely coincide with the Bishop. We know not of any distinction in the truths of revelation in point

of

of their fitness or unfitness to be declared to the vulgar: the whole of Christianity was designed to be preached to the whole body of Christians, without any regard to their attainments or condition; and so far are we from thinking that doctrinal discourses properly managed are less interesting to the common people than those which merely recommend the performance of moral duties, that we believe the contrary to be the fact. We are assured that it is possible to fix their attention more closely by preaching on the Fall, on the Incarnation, on the Atonement, on the Resurrection, or on the Influences of the Holy Spirit, than by almost any other subjects within the wide range of Christian instruction. We shall hardly be understood to mean, that other topics must not frequently be brought forward; otherwise the preacher would not exhibit the whole of Christianity, nor would he follow the practice of our Saviour or his Apostles: we mean only, that the morality inculcated must be Christian morality, enforced under Christian sanctions. In any other view morality and religion are quite distinct things; and the former may subsist where the latter is wholly wanting. But on this head we cannot better express our sentiments than in the words of the Bishop:

"Again, religion and morality differ, not only in the extent of the duty they prescribe, but in the part in which they are the same in the external work: they differ in the motive; they are just as far asunder as heaven is from earth. Morality finds all her motives here below: Religion fetches all her motives from above. The highest principle in morals is a just regard to the rights of each other in civil society: the first principle in religion is the love of God, or, in other words, a regard to the relation which we bear to him, as it is made known to us by revelation; and no action is religious, otherwise than as it respects God, and proceeds from a sense of our duty to him, or at least is regulated by a sense of that duty. Hence it follows, as I have before observed, that although religion can never be immoral, because moral works are a part of the works of religion, yet morality may be irreligious; for any moral work may proceed from mere moral motives, apart from all religious considerations: and if a moral work be done by a person not sufficiently instructed in religion to act upon religious considerations, it cannot proceed from any other than mere moral motives; and of consequence, it must in that instance be irreligious, not contrary to religion, but without it.

"Upon this ground stands the doctrine of the first reformers, concerning works done before justification, which is laid down in the 13th of our Articles,- Works done before the grace of Christ and the inspiration of his Spirit are not pleasing to God; forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ, neither do they make men meet to receive grace, or (as the school authors

say)

say) deserve grace of congruity; yea, rather for that they are not done as God had commanded and willed them to be done, we doubt not (saith the Church) but that they have the nature of sin.' Not that they are in such sort sins, that in the mere overt act, without consideration had of the obliquity of the motive, they add to the guilt of the doer of them; but being done without any thought of God, though not in defiance and despite of him, they have nothing in them that should make them pass for marks or symptoms of the regenerate character: on the contrary, in all these works merely meral, the atheist may be as perfect as the Christian.

"And this explains what at the first sight may seem a strange fact in the history of man, and is very apt to be misinterpreted, as if it disproved the connexion which divines are desirous to maintain between the truth of religious opinion and true practical godliness, -namely, that Infidelity and Atheism boast among their disciples eminent examples of moral rectitude. History records, I think, of Servetus, Spinoza, and Hobbes, that they were men of the strictest morals; the memory of the living witnesses the same of Hume; and history in some future day may have to record the same of Priestley and Lindsay. But let not the morality of their lives be mistaken for an instance of a righteous practice resulting from a perverse faith, or admitted as an argument of the indifference of error. Their moral works, if they be not done as God hath willed and commanded such works to be done, have the nature of sin; and their religion, consisting in private opinion and will-worship, is sin, for it is heresy." P. 28.

To the neglect of the Clergy sufficiently to enforce the doctrinal parts of Christianity, the Bishop ascribes in some degree the rapid progress of separation; and perhaps there was a time when some of the Clergy, from a fear of countenancing Enthusiasm, were too cautious of insisting strongly upon doctrines, which they saw perverted and abused. We hope and believe that this mistaken policy is now abandoned: it would inevitably be fatal to its own cause: if from one set of pulpits only lessons of morality were heard, while another dispensed the doctrines of the Gospel, all who looked into their Bibles would discover that the former mode of preaching was defective, though they might not perceive wherein the latter was erroneous.

The other cause, to which Bishop Horsley in this charge im putes the success of Methodism, still operates, we are afraid, to a considerable degree; it is, that while an irregular Ministry is exercised by self-commissioned Teachers, little pains are taken by the Clergy to shew with what hazard to himself the private Christian intrudes into the sacred office, and "how strictly it is required of the Laity to submit themselves to those, teachers, who are by due authority set over the people to watch over their

souls."

souls." The Bishop's remarks upon this subject, are conveyed in a vein of strong sense, and in that vigorous diction which characterizes his manner :

"Upon these topics the Clergy of late years have been more silent, than is perfectly consistent with their duty; from a fear, as I conceive, of acquiring the name and reputation of High-Churchmen. But, my brethren, you will not be scared from your duty by the idle terror of a nickname, artfully applied, in violation of the true meaning of the word, to entrap the judgment of the many, and bring the discredit of a folly long since eradicated, upon principles which have no connexion with it. You promote the stratagem of your enemies, you are assisting in the fraud upon the public, and you are accessaries to the injury to yourselves, if you give way to a dread of the imputation. To be a High-Churchman, in the only sense which the word can be allowed to bear, as applicable to any of the present day,-God forbid that this should ever cease to be my public pretension, my pride, my glory!-To be a High-Churchman in the true import of the word in the English language,-God forbid that ever I should deserve the imputation! A High-Churchman, in the true sense of the word, is one that is a bigot to the secular rights of the priesthood,-one who claims for the hierarchy, upon pretence of a right inherent in the sacred office, all those powers, honours, and emoluments, which they enjoy under an establishment: which are held indeed by no other tenure than at the will of the prince, or by the law of the land. To the prince, or to the law, we acknowledge ourselves indebted for all our secular possessions-for the rank and dignity annexed to the superior order of the clergy-for our secular authority-for the jurisdiction of our courts, and for every civil effect which follows the exercsie of our spiritual authority. All these rights and honours, with which the priesthood is adorned by the piety of the civil magistrate, are quite distinct from the spiritual commission which we bear for the administration of our Lord's proper kingdom. They have no necessary connexion with it: they stand merely on the ground of human law; and vary, like the rights of other citizens, as the laws which create them vary: and in every church, connected like our church with the state by an establishment, even the spiritual authority cannot be conferred without the consent of the supreme civil magistrate. But in the language of our modern sectaries, every one is a high-churchman who is not unwilling to recognize so much as the spiritual authority of the priesthood, every one who, denying what we ourselves disclaim, any thing of a divine right to temporalities, acknowledges, however, in the sacred character, somewhat more divine than may belong to the mere hired servants of the state or of the laity; and regards the service which we are thought to perform for our pay as something more than a part to be gravely played in the drama of human poli; tics. My reverend brethirhn, we must be content to be HighChurchmen according to this usage of the word, or we cannot be churchmen

churchmen at all; for he who thinks of God's ministers as the mere servants of the state, is out of the Church-severed from it by a kind of self-excommunication. Much charitable allowance is to be made for the errors of the laity upon points to which it is hardly to be expected they should turn their attention of their own accord, and upon which, for some time past, they have been very imperfectly instructed. Dissenters are to be judged with much candour, and with every possible allowance for the prejudices of education. But for those who have been nurtured in the bosom of the Church, and have gained admission to the ministry, if from a mean compliance with the humour of the age, or ambitious of the fame of liberality of sentiment (for under that specious name a profane indifference is made to pass for an accomplishment), they affect to join in the disavowal of the authority which they share, or are silent when the validity of their divine commission is called in question, for any (I hope they are few) who hide this weakness of faith, this poverty of religious principle, under the attire of a gown and cassock, they are in my estimation little better than infidels in masquerade." P. 39.

We earnestly wish that the passage which we have cited could be impressed upon the minds of the whole body of the laity, and that the young especially should be made acquainted with the Constitution of our Church. Erastian principles have lately made an alarming progress, if, indeed, we can dignify with the name of principles what we really believe to be nothing better than a culpable and utter ignorance of the authority which is inherent in the church, independently of Acts of Parliament; an authority possessed by it in full right, and exercised, when instead of being patronized by the State, it was depressed by persecution.

The next Charge, a very powerful, though somewhat desultory composition, was delivered at the Bishop's primary visitation of the Diocese of Rochester. Its leading object is to inquire wherein the difficulties, with which the clergy of the present day have to contend, differ froin those which their predecessors encountered in the early ages of the Church; and the learned preTate, having ascertained the peculiar situation of the present teachers of religion, proceeds to deduce from it the line of conduct which it will behove them to pursue,

For the opposition made by the Pagan rulers to the growth of Christianity, the Bishop accounts more satisfactorily in the space of a paragraph than has been done by Gibbon with all his subtilty and refinement in several pages. The sovereigns of the world had long experienced the utility even of a false religion to the purposes of social life; and they entertained apprehensions of the danger of innovation: They might also view the rising

Church