the sight of God, and give them something upon which they may pride themselves on the one hand, while on the other they will, in the same degree, undervalue the full salvation provided for us in Jesus Christ, and lower the standard of that perfect holiness which was brought in by the New Testament, which is emphatically, and in one sense exclusively, the dispensation of the Holy Spirit; by whose gracious aid alone it is that men can apprehend or attain to the standard presented in Christ Jesus, our example, to be followed by the members of his body, the Church. The tendency to rely on human merit, instead of the sole merits of Christ, is common to all mankind: the form which it takes is accidental-dependent upon the circumstances of the time-and the principle is the same when men rely on the good works of other men as when they rely on their own: the merits of saints are in a subtle sense our own, as belonging to our species; and intercessions of any creature come under the same though a more enlarged category. All tend to place the seat of mercy and the place of supplication elsewhere than in God-all turn the eyes to some other saviour, or other channel of salvation, than Christ Jesus-all are such corruptions of the Gospel as St. Paul especially denounces in his Epistle to the Galatians.

At the time of the Reformation the same evil tendency, which at the beginning was resisted by the great apostle of the Gentiles, had leavened the Gentile Church, and had corrupted the faith of the Romanists to such a degree, that works done by men were regarded not only as sufficing to accomplish their own salvation but as having a merit beyond this-capable of being carried to account, as a joint-stock capital; so as to be drawn upon by the priests for the pardon of sins or the procuring of blessings to any, who, by paying a certain price, secured a certain amount of their good offices, as dispensers of the treasures contained in this depository of the works of supererogation.

Whensoever the zeal, or if you will the excesses, of the Reformers are spoken of, we should keep in mind the excessive provocation which was given in the monstrous doctrines concerning indulgences which were promulgated by the highest authorities in the Church, and were practically rendered, at the same time, ridiculous and intolerable, in the indulgences being hawked about from town to town by low-minded men, whose language and demeanour can only be compared to the arts which are practiced by mountebanks at a fair, and when all men knew that the money thus shamefully acquired was not destined to any holy or ecclesiastical purpose, but ministered

only to illegitimate and often to reprehensible or sinful extravagance.

If Luther had been an ordinary man he might have been satisfied with counteracting the immediate evil, and guarding those committed to his care against being deluded by the imposture; but this would have left his flock liable to another assault or another similar imposture, and Luther was not an ordinary man: he struck, therefore, at the root of the evil and the false doctrine on which the imposture was grounded: and, thereby, so far as in him lay, delivered that generation from all future assaults of the same kind. And not only so, but he demolished the whole system of indulgences root and branch; so that although, in the immutability of Rome, the name may continue, the thing itself is annihilated; the doctrine, as then maintained, received its death-blow from Luther, and was never afterwards revived.

It was from the Epistle to the Galatians that Luther derived the doctrines and arguments wherewith to oppose the falsehoods which had been propagated by the Romanists respecting indulgences. The Galatians in the first century were attaching importance to the works of the law, deeming such works necessary to carry on or complete the salvation which had been begun by Jesus Christ. St. Paul refutes their error by showing that, if they do not regard the work of Christ as every thing, it will be nothing to them; for they will have failed of apprehending it at all. The Romanists in the sixteenth century were making void the work of Christ, by substituting in like manner the works of men in its stead. But the error in the last instance was far more culpable in itself, and far more deadly in its consequences than in the first case, because it was professedly a substitution of human merits in place of Christ, while the Galatians only professed a desire to retain the law as well as the Gospel. And the law, which the Galatians thus endeavoured to carry on beyond its proper period into the Christian dispensation, had been an appointment of God, and was imperatively binding up to the time of its abrogation: whereas the Roman doctrine of human merit was pure fiction, and never had the least sanction from the word of God-never had been the doctrine or practice of the Church-and was as pernicious and anti-social in its immoral tendencies, as it was dishonourable to God and Christ Jesus by the subversion of every right view of man's salvation. The decencies of life, and men's instinctive feelings of right and wrong, were outraged on the one hand; while all the fundamental doctrines of Christianity were found to be also

denied or subverted: and thus, reformation was called for by every right-hearted man among the people as much as by every theologian who knew and believed in the word of God: and we owe the Reformation, not so much to the exertions of Luther and his coadjutors, as to the crying evils which had rendered those exertions necessary. Outraged humanity and insulted Christianity demanded a reformation, and would have enforced their demands through some other leaders if these had not come forward; and without such a support, Luther's exertions would have been vain. Yet every contemplative Christian derives encouragement from remarking that, whensoever God has a purpose to accomplish, the minds of men are prepared, and suitable instruments are also raised up for accomplishing the work.

Those who are accustomed to study mankind in the triple aspect of body, soul, and spirit, which constitute the being of man, will find that every erroneous principle may manifest itself in three forms, according as the state of society may have a fleshly or intellectual or spiritual tendency: either of these constituents being exaggerated, man is thrown off his balance, and becomes both more liable to errors of the same tendency, and gives to whatever errors have arisen the form and colour which his own character has assumed. The coming of Christ was the commencement of a spiritual dispensation in contradistinction to the literal dispensation of the law; and it was in this sense that the first Christians were warned against the carnality of the law, as, by resting in visible things they would be falling short of invisible or spiritual things, and were warned also against spiritual delusions; because we wrestle not with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers, with spiritual wickedness in high places, and therefore need the whole armour of God. Hence it came to pass that both the errors on the one hand, and the assaults on the other, to which the early Church was liable, had chiefly to do with spiritual things, either through not discerning the spirituality of their Christian calling, or from being deluded by falsehoods which should assume, or really possess, a spiritual character; but that not of the Holy Spirit-not of the Spirit of God, but from a spirit of delusion. The errors arising from forsaking the spirit of Christianity, to follow the letter of the law, are those combatted in St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians : the delusions of false spirits are those manifested by the Gnostics and other early heretics like themselves, and in a less palpable and subtle form by the Montanists and many of the Platonizing fathers, as may be detected in some of the writings

of Origen, and which infected the whole Eastern Church down to the time of John Damascene.

The errors which rendered a reformation necessary in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were of a fleshly character, being grounded upon ignorance of the grossest and deepest kind, which had lain for centuries upon western Europe, debasing and brutalizing the people and clergy almost to the same degree, and tempting the latter, as a body, to use the slight advantages they possessed of retaining some little remnant of knowledge to abuse these advantages; thereby to practice the more successfully upon the total ignorance of the people by base arts which the majority of the clergy and laity could not detect, or had an interest in promoting, and which the few who thought or felt aright, dared not, as a feeble minority, expose or withstand. It has been the fashion to palliate, and some have altogether denied, the ignorance and vice which pervaded western Europe at that time, and at length issued in the Reformation. That there have been good and learned men at every period, and wherever the Church has subsisted, we may not deny, since we may not cut off the continuity of the faith; and that they have been more numerous than may appear we can well believe, just as God knew of seven thousand true worshippers in Israel when Elijah thought that he stood alone, and that all men sought to slay him. But the facts of general ignorance and universal corruption stand out in characters too strong and in stations too conspicuous to be mistaken: the facts can only be denied on grounds which would render suspicious the whole tenor of history. If such men as Alexander the Sixth could occupy the highest place in the Church-if the accusations against him and his children, which have rendered the name of Borgia proverbial for infamy, could have been thought of merely, not to say entertained, not to say credited, by his contemporaries-if these thoughts could arise in the minds of men, it proves that the age was accustomed to such kind of things, and could believe a Pope to be capable of the blackest and most unnatural crimes upon record. And almost as disgraceful a neglect of the qualifications necessary for rightly discharging the duties of the Church may be inferred from the fact that Leo the Tenth, though he proved an enlightened man and made a good Pope, had been ordained a priest at seven years of age, and was a cardinal at seventeen ; which, that any man should be, fully establishes the universality of the corruption and abuse, when preferment depends thus upon interest alone, without the smallest regard to qualification. To counteract these gross fleshly forms of corruption, the

doctrine of justification by faith and all its concomitant truths were brought forward in the sixteenth century; and the defence of the truth requires that its champions should adapt their weapons to the form which the error has put on at that very time.

We live three hundred years later in the Church's history, and during those three centuries knowledge of every kind has been uninterruptedly advancing, and pervading more and more all classes of society throughout Christendom. But an enlightened age has its own peculiar temptations-its own peculiar errors; and, as under apparent diversity of form truth is one, because there is unity in the principles on which it rests, so also the various obliquities of error may be traced to a much smaller number of false principles than is generally supposed, the radical meaning of error being "to miss the mark:" the point of truth has been aimed at but has been missed, by going beyond or falling short-by diverging to the right hand or to the left. The peculiar temptations of an enlightened age arise from what man has really acquired in the way of knowledge, and what we have already accomplished thereby. Looking at the wonders which have been wrought, we scarcely allow any thing to be impossible to science; and we are tempted to suppose that the miracles on record may have been accomplished by art, and that things which are at the present time deemed miraculous may be brought within the domain of art, and grace the triumph of some future achievement of science; and its peculiar errors consist in assuming that there are more ways of salvation than one.

God looks upon all men as equal—all lying under one common condemnation-all powerless to help themselves-all alike needing, and needing to the same extent, the salvation which He has provided: the ignorant do not need it one whit more-the enlightened not one whit less; with God there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free; all are regarded as in the same condition-all dead in trespasses and sins. And each, being thus unable to save himself, is of course unable to procure salvation for other men: 66 none of them can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him." All are shut up to faith in Christ alone as the only Saviour, who is given to be the propitiation for the sins of the whole world, and without whom no one individual of the fallen race can attain to the kingdom of heaven.

But men of science, feeling their intellectual superiority, can scarcely believe themselves to be, in a moral point of view,