The late that regeneration may be the accompaniment of baptism." Rev. T. Kerchever Arnold thought that English clergymen "Must feel pained at the violence which any other interpretation must at least seem to do to the plain language of positive assertion which the Offices put into their mouths. It was impossible that the Church could intend to mock Christian parents by solemnly asserting that to be which she believes may very possibly not be. Such clergymen must, one would think, desire, with the Puritan divines of 1661, to have their consciences relieved."† The Rev. H. Melville goes so far as to say, that the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration would never have been disputed, "Had not men been anxious to remain in her communion, and yet to make her formularies square with their own private notions. So long as I subscribe to that Prayer Book, and so long as I officiate according to the forms of that Prayer Book, I do not see how I can be commonly honest, and yet deny that every baptized person is, on that account, regenerate."+ In a previous article, the testimonies of Bishops Waterland, Philpotts, and Wilberforce, were quoted to the like effect; we will now add that of the Bishop of Tasmania: "It is perfectly incomprehensible to me how the denier of Baptismal Regeneration can make up his mind to use the services * "Sermon preached at St. George's Church," p. 167. "Remarks on the Rev. G. S. Faber's Primitive Doctrine of Regeneration,” p. 50. "Sermons," vol. ii. pp. 237, 238. Compare with this the language of Mr. Spurgeon:-"For me to take money for defending what I do not believe; for me to take the money of a church, and then to preach against what are most evidently its doctrines I say for me to do this-for me, or for any other simple, honest man to do 9), were an atrocity so great, that if I had perpetrated the deed, I should consider myself out of the pale of truthfulness, honesty, and common morality."-" Baptismal Regeneration,” p. 317. We cannot better close this portion of our article than by quoting the language of Dr. Wordsworth: "If the words of the English Church, in the English Prayer Book, are not to be understood in their plain, simple, literal English sense; if she is not to be understood to mean that the child is regenerate, then doubt, suspicion, and scepticism will lurk beneath her altars, and steal into the most solemn mysteries of religion; then faith in subscription to Articles will be no more; and all confidence in her teaching and in that of her ministers will be destroyed a heavy injury will be sustained by her people, and the English name and nation will sink low in the scale of honesty, sincerity, and truth." If the witness of Churchmen is to be believed, then are the evangelical clergy, in particular, guilty of the charge laid at their door. Third. The testimony of clergymen who have left the Church of Eng land from conscientious motives, is very remarkable. It will be unnecessary to quote at length the strong and never-refuted language of the Hon. and Rev. Baptist Noel. Mr. Spurgeon has already done this to some extent in his two letters to Mr. Noel and the Christian public. But it is important to remember Mr. Noel's personal testimony, as to his own conflict while a member of the Establishment: "I once," he says, "laboured hard to convince myself that our Reformers did not and could not mean that infants are regenerated by baptism; but no reasoning avails. The language is too plain." That this struggle existed, and exists still, in the minds of many who were his co-religionists, Mr. Noel shows by sundry "symptoms," which his experience enables him to say are "common." Thus, he says, pious Anglican pastors denounce Popery with great violence, which requires no The Rev. W. Brock, in his letter to Mr. Spurgeon, adduces the case of Mr. Prebendary Wodehouse, as showing the martyrdom of conscience through which an earnest, sincere man must pass, in order to make his belief tally with his profession. The Prebendary was obliged to give up the contest at last, and to lay down the orders he had assumed.* The controversy has brought out one or two illustrations of the truth of the accusation of dishonesty, which deserve very attentive consideration. Mr. Leonard Strong, for eleven years a clergyman in Barbadoes, in a small tract which he calls "A Personal Testimony to the Truth * We must refer to Mr. Spurgeon's "Letter to the Christian Public" for the testimonies of the Rev. T. W. Teesdale, M.A., the Rev. S. Minton, M.A., the Rev. Thos. Davis, M.A., all clergymen of the Establishment, and especially to the "Reasons" given by the Association for Promoting a Revision of the Prayer Book. fulness of C. H. Spurgeon's Witness," writes as follows: "I write to cheer you in this testimony which God has enabled you to give, by my expression of sympathy with all you have said. It is a truthful portrait-it is a faithful photograph. How many are there who become disgusted at their own likeness! still it may not be the less faithfully drawn. I stand before you, and plead guilty to all you have said." Speaking of himself and his friends at Oxford, he says, "We all perceived the falseness of the Catechism and the Baptismal Service, yet I thought there was no other way to get a door for preaching the Gospel than by ordination in the Establishment." The example of many pious clergymen was urged upon him; his hesitation was pooh-poohed; his conscientious scruples to subscription were met by the proposal of reservation. He was ordained. "So," he says, "I yielded, but with a bad conscience. I was installed, and I returned to my Christian wife, saying, 'I am rector of this parish; I have now a field for labour in the Gospel; but I am a liar.' I could never shake this off from my conscience. We gave ourselves to the work. I never taught the catechism, or allowed it in the parish. I did not baptize the children of unconverted persons. I often left out parts of the baptismal service. I never read the whole of the burial service over the unconverted dead. Indeed, I never used the Prayer Book when I could help it. But in all this I was dishonest. At last I could bear it no longer. I was altogether dishonest-at first, in telling lies to obtain my position; and then, in breaking my promises to man in order to obey God, but at the same time receiving man's pay on condition that I kept my word with him, which I did not, because I must obey God." So Mr. Strong gave up his living in the Establishment, and left it with the conviction that there were many in its fold who, like himself, were dishonest, but who have not, like him, the courage to renounce "the hidden things of dishonesty." It will suffice to add to the above the following remarkable words of Dr. Fraser, (at the Bristol Congress,) who, however, remains a minister of the Establishment. A more open and scandalous avowal of dishonesty to sworn obligations we scarcely know, and the speaker is evidently encouraged in his avowal by the knowledge that many of those whom he addressed are in the same position: "Twice, since I have been a priest, I have had cases in which my conscience would have been deeply wounded if I had used the full burial service. But every month, and sometimes for weeks or even days running, I am compelled to profane the clear, pure, holy words of the marriage service, standing by the altar; and those words, so holy and devotional, blister my tongue as I use them. I get through that beautiful touching office somehow, by a strong effort of formality and hypocrisy, and I go back to the vestry, silent, disappointed, and ashamed. Is my experience a singular one?" Fourth. This outspoken expression of conscious dishonesty is not, however, the usual way in which the reality of its existence makes itself known. The evangelical clergy generally profess themselves satisfied with their position, and say that they are able to reconcile their belief with their practice. Still, some of the most eminent cannot but at times reveal the true state of their minds. Thus, the late Rev. Thomas Scott, the wellknown commentator, once declared the Baptismal Service to be "a grievous burthen, hard to bear." Why "hard to bear," if he honestly believed, as by his subscription he said he did, that the service was in accordance with God's word? There is no true evangelical clergyman who will not speak with reverence of the late Charles Simeon, of Cambridge. No man, perhaps, laboured with more success to remove the "offence" which the words of the Offices for Baptism have occasioned. But truth forced from him the confession "I do not mean to say that a slight alteration in two or three instances would not How can that be a burden, to the mind which has willingly and ex animo consented to it? What has made "laboured explanations" necessary, but the discrepancy that conscience discovers between speech in the pulpit and the words at the font? Dr. Miller, of Birmingham, has truly and aptly expressed the fact in his memorable words "It is we," the Evangelical clergy," who feel that the shoe pinches." And Canon Stowell, of Manchester, reveals to us that he did not find "the key to the strong expressions used by our Church in her Baptismal Services," until "after much mental struggle in the course. of his academical career."+ The Rev. P. Gell makes a clean breast of it: "Ourlay brethren," he says, "can scarcely conceive the difficulties and misgivings of conscience in which it continually involves those who have actually subscribed. Often, very often, there must have been a carelessness in such subscriptions, and an elasticity of conscience, as I am sure it was with myself, very hard to be given an account of, and then trouble and anguish have taken hold upon us afterwards.‡ Thus the evangelical clergy give us ample grounds for saying that the charge of insincerity is not without justification, their own words being witness thereof. their moral judgments unjust, or their moral perceptions distortions of the truth. At all events, their sufferings, the long years of reproach they have patiently borne, testify to the purity of their motives, and the sincerity of the views they hold. The words of the great thinker and essayist, John Foster, shall sum up for us the evidence of this long array of witnesses for truth and honesty: can "It is meanly disingenuous, nor we comprehend how it can be otherwise than utterly immoral, for this man, in order to pursue his own interests by entering the Church, to pretend that its grand law of doctrine must not and cannot mean that which it has notoriously taken all possible care to express that it absolutely does mean, and absolutely does enjoin. Any clergyman who remains in the Church disbelieving any one proposition in its Articles, violates the sanctity and integrity of the Church, and, as far as we are able to comprehend, must violate his own conscience."** This general consent, then, of men of various parties, looking on the matter from many different points of view, some of them having suffered the loss of all things for their conscientious adhesion to the judgments of their common sense, is surely a most important fact in the decision of this question-one that it behoves the evangelical clergy very seriously to ponder. They may be quite sure that there is something very equivocal in the position they hold, something that truly shocks the moral and Christian sense of honest men, in their promulgation of the doctrines of grace, while they continue to use the Baptismal Offices of the Establishment. If they say that they do not understand these obnoxious formularies as others do, and that, in their opinion, these Offices are not so contradictory to "Critical Essays," vol. i. pp. 326, 328. Bohn's edit. Gospel truth as they seem, their attempts at explanation, the evasions they practise, the elaborate devices they invent, the disagreements existing amongst themselves as to the true meaning of the Church, prove to men of common sense that they have no desire to reach a true, just, and honest decision. bishop Whately, "how easily even intel"Daily experience shows us," says Archligent men are satisfied with the slightest pretences of argument, with the most extravagant conclusions, when they are seeking not really for instruction as to what they ought to do, but for a justification of what they are inclined to do." † New theories of reconciliation are perpetually being put forth, and as hastily abandoned. At present the one most in favour seems to be, that the judgment in the Gorham case allows a diversity of interpretation, and shelters the evangelical clergy from the charge of dishonesty. But this is a mistake. The judges of the Privy Council nowhere in their decision attempt to define the meaning of the baptismal formularies. Indeed they leave both the interpretation and the arguments of Dr. Lushington, the Judge of the Court of Arches, untouched. Their decision goes simply to this, that the Church Courts will not punish those who hold the theory of Mr. Gorham. They do not approve that theory; they do not say that it is in harmony with the Offices for Baptism. They simply resolve not to inflict penalties on those who hold it. They leave the subscriptions of the clergy unaltered. They impose no new meaning on the language in dispute. The Catechism and the Baptismal services must be used by clergymen as before, without reservation or alteration, and their consciences have to reconcile as much as ever their "The Kingdom of Christ. Two Essays," p. 38. pulpit ministrations with the sacramental heresy of the font. If it was formerly dishonest to use the words of the prayer after baptism, while the celebrant believes in salvation only through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, it is so still. The Gorham judgment has changed nothing in the bearing of this grave question on the conscience. The state of the case is, if anything, more distressing, as it brings out the fact that the evangelical clergy, by this argument, have adopted the immoral dictum of Mr. Wilson as their rule of action that the legal is the measure of their moral obligation. We find them making this wicked maxim of the rationalist school their own, and by their dishonesty to conscience, and to moral obligation, aiding the growth of a system which threatens the very existence of their Church. We write all this with the deepest pain. We have known and loved many of the men of whose errors we speak. But we can only release them from the terrible accusation they so bitterly resent, by attributing to them a mental obliquity and a blindness of intelligence which would be insulting. It remains for us to pray that God would open the eyes of their understanding, and give them grace to come out and be separate from a system so dishonouring to God and so hurtful to the souls of men. AN EPISODE IN ULRIC ZWINGLI'S LIFE. CHAPTER VI. THE factions which distracted unhappy Switzerland increased every month in bitterness and hatred. Famine raged in the Catholic cantons, the Protestants still adhering obstinately to the prohibition of entrance to all articles of food. It was a cruel device one that Zwingli ought to have opposed; but his power was no longer the same as heretofore. The voices of faction and passion were raised higher and higher on the other side of the Council. The prudent Berne expostulated in vain, whilst the famine increased in severity in the five cantons. Oh! when has hatred ever begotten love? When have hardness and violence ever won hearts, or convinced souls? Zwin gli's good angel still whispered these words in his ear. But now he stood alone; the others would not listen; they were like the Indian who slept whilst his boat neared the falls of Niagara, awaking only when it was too late; to be dashed to pieces in the foaming torrent! There was no unity amongst the Protestant cantons; they had no faith in each other; and secret opponents were working everywhere against them. No steps were taken to bring things to a favourable issue; and the Catholic priests, on their side, profited by the strange and sinister signs of the times to increase their hold on the minds of the people. Ah! the wonders were not needed which |