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worthy of the interference of the legislature. We trust that the representation of the Archdeacon will not be without its weight, but that the wisdom of Parliament will provide a remedy for an evil which is daily increasing and has already grown to so alarming a magnitude.

From the pleasure which we have received from the perusal of this excellent Charge, we trust that it will not be the last which will come before us, from the worthy Archdeacon, either in his present, or in a more exalted capacity.

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ART. VIII. A Sermon preached in the Church of Aylesbury, at the Visitation of the Right Rev. George, Lord Bishop of Lincoln. By the Rev. C. J. Blomfield, Rector of Dunton, Bucks; and late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Published by Desire of his Lordship and the Clergy. 4to. 31 pp. Mawman. 1815.

IT seldom falls to our lot to record in the same review the suc cessful labours of the same author in two branches of literature so apparently distinct from each other. We record them, however, with the greater pleasure, as they shew in the strongest point of view how close a connexion exists between theological and secular learning, how they mutually confirm and strengthen each other; all human knowledge preparing and enlarging the faculties for the reception of things divine, and they in their turn enlightening and adorning the bulwarks which form their support. On the union of the scholar and the divine, Christianity rests her surest hopes and her ablest defence.

The subject which Mr. Blomfield has chosen for his discourse, is the dignity and the responsibleness of the Pastoral Office.

That the ministry is a sacred trust, will be allowed by all, even by the wildest enthusiast and fanatic; now this very trust implies the notion of its being entrusted, hence Mr. B. very ingeniously and justly argues.

"Whoever is accountable to God for the fulfilment of a trust, must in the first instance have had it committed by Him to his hands; those, who have, as the Apostle says, to give account of the souls for which they watch, must first have been appointed to watch over them by Him to whom they are accountable. It is the same in civil affairs. No man is responsible for the discharge of an office, to which he has not been regularly constituted and ordained: he is, indeed, punishable for the illegal usurpation of authority, but not for the ill discharge of the duties of his franchise. In like man

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ner, no self-elected minister of God's word can, i in strictness of speech, be termed accountable for the souls of those whom he directs; for that responsibility is evidently nugatory, which any man may assume or lay down at pleasure. And where this person or that, as vanity or enthusiasm may prompt him, exchanges the workshop or the plough for the pulpit of the conventicle, which of them is to be considered as the shepherd who may be called upon to answer for the flock? or how is it possible for the flock, who thus heap up to themselves teachers,' to know,' as the Apostle says, 'them which labour among them and are over them in the Lord?” P. 9.

Mr. B. proceeds to shew that the Divine institution of the priesthood, and its legal collation upon us, can alone make under it, spiritually speaking, an accountable office.

"From which truth arise two important considerations. We ought not, on the one hand, to be suspected of selfishness, in endea vouring to establish this point: because, if we succeed in doing so, we place ourselves in a predicament of great labour, difficulty, and danger of labour, from the multiplicity and magnitude of those duties, which an office of this nature must impose upon us; of difliculty, in qualifying ourselves to perform them in an edifying and effectual manner; and of danger, in proportion to the difficulty. On the other hand, it is not to be wondered at, if we lift up our voice against the intrusion of those, who call themselves ministers, being such neither according to divine institution, nor by legal collation; because, even were we to allow that the responsibleness of this office is not necessarily dependent upon regular ordination to it, yet the extreme danger, which must result from misinterpreting important texts of scripture of simple and unlearned people, places in a strong point of view the temerity of those men, who, without any previous qualification, undertake the exposition of those sacred mysteries, which even we, who have been brought up in the schools of the prophets,' venture upon with diffidence and fear. For although there can be no doubt, but that the Scriptures are a book, intended for the comfort and instruction of all Christian people without distinction, and that to debar them from the perusal of it, is to prevent their access to the well-spring of life; although the main doctrines of the Gospel be laid down in so plain and perspicuous a manner, that to understand them requires no other qualifications than a sound head and a sincere heart; yet it is no less certain, that many parts of the sacred volume, which have a peculiar reference to the circumstances of time and place under which they were written, are for that reason necessarily obscure and ambiguous to the unlearned reader, and, of consequence, liable to be perverted to a mischievous sense. Of many passages in the Apostolical Epis tles, in particular, no man can reasonably pretend to develop the exact drift and application, who has not previously qualified himself for the task, by obtaining an accurate knowledge of the

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language in which the originals were written, of the particular objects which the writers had in view, of the circumstances and opi nions of those whom they addressed. The methods of acquiring this knowledge it would be presumptuous and useless for me to specify; but an endeavour to acquire it is evidently a most essential part of his duty, who undertakes to be an expositor of scripture; and it is one, which demands no trifling expenditure of time and mind: for there is no compendious road in divinity: no extraordinary way nor short cut to knowledge is now to be trusted: we have no reason to suppose that men in these days grow wise by special inspiration, nor by any other method than that of treading, with the assistance of God's grace, in the beaten paths of reading and meditation." P. 12.

The following short character of enthusiasm is so justly drawn, that we cannot but present it to the consideration of our readers.

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"Enthusiasm, without learning and judgment, is a fire which burns but to delude. The word of God is indeed quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword;' but it is a weapon, which, being wielded by unskilful hands, may be converted, from a part of the armour of righteousness, into an implement of destruction. For this we have the authority of St. Peter himself: and if, even in his time, many things in the writings of St. Paul were hard to be understood, have we not good reason to wonder, that the darkest parts of those very writings should in these days be the particular portions of scripture, which the self-elected and unlearned divine expounds with so much ease and satisfaction to himself, and so much to the bewildering of his hearers?" P. 15.

The whole of this admirable sermon is highly deserving the attention of every Christian minister. The language is earnest but simple, overloaded with no artificial rhetoric, obscured by no abstruse speculation. It is the language of a heart seriously and zealously devoted to the sacred cause in which it is engaged. In his notes, we view the union of the scholar and the divine; many of the points there discussed are exceedingly curious, and the citations of various kinds, highly worthy of our attention. Such is the following.

"P, 9. Vanity or enthusiasm.-The post of honour is due to vanity, as having been more instrumental than enthusiasm in setting up false teachers. Hæc sunt enim, says Cyprian, initia Hæreticorum, et ortus Schismaticorum male cogitantium, ut sibi placeant, et præpositos suos (nyovμérovę) superbo tumore contemnant. Sic de Ecclesia receditur; sic altare profanum foris collocatur; sic contra pacem Christi et ordinationem atque unitatem Dei rebellatur. How well is the tub of the field preacher described by the words, Altare pro

* 2 Peter iii. 16,

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fanum foris collocatur! I will not determine which of these two motives is most active in the itinerant evangelist of the present day; but to the few of them who can read it, I recommend the following passage from Plato, as descriptive of their own circumforaneous doctrine, and the discriminating faculties of their hearers. Οὕτω δὴ καὶ εἴ τα μαθήματα περιάγοντες κατὰ τὰς πόλεις, καὶ πωλοῦντες, καὶ καπηλεύοντας (compare 2 Cor. ii. 17.) τῷ ἀεὶ ἐπιθυμοῦντι, ἐπαινοῦσι μὲν πάντα πωλοῦσι, τάχα δ ̓ ἂν τίνες, ὦ ἄριστε, καὶ τούτων ἀγνοοῖεν ὧν πωλοῦσι ὅ τι χρηστὸν ἢ ποιητὸν πρὸς τὴν ψυχήν· ὡς δ ̓ αὕτως καὶ οἱ ὠνούμενοι παρ' αὐτῶν, ἐὰν μή τις τύχῃ περὶ τὴν ψυχὴν ἰατρικὸς ὤν. Protagor. T. I. p. 313. D. P. 25.

The citation, which Mr. Blomfield has brought from Bishop Wren at the conclusion of the following note, is so curious in itself, and so wonderfully applicable to the present times, that we cannot forbear presenting it to our readers.

"P. 15. Hard to be understood.—dvovóntá tiva. It is thought by many of the most learned divines, that St. Peter here refers to St. Paul's mode of speaking on the subject of Justification. And some of the ancient Fathers, Augustine amongst the rest, thought that the Epistles of James and Jude, the first of Jöhn, and the second of Peter, were written, partly with a view to refute the errors of the Solifidians. See Bishop Bull's Examen. Censuræ, p. 531, where is quoted from Irenæus a passage relative to the Valentinians, admirably descriptive of the modern enthusiast; auroùs de un dia πράξεως, ἀλλὰ διὰ τὸ φύσει εἶναι πνευματικούς, πάντη καὶ πάντως σωθήσεσθαι Joypari Covo. (See the Bishop of Lincoln's Refutation of Calvinism, p. 512.) I cannot refuse myself the pleasure of transcribing a passage, which seems to have been almost as prospectively as historically true. It is from a paper of Bishop Wren's, in the Sancroft Collection, published by Mr. Gutch in his Collectanea Curiosa, vol. I. p. 930. After the conference at Hampton Court, in which the Puritan Faction lost all hopes of gaining the King, they returned to the old art of perverting the people; using an extraordinary diligence by Lectures, Conventicles, Libels, &c. to push forward their design; they erected schools in every corner, and procured a college or two to be founded (reserved?) in a manner solely for themselves. But above all things they laboured to gain the possession of the Pulpits, having, it must be confessed, among them many of good popular Rhetorick, or, which served instead of it, Vehemency. Hence the so many Lectures, Afternoon Sermons, Repetitions, buying in of Impropriations, and other arts of the same stamp. You should have heard these Demagogues magnifying their own preaching, applying to it whatsoever is spoken in Scripture of the Apostles preaching, when it was necessary for converting the Pagan world; and withal reproaching all men who had not so strong lungs as themselves. So that, within a while, Preaching had almost juustled out of the Church all other parts of public divine worship; the peo

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ple relishing nothing besides a Sermon, as being withal the cheapest way of serving God.'” P. 27.

If a picture of the progress of fanaticism in the present times were to have been drawn, its features could not have been represented in so powerful and so just a view. The dreadful consequences which resulted to this Church and nation from such beginnings, now stand recorded upon the page of history; and shall we be thought unnecessary alarinists, when we descry the same dangers arising in the same manner, from the same causes, and in the same shape: but aided by an engine, far more powerful than any that existed in those days to hurry them on to a rapid and a fatal maturity. Is there not now a fund for buying up impropriatious, and an act framed with scarcely any other view than to lessen the value of small livings, and thus to further its designs? Are there not colleges now set apart in both our Universities for the reception and the maintenance of embryo fanatics? Is not "the preaching of the Gospel," as it is termed, limited to particular chapels, and confined to a particular party or sect? Are not the great mass of the Clergy, however zealous, however Christian in their life and doctrine, denounced by these self-created saints, as little better than unenlighted heathens? These are matters of fact, not phantoms of the imagination; as such let them be warnings, to this Church and nation.

At the conclusion of the notes, Mr. B. has strongly insisted upon the minister's duty of catechizing the children of his parish; a custom far more useful, than what is generally resorted to, a second Sermon.

"I allude more particularly to that most necessary branch of religious education, which falls within the province of those ministers, who, having the care of souls, leave a very important part of their duty unperformed, if they neglect to catechize, where it is practicable, the children of the lower orders. Those, who think that preaching is the chief duty of their office, as guides and teachers, can have but little knowledge of human nature. The eloquence of the pulpit will no more instil the principles of religion into a mind, which has not been imbued with them in early youth, than kindly showers will render prolific the field, in which no seed has been sown." P. 29.

We cannot conclude this article, without returning our thanks to Mr. Blomfield for this admirable discourse, which fully proves that his mind has been no less directed to the duties of his high calling as a minister of the gospel, than to the elegancies and beauties of heathen literature as a deep and accomplished cholar.

ART.

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