his livelihood, is required to write with brevity and perspicuity on the following subjects :-Redemption by Jesus Christ, Original Sin, Free Will, Justification, Justification in reference to its causes, Justification in reference to the time when it takes place, Everlasting Salvation, Predestination, Regeneration on the New Birth, Renovation, and the Holy Trinity. As a specimen of these questions, the answer to which is required to be so brief and clear, we shall insert the following quotation :

"Section II.-Of Justification in reference to its cause.

"I. Does not the eleventh Article declare that we are justified by Faith only?

"2. Does not the expression 'Faith only' derive additional strength from the negative expression in the same Article and not for our own works?' "3. Does not therefore the eleventh Article exclude good works from all share in the office of Justifying? Or can we so construe the term 'Faith' in that Article as to make it include good works?

"4. Do not the twelfth and thirteenth Articles further exclude them, the one by asserting that good works follow after Justification, the other by maintaining that they cannot precede it?

“5. Can_that_which never precedes an effect be reckoned among the causes of that effect?

"6. Can we then, consistently with our Articles, reckon the performance of good works among the causes of Justification, whatever qualifying epithet be used with the term cause?"

We entirely deny that the Calvinistical Clergy are bad members of their profession. We maintain that as many instances of good, serious, and pious men-of persons zealously interesting themselves in the temporal and spiritual welfare of their parishioners, are to be found among them, as among the clergy who put an opposite interpretation on the Articles. The Articles of Religion are older than Arminianism, eo nomine. The early reformers leant to Calvinism; and would, to a man, have answered the Bishop's questions in a way which would have induced him to refuse them ordination and curacies; and those who drew up the Thirty-nine Articles, if they had not prudently avoided all precise interpretation of their Creed on free will, necessity, absolute decrees, original sin, reprobation and election, would have in all probability given an interpretation of them like that which the bishop considers as a disqualification for Holy Orders. Laud's Lambeth Articles were illegal, mischievous and are generally condemned. The Irish clergy in 1641, drew up one hundred and four articles as the creed of their Church; and these are Calvinistic and not Arminian. They were approved and signed by Usher, and never abjured by him; though dropped as a test or qualification. Usher was promoted (even in the days of Arminianism) to bishoprics and archbishoprics-so little did a Calvinistic interpretation of the Articles in a man's own breast, or even an avowal of Calvinism beyond what was required by the Articles, operate even then as a qualification for the cure of souls, or any other office in the Church. Throughout Charles II. and William III.'s time, the best

men and greatest names of the Church not only allowed latitude in interpreting the Articles, but thought it would be wise to diminish their number, and render them more lax than they are; and be it observed, that these latitudinarians leant to Arminianism rather than to high Calvinism, and thought, consequently, that the Articles, if objectionable at all, were exposed to the censure of being too Calvinistic," rather than too Arminian. How preposterous, therefore, to twist them, and the subscription to them required by law, by the machinery of a long string of explanatory questions, into a barrier against Calvinists, and to give the Arminians a monopoly in the

Church!

Archbishop Wake, in 1716, after consulting all the Bishops then attending Parliament, thought it incumbent on him "to employ the authority which the ecclesiastical laws then in force, and the custom and laws of the reaim vested in him," in taking care that " no unworthy person might hereafter be admitted into the sacred Ministry of the Church," and he drew up twelve recommendations to the Bishops of England, in which he earnestly exhorts them not to ordain persons of bad conduct or character, or incompetent learning; but he does not require from the candidates for Holy Orders or preferment any explanation whatever of the Articles which they had signed.

The Correspondence of the same eminent Prelate with Professor Turretin in 1718, and with Mr. Le Clerc and the Pastors and Professors of Geneva in 1719, printed in London, 1782, recommends union among Protestants, and the omission of controverted points in Confessions of Faith, as a means of obtaining that union; and a constant reference to the practice of the Church of England is made, in elucidation of the charity and wisdom of such policy. Speaking of men who act upon a contrary principle, he says, O quantum potuit insana qıλavrıa!

These passages, we think, are conclusive evidence of the practice of the Church till 1719. For Wake was not only at the time Archbishop of Canterbury, but both in his circular recommendations to the Bishops of England, and in his correspondence with foreign Churches, was acting in the capacity of metropolitan of the Anglican Church. He, a man of prudence and learning, publicly boasts to Protestant Europe, that his Church does not exact, and that he de facto has never avowed, and never will, his opinions on those very points upon which Bishop Marsh obliges every poor curate to be explicit, upon pain of expulsion from the Church.

It is clear, then, the practice was to extract subscription and nothing else, as the test of orthodoxy-to that Wake is an evidence. As far as he is authority on a point of opinion, it is his conviction that this practice was wholesome, wise, and intended to preserve peace in the Church; that it would be wrong at least, if not illegal, to do otherwise: and that the observance of this forbearance is the only method of preventing schism. The Bishop of Peterborough, however, is of a different opinion; he is so thoroughly convinced of the pernicious effects of Calvinistic doctrines that he does what no other Bishop does, or ever did do, for their exclusion. This may be either wise or

injudicious, but it is at least zealous and bold; it is to encounter rebuke and opposition from a sense of duty. It is impossible to deny this merit to his Lordship. And we have no doubt, that, in pursuance of the same theological gallantry, he is preparing a set of interrogatories for those clergymen who are presented to benefices in his diocese. The patron will have his action of Quare impedit, it is true; and the judge and jury will decide whether the Bishop has the right of interrogation at all; and whether Calvinistical answers to his interrogatories disqualify any man from holding preferment in the Church of England. If either of these points are given against the Bishop of Peterborough, he is in honour and conscience bound to give up his examination of curates. If Calvinistic ministers are, in the estimation of the Bishops, so dangerous as curates, they are of course much more dangerous as rectors and vicars. He has as much right to examine one as the other. Why then does he pass over the greater danger, and guard against the less? Why does he not show his zeal when he would run some risk, and where the excluded person (if excluded unjustly) could appeal to the laws of his country? If his conduct be just and right, has he anything to fear from that appeal? What should we say of a police officer who acted in all cases of petty larceny, where no opposition was made, and let off all persons guilty of felony who threatened to knock him down? If the Bishop value his own character, he is bound to do less-or to do more. God send his choice may be right! The law, as it stands at present, certainly affords very unequal protection to rector and to curate; but if the Bishop will not act so as to improve the law, the law must be so changed as to improve the Bishop; an action of Quare impedit must be given to the curate also-and then the fury of interrogation will be calmed.

We are aware that the Bishop of Peterborough, in his speech, disclaims the object of excluding the Calvinists by this system of interrogation. We shall take no other notice of his disavowal than expressing our sincere regret that he ever made it; but the question is not at all altered by the intention of the interrogator. Whether he aim at the Calvinists only, or includes them with other heterodox respondents-the fact is, they are included in the proscription, and excluded from the Church, the practical effect of the practice being that men are driven out of the Church who have as much right to exercise the duties of clergymen as the Bishop himself. If heterodox opinions are the great objects of the Bishop's apprehensions, he has his Ecclesiastical Courts, where regular process may bring the offender to punishment, and from whence there is an appeal to higher courts. This would be the fair thing to do. The Curate and the Bishop would be brought into the light of day, and subjected to the wholesome restraint of public opinion.

His Lordship boasts that he has excluded only two curates. So the Emperor of Hayti boasted that he had only cut off two persons' heads for disagreeable behaviour at his table. In spite of the paucity of the visitors executed, the example operated as a considerable

impediment to conversation; and the intensity of the punishment was found to be a full compensation for its rarity. How many persons have been deprived of curacies which they might have enjoyed, but for the tenour of these interrogatories? How many respectable clergymen have been deprived of the assistance of curates connected with them by blood, friendship, or doctrine, and compelled to choose persons for no other qualification than that they could pass through the eye of the Bishop's needle? Violent measures are not to be judged of merely by the number of times they have been resorted to, but by the terror, misery, and restraint which the severity is likely to have produced.

We never met with any style so entirely clear of all redundant and vicious ornament as that which the ecclesiastical Lord of Peterborough has adopted towards his clergy. It, in fact, may be all reduced to these few words-" Reverend Sir, I shall do what I please. Peterborough." Even in the House of Lords, he speaks what we must call very plain language. Among other things, he says that the allegations of the petitions are false. Now, as every Bishop is, besides his other qualities, a gentleman, and as the word false is used only by laymen who mean to hazard their lives by the expression; and as it cannot be supposed that foul language is ever used because it can be used with personal impunity, his Lordship must therefore be intended to mean not false but mistaken-not a wilful deviation from truth, but an accidental and unintended departure from it.

His lordship talks of the drudgery of wading through ten pages of answers to his eighty-seven questions. Who has occasioned this drudgery, but the person who means to be so much more active, useful, and important, than all other Bishops, by proposing questions which nobody has thought to be necessary but himself? But to be intolerably strict and harsh to a poor curate, who is trying to earn a morsel of hard bread, and then to complain of the drudgery of reading his answers, is much like knocking a man down with a bludgeon, and then abusing him for splashing you with his blood, and pestering you with his groans. It is quite monstrous, that a man who inflicts eightyseven new questions in Theology upon his fellow-creatures should talk of the drudgery of reading their answers.

A Curate-there is something which excites compassion in the very name of a Curate!!! How any man of Purple, Palaces, and Preferment, can let himself loose against this poor working man of God, we are of a loss to conceive-a learned man in a hovel, with sermons and saucepans, lexicons and bacon, Hebrew books and ragged children—good and patient—a comforter and a preacher-the first and purest pauper of the hamlet, and yet showing, that, in the midst of his worldly misery, he has the heart of a gentleman, and the spirit of a Christian, and the kindness of a pastor; and this man, though he has exercised the duties of a clergyman for twenty years— though he has most ample testimonies of conduct from clergymen as respectable as any Bishop-though an Archbishop add his name to the list of witnesses, is not good enough for Bishop Marsh, but is

pushed out in the street, with his wife and children, and his little furniture, to surrender his honour, his faith, his conscience, and his learning or to starve !

An obvious objection to these innovations is that there can be no end to them. If eighty-three questions are assumed to be necessary by one Bishop, eight hundred may be considered as the minimum of interrogation by another. When once the ancient faith marks of the Church are lost sight of and despised, any misled theologian may launch out on the boundless sea of polemical vexation.

The Bishop of Peterborough is positive that the Arminian interpretation of the Articles is the right interpretation, and that Calvinists should be excluded from it; but the country gentlemen who are to hear these matters debated in the Lower House are to remember that other Bishops have written upon these points before the Bishop of Peterborough, and have arrived at conclusions diametrically opposite. When curates are excluded because their answers are Calvinistical, a careless layman might imagine that this interpretation of the Articles had never been heard of before in the Church-that it was a gross and palpable perversion of their sense, which had been scouted by all writers on Church matters, from the day the Articles were promulgated, to this hour-that such an unheard-of monster as a Calvinistical Curate had never leapt over the pale before, and been detected browsing in the sacred pastures.

The following is the testimony of Bishop Sherlock :

"The Church has left a latitude of sense to prevent schisms and breaches upon every different opinion. It is evident the Church of England has so done in some Articles, which are most liable to the hottest disputes, which yet are penned with that temper as to be willingly subscribed by men of different apprehensions in those matters." "-Sherlock's Defence of Stillingfleet's Unreasonableness of Separation.

Bishop Cleaver, describing the difficulties attending so great an undertaking as the formation of a national creed, observes :—

"These difficulties, however, do not seem to have discouraged the great leaders in this work from forming a design as wise as it was liberal, that of framing a confession, which, in the enumeration and method of its several articles, should meet the approbation and engage the consent of the whole reformed world.

"If upon trial it was found that a comprehension so extensive could not be reduced to practice, still as large a comprehension as could be contrived within the narrower limits of the kingdom, became, for the same reasons which first suggested the idea, at once an object of prudence and duty, in the formation and government of the English Church.""

"After dwelling on the means necessary to accomplish this object, the Bishop proceeds to remark :- Such evidently appears to have been the origin and such the actual complexion of the confession comprised in the Articles of our Church; the true scope and design of which will not, I conceive, be correctly apprehended in any other view than that of one drawn up and adjusted with an intention to comprehend the assent of all, rather than to exclude that of any who concurred in the necessity of a reformation.