of the blessed are disturbed by an unwonted discord; and the fiery soul of Whitfield blazes with intense desire to resume his wanderings through the earth, and to lift up his voice against the new apostasy.

It was with no unmanly dread of the probe, but from want of skill or leisure to employ it, that the self-scrutiny of Whitfield seldom or never penetrated much below the surface. Preach he must; and when no audience could be brought together, he seized a pen and exhorted himself. The uppermost feeling, be it what it may, is put down in his journal honestly, vigorously and devoutly. Satan is menaced and upbraided. Intimations from Heaven are recorded without one painful doubt of their origin. He prays and exults, anticipates the future with delight, looks back to the past with thankfulness, blames himself simply because he thinks himself to blame, despairs of nothing, fears nothing, and has not a moment's ill-will to any human being.

better shot than I had described myself. I had an impulse, too, to let it be thought I had only three shots when I really had had four. It was slight, to be sure, but I felt it."-"I have read my journal, though I can hardly identify myself with the person it describes. It seems like leaving some one under one's guardianship who was an intolerable fool, and exposed himself to my contempt every moment for the most ridiculous and trifling motives; and while I was thinking all this, I went into L.'s room to seek a pair of shoes, and on hearing him coming got away as silently as possible. Why did I do this? Did I think I was doing what L. did not like, or was it the relic of a sneaking habit? I will ask myself these questions again."-"I have a sort of vanity which aims at my own good opinion, and I look for any thing to prove to myself that I am more anxious to mind myself than other people. I was very hungry, but because I thought the charge unreasonable, I tried to shirk the Mr. Froude conducts his written soliloquies waiter; sneaking!"—“ Yesterday I was much in a different spirit. His introverted gaze put out by an old fellow chewing tobacco analyzes with elaborate minuteness the va- and spitting across me; also bad thoughts of rious motives at the confluence of which his various kinds kept presenting themselves to my active powers receive their impulse, and, with mind when it was vacant."-"I talked sillily perverted sagacity, pursues the self-examina- to-day as I used to do last term, but took no tion, until, bewildered in the dark labyrinth of pleasure in it, so I am not ashamed. Although his own nature, he escapes to the cheerful I don't recollect any harm of myself, yet I light of day by locking up his journal. "A don't feel that I have made a clean breast of friend" (whose real name is as distinctly inti-it."-"I forgot to mention that I had been inated under its initial letter as if the patro-looking round my rooms and thinking that nymic were written at length) "advises burning they looked comfortable and nice, and that I confessions. I cannot make up my mind to said in my heart, Ah, ha! I am warm."—"It that," replies the penitent, "but I think I can always suggests itself to me that a wise thought see many points in which it will be likely to is wasted when it is kept to myself, against do me good to be cut off for some time from which, as it is my most bothering temptation, these records." On such a subject the author I will set down some arguments to be called of "The Christian Year" was entitled to more to mind in time of trouble."-" Now I am deference. The great ornament of the Col- proud of this, and think that the knowledge it lege de Propaganda at Oxford, he also had shows of myself implies a greatness of mind."→ used the mental microscope to excess. Admo-"These records are no guide to me to show nishing men to approach their Creator not as isolated beings, but as members of the Universal Church, and teaching the inmates of her hallowed courts to worship in strains so pure, so reverent, and so meek, as to answer not unworthily to the voice of hope and reconciliation in which she is addressed by her Divine Head, yet had this "sweet singer" so brooded over the evanescent processes of his own spiritual nature, as not seldom to throw round his meaning a haze which rendered it imperceptible to his readers and probably to himself. With what sound judgment he counselled Mr. Froude to burn his books may be judged from the following entries in them:

"I have been talking a great deal to B. about religion to-day. He seems to take such straightforward practical views of it that, when I am talking to him, I wonder what I have been bothering myself with all the summer, and almost doubt how far it is right to allow myself to indulge in speculations on a subject where all that is necessary is so plain and obvious."-" Yesterday when I went out shooting, I fancied I did not care whether I hit or not, but when it came to the point I found myself anxious, and, after having killed, was not unwilling to let myself be considered a

the state of my mind afterwards; they are so far from being exercises of humility, that they lessen the shame of what I record just as professions and good-will to other people reconcile us to our neglect of them."

The precept "know thyself," came down from heaven; but such self-knowledge as this has no heavenward tendency. It is no part of the economy of our nature, or of the will of our Maker, that we should so cunningly unravel the subtle filaments of which our motives are composed. If a man should subject to such a scrutiny the feelings of others to himself, he would soon lose his faith in human virtue and affection; and the mind which should thus put to the question its own workings in the domestic or social relations of life would ere long become the victim of a still more fatal skepticism. Why dream that this reflex operation, which, if directed towards those feelings of which our fellow-creatures are the object, would infallibly eject from the heart all love and all respect for man, should strengthen either the love or the fear of God? A well-tutored conscience aims at breadth rather than minuteness of survey; and tasks itself much more to ascertain general results than to find out the solution of riddles. So

long as religious men must reveal their "expe- | unbroken. We cannot know about any seemriences," and self-defamation revels in its pre-ingly indifferent practice of the Church of sent impunity, there is no help for it, but in Rome that is not a development of the apostowithholding the applause to which even lowli- lic 2005, and it is to no purpose to say that we ness itself aspires for the candour with which can find no proof of it in the writings of the it is combined, and the acuteness by which it first six centuries-they must find a disproof is embellished. if they would do any thing."-"I think people are injudicious who talk against the Roman Catholics for worshipping saints and honouring the Virgin and images, &c. These things may, perhaps, be idolatrous; I cannot make up my mind about it."-"P. called us the Papal Protestant Church, in which he proved a double ignorance, as we are Catholics without the popery, and Church of England men without the protestantism."-"The more I think over that view of yours about regarding our present communion service, &c., as a judgment on the Church, and taking it as the crumbs from the apostle's table, the more I am struck with its fitness to be dwelt upon as tending to check the intrusion of irreverent thoughts, without in any way interfering with one's just indignation."-"Your trumpery principle about Scripture being the sole rule of faith in fundamentals (I nauseate the word) is but a mutilated edition, without the breadth and axiomatic character, of the original."— Really I hate the Reformation and the reformers more and more, and have almost made up my mind that the rationalist spirit they set afloat is the sudonpors of the Revelation." Why do you praise Ridley? Do you know sufficient good about him to counterbalance the fact, that he was the associate of Cranmer, Peter Martyr, and Bucer?" —“ I wish you could get to know something of S. and W. (Southey and Wordsworth) and unprotestantize and un-Miltonize them."-"How is it we are so much in advance of our generation ?"

It is not by these nice self-observers that the creeds of hoar antiquity, and the habits of centuries are to be shaken; nor is such high emprize reserved for ascetics who can pause to enumerate the slices of bread and butter from which they have abstained. When Whitfield would mortify his body, he set about it like a man. The paroxysm was short, indeed, but terrible. While it lasted his diseased imagination brought soul and body into deadly conflict, the fierce spirit spurning, trampling, and well-nigh destroying the peccant carcass. Not so the fastidious and refined "witness to the views" of the restorers of the Catholic Church. The strife between his spiritual and animal nature is recorded in his journal in such terms as these:-"Looked with greediness to see if there was goose on the table for dinner.""Meant to have kept a fast, and did abstain from dinner, but at tea ate buttered toast." "Tasted nothing to-day till tea-time, and then only one cup and dry bread."—"I have kept my fast strictly, having taken nothing till near nine this evening, and then only a cup of tea and a little bread without butter, but it has not been as easy as it was last."-"I made rather a more hearty tea than usual, quite giving up the notion of a fast in W.'s rooms, and by this weakness have occasioned another slip."

Whatever may be thought of the propriety of disclosing such passages as these, they will provoke a contemptuous smile from no one who knows much of his own heart. But they may relieve the anxiety of the alarmists. Luther and Zuingle, Cranmer, and Latimer, may still rest in their honoured graves. "Take courage, brother Ridley, we shall light up such a flame in England as shall not soon be put out," is a prophecy which will not be defeated by the successors of those who heard it, so long as their confessors shall be vacant to record, and their doctors to publish, contrite reminiscences of a desire for roasted goose, and of an undue indulgence in buttered toast.

Yet the will to subvert the doctrines and discipline of the Reformation is not wanting, and is not concealed. Mr. Froude himself, were he still living, might, indeed, object to be judged by his careless and familiar letters. No such objection can, however, be made by the eminent persons who have deliberately given them to the world on account of "the truth and extreme importance of the views to which the whole is meant to be subservient," and in which they record their "own general concurrence." Of these weighty truths take the following examples:

"You will be shocked at my avowal that I am every day becoming a less and less loyal son of the Reformation. It appears to me plain, that in all matters which seem to us indifferent, or even doubtful, we should conform our practices to those of the Church, which has preserved its traditionary practices

Spirit of George Whitfield! how would thy voice, rolled from the secret place of thunders," have overwhelmed these puny protests against the truths which it proclaimed from the rising to the setting sun! In what does the modern creed of Oxford differ from the ancient faith of Rome? Hurried along by the abhorred current of advancing knowledge and social improvement, they have indeed renounced papal dominion, and denied papal infallibility, and rejected the grosser superstitions which Rome herself at once despises and promotes. But a prostrate submission to human authority (though veiled under words of vague and mysterious import)-the repose of the wearied or indolent mind on external observances-an escape from the arduous exercise of man's highest faculties in the worship of his Maker-the usurped dominion of the imaginative and sensitive over the intellectual powers-these are the common characteristics of both systems.

The Reformation restored to the Christian world its only authentic canon, and its one Supreme Head. It proclaimed the Scriptures as the rule of life; and the Divine Redeemer as the supreme and central object to whom every eye must turn, and on whom every hope must rest. It cast down not only the idols erected for the adoration of the vulgar, but the

There is nothing to dread from such hostility and such enemies. A fine lady visits the United States, and. in loathing against the tobacconized republic, becomes an absolutist. A "double first-class" theologian overhears the Evangelical psalmody, and straightway turns Catholic. But Congress will not dissolve at the bidding of the fair; nor will Exeter hall be closed to propitiate the fastidious. The martyrs of disgust and the heroes of revolutions are composed of opposite materials, and are cast in very different moulds. Nothing truly great or formidable was ever yet accomplished, in thought or action, by men whose love for truth was not strong enough to triumph over their dislike of the offensive objects with which it may be associated.

idolatrous abstractions to which the worship of more cultivated minds was rendered. Penetrating the design, and seizing the spirit of the gospels, the reformers inculcated the faith in which the sentient and the spiritual in man's compound nature had each its appropriate office; the one directed to the Redeemer in his palpable form, the other to the Divine Paraclete in his hidden agency; while, united with these, they exhibited to a sinful but penitent race the parental character of the Omnipresent Deity. Such is not the teaching of the restored theology. The most eminent of its professors have thrown open the doors of Mr. Froude's oratory, and have invited all passers-by to notice in his prayers and meditations "the absence of any distinct mention of our Lord and Saviour." They are exhorted Mr. Froude was the victim of these associanot to doubt that there was a real though silent tions. Nothing escapes his abhorrence which allusion to Christ" under the titles in which has been regarded with favour by his political the Supreme Being is addressed; and are told or religious antagonists. The Bill for the that this circumstance may be a comfort to Abolition of Slavery was recommended to those who cannot bring themseives to assume Parliament by an administration more than the tone of many popular writers of this day, suspected of liberalism. The "Witness to who yet are discouraged by the peremptori- Catholic Views," "in whose sentiments as a ness with which it is exacted of them. The whole," his editors concur, visits the West truth is, that a mind alive to its own real state Indies, and they are not afraid to publish the often shrinks to utter what it most dwells following report of his feelings:-" I have felt upon; and is too full of awe and fear to do it a kind of duty to maintain in my mind an more than silently hope what it most wishes." habitual hostility to the niggers, and to chuckle It would indeed be presumptuous to pass a over the failures of the new system, as if these censure, or to hazard an opinion, on the pri- poor wretches concentrated in themselves all vate devotions of any man; but there is no the whiggery, dissent, cant, and abomination such risk in rejecting the apology which the that have been ranged on their side." Lest publishers of those secret exercises have ad- this should pass for a pleasant extravagance, vanced for Mr. Froude's departure from the the editors enjoin the reader not to "confound habits of his fellow Christians. Feeble, in- the author's view of the negro cause and of deed, and emasculate must be the system, the abstract negro with his feelings towards which, in its delicate distaste for the "popular any he should exactly meet;" and Professor writers of the day," would bury in silence the Tholuck is summoned from Germany to exname in which every tongue and language has plain how the "originators of error" may lawbeen summoned to worship and to rejoice. fully be the objects of a good man's hate, and Well may "awe and fear" become all who how it may innocently overflow upon all their assume and all who invoke it. But an "awe" clients, kindred, and connexions. Mr. Froude's which "shrinks to utter" the name of Him feelings towards the "abstract negro" would who was born at Bethlehem, and yet does not have satisfied the learned professor in his fear to use the name which is ineffable;-a most indignant mood. "I am ashamed," he "fear" which can make mention of the Father, says, “I cannot get over my prejudices against but may not speak of the Brother, of all-is a the niggers."-"Every one I meet seems to feeling which fairly baffles comprehension. me like an incarnation of the whole AntiThere is a much more simple, though a less Slavery Society, and Fowell Buxton at their imposing theory. Mr. Froude permitted him- head."-"The thing that strikes me as most self, and was encouraged by his correspond-remarkable in the cut of these niggers is ents, to indulge in the language of antipathy and scorn towards a large body of his fellow Christians. It tinges his letters, his journals, and is not without its influence even on his devotions. Those despised men too often celebrated the events of their Redeemer's life, and the benefits of his passion, in language of offensive familiarity, and invoked him with fond and feeble epithets. Therefore, a good Oxford Catholic must envelope in mystic terms all allusion to Him round whom as its centre the whole Christian system revolves. The line of demarcation between themselves and these coarse sentimentalists must be broad and deep, even though it should exclude those by whom it is run, from all the peculiar and distinctive ground on which the standard of the Protestant churches has been erected.

excessive immodesty, a forward, stupid familiarity intended for civility, which prejudices me against them worse even than Buxton's cant did. It is getting to be the fashion with every body, even the planters, to praise the emancipation and Mr. Stanley." Mr. Froude, or rather his editors, appear to have fallen into the error of supposing that his profession gave him not merely the right to admonish, but the privilege to scold. Lord Stanley and Mr. Buxton have, however, the consolation of being railed at in good company. Hampden is "hated" with much zeal, though, it is admitted, with imperfect knowledge. Louis Philippe, and his associates of the Three Days, receive the following humane benediction—“I sincerely hope the march of mind in France may yet prove a bloody one." "The election of the D

for

the editors protest against our supposing that this is a playful exercise in the art of exaggeration. It should be observed," they say, "as in other parts of this volume, that the author used these words on principle, not as abuse, but as expressing matters of fact, as a way of bringing before his own mind things as they are."

wretched B. for —, and that base fellow, H. | book than the preceding quotations might ap in spite of the exposure," &c. Again, pear to promise. If given as specimens of his power, they would do gross injustice to a good and able man, a ripe scholar, and a devout Christian. But as illustrations of the temper and opinions of those who now sit in Wycliffe's seat, they are neither unfair nor unimportant. And they may also convince all whom it concerns, that hitherto, at least, Oxford has not given birth to a new race of giants, by whom the evangelical founders and missionaries of the Church of England will be expelled from their ancient dominion, or the Protestant world excluded from the light of day and the free breath of heaven.

Milton, however, is the especial object of Mr. Froude's virtuous abhorrence. He is "a detestable author." Mr. Froude rejoices to learn something of the puritans, because, as he says, "It gives me a better right to hate Milton, and accounts for many of the things which most disgusted me in his (not in my sense of the word) poetry."."—"A lady told me yesterday that you wrote the article of Sacred Poetry, &c. I thought it did not come up to what I thought your standard of aversion to Milton." Mr. Froude and his editors must be delivered over to the secular arm under the writ De Heretico Comburando for their wilful obstinacy in rejecting the infallible sentence of the fathers and ecumenical counsels of the church poetical, on this article of faith. There is no room for mercy. They did not belong to the audience, meet but few, to whom the immortal addressed himself to that little company to which alone it is reserved to estimate the powers of such a mind, and reverently to notice its defects. They were of that multitude who have to make their choice between repeating the established creed and holding their peace. Why are free-thinkers in literature to be endured more than in religion? The guilt of liberalism has clearly been contracted by this rash judgment; and Professor Tholuck being the witness, it exposes the criminals and the whole society of Oriel, nay, the entire University itself, to the diffusive indignation of all who cling to the Catholic faith in poetry.

There are much better things in Mr. Froude's

Whenever the time shall be ripe for writing the ecclesiastical history of the last and the present age, a curious chapter may be devoted to the rise and progress of the Evangelical body in England from the days of Whitfield to our own. It will convey many important lessons. It will manifest the irresistible power of the doctrines of the Reformation when proclaimed with honesty and zeal, even though its teachers be unskilled in those studies which are essential to a complete and comprehensive theology. It will show that infirmities which, not without some reason, offend the more cultivated, and disgust the more fastidious members of the Catholic Church amongst us, are but as the small dust in the balance, when weighed against the mighty energy of those cardinal truths in the defence of which Wycliffe and Luther, Knox and Calvin, Ridley and Latimer, lived and laboured, and died. It may also prove that recondite learning, deep piety and the purest virtue may be all combined in bosoms which are yet contracted by narrow and unsuspected prejudices. But, above all, it may teach mutual charity; admonishing men to listen with kindness and selfdistrust even to each other's extravagant claims to an exclusive knowledge of the Divine will, and the exclusive possession of the Divine favour.

D'AUBIGNÉ'S HISTORY OF THE GREAT
REFORMATION.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1839.]

ENGLISH literature is singularly defective in To fill this void in our libraries, is an enter whatever relates to the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, and to the lives of the great men by whom it was accomplished. A native of this island who would know any thing to the purpose, of Reuchlin or Hutten, or Luther or Melancthon, of Zuingle, Bucer or Ecolampadius, of Calvin or Farel, must betake himself to other languages than his own.

*History of the Great Reformation of the Sirteenth Century, in Germany, Switzerland, &c. By J. H. MERLE D'AUBIGNE, President of the Theological School of

Geneva. 8vo. Vol. I. London, 1838.

prise which might stimulate the zeal, and establish the reputation of the ripest student of Ecclesiastical History amongst us. In no other field could he discover more ample resources for narratives of dramatic interest; for the delineation of characters contrasted in every thing except their common design; for exploring the influence of philosophy, arts, and manners, on the fortunes of mankind; and for reverently tracing the footsteps of Divine Providence, moving among the ways and works of men, imparting dignity to events otherwise