noticing the deliverance of the Establishment from that formidable blow aimed at the ecclesiastical regulations,' the motion for a repeal of the Act for observing the 30th of January; proceeds to speak of the bold measure' of the Dissenters in petitioning for a repeal of the Test Act.

The hardships imposed by the law on Protestant Dissenters,' he says, were represented as contrary to the generous principles of the British Constitution, and their cause was ably and eloquently pleaded. It was replied that the penalties were never enforced, as the Dissenters were not called on to subscribe; that the hardship was rather in letter than in fact; that the continuance of a test was necessary; for, if abolished, all the barriers raised by the wisdom of our ancestors in defence of the Church would be destroyed; and religious teachers might promulgate the most obnoxious doctrines without pos sibility of restraint or fear of punishment.'

one.

That a number of things were urged on that occasion against the measure, untrue in point of fact, and inconclusive in point of reasoning, is certain and notorious; although this brief summary of the debate will not be accepted as a very adequate But we suppose, from Mr. Middelton's selecting the reasons here assigned, that they are such as appeared to him the most forcible. The first is a curious argument: the Bill is too bad to act upon; it is a dead letter, being never enforced; therefore its repeal would endanger the Church. The assertion, however, was incorrect. Dissenters had been, and were, long after that period, called on to subscribe; and it was but so recently as 1767, that the decision of the House of Lords rendered them not liable to be compelled to serve corporate offices. The other argument proceeds upon a blunder. The Test Act never was designed to operate as a restraint upon the promulgation of obnoxious doctrines: it can have no such effect. Mr. Middelton must surely be mistaken in representing that so silly a reply was given. Weak enough, the arguments doubtless were, and accordingly, they had no weight in the House of Commons. Notwithstanding these representations,' says our Memorialist, the Bill for relief passed the Lower House, and was carried up to the Lords, where it was re'jected on the second reading by a large majority.' He does not give us the numbers, but he states who were the leading speakers in the debate when it came before the Lords. The Bill was supported by the Duke of Richmond, and Lords Chatham, Shelburne, and Lyttleton: it was opposed by Lords Bruce and Gower, and the Bishops. Mr. Middleton complacently adds:

Such was the determination of the British aristocracy on the ma

terial question of liberty of conscience, after an able discussion of the rights of nonconformists, and at a time when even the sentiments of the government were in their favour............ The condition of dissidents from the national communion may therefore be considered as having undergone the fullest investigation; and acquiescence in the result of that investigation seems to be the part of modesty and candour.'

This is amusing. After the recorded opinion of the ablest and wisest statesmen of this country, that the Dissenters are entitled to the relief they prayed for,-after the decision of the House of Commons in their favour,-after the able discussion and full investigation of their rights had terminated in procuring for them this emphatic acknowledgement of their unquestionable nature,-modesty and candour, we are told, require them to rest satisfied with the decision of a majority in the House of Lords, half made up of dumb and passive proxies, and chiefly determined by the Bishops, who form no part of the British aristocracy, and are never known to dissent from the Minister, but when he wishes to do some act of justice.

From these specimens, our readers will infer that Mr. Middelton is not precisely qualified to be the impartial ecclesiastical historian of the period he has undertaken to review. The causes which led to the decline of religion in this country, and the means of the astonishing revival of the spirit of piety which has since been witnessed, he does not attempt to explain or to illustrate. He confines his review entirely to the state of religion in the Church of England, which the style of his occasional references to the Dissenters leaves us no room to regret. But how the Church of England came into the state in which he describes it to have been lying at the accession of George III., and by whom the cause of truth was upheld, the tenets of the Reformation maintained, and an evangelical ministry perpetuated in this country, before the days of Mr. Romaine, he does not think it worth while to inform his readers. The rise of the Methodists, from which the revival of religion in the Established Church may be dated, is classed by our Author, together with the attacks of infidel writers and the restlessness of 'sectaries,' among the circumstances which were tending more or less to disturb the foundations of the throne, and loosen the stones of the national altar.' That the foundations of the throne were in danger of being disturbed by the rise of Methodism, is a gratuitous calumny. The national altar' is another matter, and the obscurity of the metaphor renders it more difficult to meet the assertion. If Mr. M. means by the national altar, the religion of altars, that was a little shaken by the rise of Methodism. If he means the religion of Christ,

6

that was not in any danger. If he means the Church of England, the tithes were as duly paid after the expulsion of the six young men from Oxford as before; and not the curl of one Episcopal wig was singed by the wild-fire of enthusiasm. What can Mr. Middelton mean, then, by the loosening of the stones of the national altar? The fire had gone out on the altar he speaks of, and the Methodists, without disturbing a single stone of it, quietly built up another on which the fire is burning still.

The following is our Author's account of the state of the Church of England at this period.

The Bishops, in their corporate capacity, were not conspicuous for evangelical purity of sentiment or attachment to the distinguishing tenets of the Reformation, as expressed in the Articles of the religious community over which they were destined to preside. They drank too much into the spirit of the fashionable theology. Occa sionally, indeed, the sound sense and pious convictions of certain individuals of their number, led them to remonstrate with their clergy on the necessity of adopting a more Scriptural strain of preaching than generally prevailed. Occasionally too, they set the example, in their own discourses, of a departure from the dry method of ethical exhortation, and fortified the lesson of obedience by the powerful sanction of Revelation, or enlightened their audience by an exhibition of the holy verities of the Gospel. But the doctrine of justification by faith alone was in general inadequately and imperfectly stated; the corruption of human nature was spoken of in qualified terms; and salvation was too often represented as the possible attainment of mortal exertion, and the legal reward of a religious and virtuous conduct. As if the shades of those heretical and schismatical characters who figured in the disgraceful scenes that followed the decapitation of the first Charles, perpetually haunted their imagination, they viewed what were termed Methodistical tenets" with a sort of instinctive horror; and seemed to lose the power of discriminating between that zeal for the honour of his Saviour, and compassion for perishing sinners, which led the preacher to proclaim with appropriate energy and in familiar terms, the fullness and freeness of the everlasting Gospel, and a covert design to court popularity, and ultimately effect the overthrow of the Church. With most of the dignitaries of the day and their ordinary associates, fervour was denominated cant, watchfulness hypocrisy, and abstraction from worldly society unnecessary strictness. Connected with the first families by birth, alliance, or circumstance, their criticisms on the belles lettres too often usurped the place of Scriptural information; what was elegant in conversation was more esteemed than what was edifying; and among the higher orders of the clergy, the unction of humility which flowed from the silvered temples of a Beveridge down to the skirts of his garment, and the glow of holy zeal which animated the breast of a Reynolds or a Hopkins, seemed to be exchanged for courtly aspirations after prefer

ment and translation, or distinction in the divinity-school of a Lord Lyttleton or a Dr. Johnson.' pp. 10–12.

This is a sufficiently faithful and by no means overcharged representation. Mr. M. proceeds to divide the ministers of the National Church' into four classes, the Secular, the Latitudinarian, the Orthodox, and the Evangelical. The latter are thus characterized :

Scattered up and down, they were opposed to the Secular class, by their devotedness to the duties of their function; to the Latitudinarian, by their jealous adherence to the letter and spirit of Revelation; and to the Orthodox, by their faithfulness in proclaiming the doctrines of grace, and declaring the whole counsel of God, while they equalled them in theological correctness and in moral consistency. There were also in this class certain subdivisions; some preferring the Calvinistic, others the Arminian scheme in divinity: they not only differed in their mode of stating divine truths in the pulpit, but were sometimes led to oppose each other in the press; while a religious zeal, acting on a warm temperament, became insensibly mixed with the baser alloy of party spirit and logical contention; and too often gave occasion of malignant joy to the enemies of that Gospel which the disputants mutually reverenced, as they saw revived in members of the pure and tolerant Church of Britain, a portion of that controversial rancour which had maintained the respective causes of the chairs of Amsterdam and Geneva, or had mingled in the quarrels of the Jansenists and Jesuits. The Evangelical divines differed again as to the phraseology which becomes the rostrum of public instruction; some conceiving that the language of the preacher might be sufficiently plain without descending to partial vulgarisms which might give needless offence to the ear of taste; others holding that abstinence from rude images and familiar style was in its degree an evasion of the offence of the cross, and that it were better, since the majority is poor and unlearned, to draw from their Master's quiver the jagged arrow than the polished shaft, to give the salutary wound of conviction. Some of them also, lamenting the darkness which overspread their native land in religious matters, and deeply impressed with a sense of the danger of that state of unconversion in which they beheld so many of their countrymen, deemed that their commission extended beyond the pale of their own parishes, and were fain, in their love of souls, to become itinerant heralds of the tidings of salvation, and exhort sinners to flee to Jesus, in a barn, a conventicle, or even in the open air. Others, and those by far the greater number, considered this step as inconsistent with that regularity of ministration which became a national priesthood, incompatible with the vow of canonical obedience, and calculated to prejudice their civil and ecclesiastical superiors against the most serious and devoted of the clergy. Nor must it be omitted, that many of these excellent men were distinguished by the manner in which they addressed their congregations, not confining themselves to the substance of a written discourse, but

delivering their harangues from short notes, memoriter, or extempore, according to the custom of the English preachers under the house of Stuart, and before the prevalence of indiscreet oratory in a time of trouble and exacerbation rendered it expedient to introduce a more cautious mode of preaching. They also revived, in some of their congregations, the custom of singing hymns and spiritual songs, abounding with Evangelical sentiment, in addition to the common versions of the Psalms of David.' pp. 40-42.

Such were the small beginnings of that party in the Church of England, which now bears the name of evangelical. The volume contains biographical notices of the leading individuals among this body. At their head ranks the venerable Romaine. To him succeed, the Rev. Messrs. Thomas Jones, Foster, Madan, Spencer, Stonhouse, Hart, Toplady, Walker, Fletcher, De Courcy, Talbot, Maddock, Berridge, Newton, Adam, Grimshaw, Venn, Powley, Atkinson, Conyers. A few names of minor note are added, but the above were all of any eminence within the first decade,' extending from 1760 to 1770.

Thus,' remarks the Author, did Jehovah, who is wise in counsel and wonderful in working, who hath put the times and seasons in his own power, vouchsafe to revive the dying spirit of religion in the Established Church of England, and render the first decade of the reign of George the Third an interesting era in the history of the Reformation. Thus did he recruit the expiring lamps of the sanctuary, bid the rod of the priesthood be covered with new blossoms, and send a gracious rain to refresh his vineyard when it was weary. This revival was effected by human instruments of various talents, attainments, and degrees of spiritual light; and while divine illumination resides in human breasts, and the hidden manna is enclosed in earthly vessels, imperfection will more or less attach to the operations of the Church. But if over-scrupulosity in some, and latent enmity in others, have magnified the inadvertencies, or aggravated the irregularities, of men of God, it will be the office of the impartial historian to place them in their true light, and exhibit their bearings in a less prejudiced point of view. It is, however, a more pleasing task to record their excellencies, and to notice how their characteristic differences were compatible with the relation they bore to the common Head. The various tints in the bow of Heaven are all produced by the same process of refraction; the different fragrancies of the flowers of Eden all arise from the same law of exhalation; and if the zeal of Luther was seen in Romaine, the perseverance of Calvin in Toplady, the sweetness of Melancthon in Newton, the elegance of Erasmus in De Courcy, the research of Beza in Madan, and the diligence of Zuinglius in Grimshaw, we hail them as united confessors of "one Lord, one faith, one baptism."' pp. 82-84.

The close of this extract is not in the purest taste; the style of the work is, indeed, very far from being chaste or pleasing.