torical facts, who eulogize Calvin as the foster parent of our Church. We owe him nothing but our miserable divisions and consequently our weaknesses. Divines of that day had no sympathy for Calvin, they never forgave him for his ridicule and abuse of their Liturgy, or the part which he took in the "Troubles of Frankfort," and yet some of us are bold enough to maintain that Calvin not only approved our services, but so influenced the compilers of them that they modelled them according to his peculiar heresies.

The very general disapprobation of Calvin's conduct in the burning of Servetus, gave courage to the patriots, who prosecuted their hatred of him with increased fury. Nothing dismayed however, he opposed them till he obtained the execution of some and the banishment of others. At this time indeed his position seems to have been more than usually unenviable and perplexing. Hated and opposed by a strong party in his own city, suspected and almost disowned by the English reformers on account of his interference at Frankfort; assailed by the Lutherans in the person of Joachim Westphal, in respect of the doctrine of the Eucharist as maintained in the Zurich Consensus, a man of less nerve and earnestness would have been overpowered by such an accumulated opposition. But Calvin was not to be dismayed. Woe to him who attacked "the prince and bishop of Geneva," as his enemies designated him. He was prepared for any and all of them, and eventually triumphed over all. And if in the course of his polemical warfare he so often transgressed the limits of Christian courtesy or rather indulged in vituperations and personal acrimony which his own friends Farel and Bullinger could not but condemn, some palliation may be found in the perplexing and arduous circumstances in which he was placed. But physical strength has a limit, and the time arrived when excitement and incessant labour and a life spent in the maintenance and propagation of what were considered great principles, and the consciousness of the responsibility of such a position, told upon the energies even of Calvin. Never robust in health, and not unfrequently disabled by indisposition in the course of his career, he was attacked at the age of about fifty with an intermittent fever, which greatly reduced him, and was accompanied by other diseases, which disabled him from the more active affairs in which he had been so long engaged. Still he was not idle and during the few last years of his life it was that he wrote several of his Commentaries on the Scriptures, one of which was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, besides addressing many letters of importance to the leaders of reformation in different countries. When he perceived his end to be not far distant, he called both the consistory and the council of Geneva into his presence and addressed them in terms which, uttered under such circumstances and by such a man, could not but have been deeply impressive. He seems to have died under a full conviction

of the truth of his mission, and without any of those compunctions of conscience which a disturber of the peace of the Church and the perverter of the truth of CHRIST might have been expected to experience. This fact excites reflections too mysterious for men to pry into-only we know that Saul when persecuting the Church, thought that he was doing GoD service, and that there is a way which seemeth right unto a man, the end whereof is death. To his own Master he standeth or falleth.

In the preceding sketch we have said nothing about those peculiar heresies of Calvin which are so generally associated with his name, and which against all other heresies, and the truth itself, he laboured so energetically to establish. The fact is "the five points" are too well known to need repetition here, nor shall we say anything of them formally, except to put our readers on their guard against a vulgar error as regards Calvin's predestinarian views, into which Mr. Dyer with many others has fallen. It is said that those views of Calvin accorded with, or rather were founded upon those held by the illustrious Father S. Augustine. This is an unworthy slander upon the Bishop of Hippo. He held no views which S. Paul had not taught and the Church in all ages maintained. It is unnecessary for us to enter into the question, as it has been so recently and so ably discussed by Archdeacon Wilberforce in his treatise on "Holy Baptism."

Generally speaking Calvin's own position is the best explanation of his views, for here as elsewhere heresy seems to have adapted itself a good deal to the circumstances in which the author of it was placed. In order to reconcile to himself his secession from the visible Church of CHRIST, it was natural that he should endeavour to believe that outward Communion is not necessary to salvation, and that there is an invisible Church in earth composed of the elect of GOD, which may be entered through another portal than that of the Church visible. To reconcile to himself the want of holy Sacraments administered in the Church by those who had authority so to do, he maintained that divine grace is not tied to such Sacraments, and that without prevenient grace which renders Sacraments unnecessary they are useless. Not that he denied the necessity of Sacraments, in the sense at least that he understood them; and he maintained that Baptism if administered even by the devil would be valid. The certainty of his own salvation, and of his election by Divine grace which was indefectible was essential to bear him on in the difficult path in which he was engaged and we can only satisfactorily account for the bitterness, rancour, and blood-thirstiness with which he assailed all who opposed him, to the supposition, that he conceived himself to be warring against GoD's enemies as well as his own, that they were reprobate, and doomed by GoD Himself, before the foundation of the world, to eternal and irrevocable destruction-for that

:

there are such persons, is one of the distinctive doctrines of Cal

vinism.

If therefore we would account for the existence of Calvinism and thoroughly understand its bearing, we must study the position in which the author placed himself, and mark the efforts of his mind to reconcile that position to his conscience. This, we are persuaded, is the light in which we may best understand the rise and progress of Calvinism-which is nothing more than the conviction excited by an earnest mind in the struggle to justify an anomalous position, and reconcile it to an uneasy conscience.

In speaking of Calvin's position, the exigencies of which required such distortion of the truth, for as Bossuet remarks, 'every error is a truth abused," to make it tolerable even to himself, it might be inferred that his position was anomalous and unjustifiable. And so it was. He had plainly no mission to be a reformer of the Church in any way, and least of all in the way in which he presumed to undertake that office. In saying this it is necessary to guard ourselves from misapprehension.

Do we deny that the Church of the sixteenth century needed to be reformed? Certainly not. This fact was admitted no less by the Church itself, than by Luther and Calvin. The council of Constance, the diet of Ratisbon, and the Council of Trent, are not only admissions of the need of reformation, but proofs of the Church's willingness to effect it to some extent. The error of Calvin and the foreign Reformers, (for here be it remembered, we are not speaking of our English reformers,) then was this-not that they were anxious for the reformation of abuses, but that they refused to work with and in the Church for that end, and thereby frustrated rather than accomplished that great object. That a more effectual reformation of the western Church was frustrated by their violent and schismatical proceedings is plain from history. The sober-minded were naturally so shocked at the excesses and spiritual wickedness of those who took upon themselves to reform others, that they concluded that any existing corruptions were better than the detestable heresies which were grafted upon the foreign reformation movement, or rather which seemed to grow out of it as the natural branches. And as regards France, in particular, where Calvin commenced his career, the great Gerson had a generation before his time prepared the way for that real reformation which there is little doubt that France would have perfected had not the profaneness of the French Protestants disgusted and alarmed men. And who will say that S. Francis Xavier would not have co-operated in the good work?

But if Calvin's position, as a reformer, was unjustifiable in France, what shall we think of him, a mere stranger and intruder at Geneva, overthrowing, or endeavouring to overthrow, the faith of centuries, to erect a system of his own devising, of which he

himself was the head and front, or as his opponents declared with undeniable truth, both pope and prince. Nothing except a miraculous call, and an unmistakeable divine mission, with the gift of miracles to confirm it, could justify such a course. And yet the only call pretended to was from an intemperate fanatic, Farel, of whom little else is known, than that at the age of seventy he was obliged to marry a young woman who had lived with him as a housekeeper, under circumstances, which though generally condemned, found a ready apologist in Calvin. Can any impartial inquirer doubt that the work of reformation would not have been in better hands, had it been taken up by the glorious S. Francis de Sales, who, about forty years after Calvin's death, became Bishop of Geneva, where he was enabled to root out some of the tares which the latter had so assiduously sown, and replace them by vigorous shoots of evangelical truth?

If any further confirmation of the unjustifiableness of Calvin's position were needed, it would be found in the miserable results of Calvinism itself. In his own Geneva, it has been succeeded by the GOD-denying heresy, and wherever it yet exists, it is the prolific source of strife and envying, and therefore, according to the Apostle, of every evil work. If tokens of the Divine displeasure are visible anywhere, they are most patent in the system of Calvin, every thing connected with it declares that it is not of GOD. And while Calvin's own position is the best key to his heresies, it not less surely explains the defects of his moral constitution. Being a reformer out of the Church, he was the inventor of a system of his own, rather than the restorer of Catholic truth. Hence, instead of proceeding with the humility and reverence of a man who knows himself to be concerned with venerable institutions redolent of holiness, and therefore their decayed portions even are to be removed carefully and not without awe; he worked haughtily and daringly, as a man who is building an edifice of his own designing, and is anxious for effect and for superiority over rival structures. This is the true explanation of Calvin's haughtiness, imperiousness, vanity, egotism, impatience of opposition, rage even to blood against all opponents.

Under such circumstances we shall in vain look for any of the tender sympathies of our nature. Twice when the plague raged at Geneva, he shrank from ministering to the sick and dying, though earnestly called upon to do so. All the charities of life were frozen into a cold subjectiveness, and he is the most intensely uninteresting of all the characters in history. His very countenance, as it has come down to us, is repulsive-a type not of mortified subdued asceticism, but of morose querulous puritanism. With a mind of inferior power, and of general attainments scarcely above mediocrity, his heart was dry, hard, sour, and unimpressible. Posterity neither fears nor loves the man, however some may uphold

his system. And that he has succeeded with all these defects to impress his opinions upon others, and to obtain for them a lasting celebrity, can only be accounted for, on the principle so eloquently enunciated by one who has done more than most to represent Calvinism in its true deformity, and to defend "ecclesiastical polity" against all innovators, past, present, or to come. "He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be, shall never want attentive and favourable hearers; because they know the manifold defects whereunto every kind of regiment is subject, but the cruel lets and difficulties, which in public proceedings are innumerable and inevitable, they have not ordinarily the judgment to consider. And because such as openly reprove disorders of state, [a fortiori of the Church,] are taken for principal friends to the common benefit of all, and for men that carry singular freedom of mind; under this fair and plausible colour, whatsoever they utter passeth for good and current. That which wanteth in weight of their speech, is supplied by the acuteness of men's minds to accept and believe it."

NOTES ON RECENT PAMPHLETS.

THE multitude of pamphlets and sermons which have issued from the press during the last month, relating to the Judgment of the Committee of Privy Council, has been so great as quite to excuse us from attempting even to give a catalogue of their titles. In the brief space which remains to us, we can only glance at a few. One important remark may nevertheless be made, arising out of a general review of all that has been published; that among the conflicting varieties of opinions hazarded, no one as yet has had a word to say for Mr. Gorham: no one dares to vindicate the Judgment on any other ground than that of a supposed expediency, a desire to keep things (as they say,) quiet; and at meetings of the Clergy, whenever the low Church party have ventured to propose an amendment to the protest or petition that has been laid before them, they do not go beyond such a general truism* (which however we believe to be false,) as that it " will conduce more to peace and unity to avoid expressing an opinion." Apparently, we say, this statement is true; it has so much of truth in it as to succeed in gaining the assent of that easy-going class who do not look beyond their "own day." But it is essentially and fatally false; for it is laying up a fruitful store of dissension for generations yet to come, at the very moment, when for the first time in the history of the Reformed English Church, it

*The pamphlet of their universal champion, Mr. Goode, though our copy is called "the third edition," (we mention this because we perceive he makes a charge against the Bishop of Exeter on the very same ground,) could only be obtained by our publisher late on Thursday. We have only had time to see that its tone is most insolent.