ART. VI. — SYNOPSIS OF THE QUARTERLIES AND OTHERS OF THE HIGHER PERIODICALS.

American Quarterly Reviews.

CHRISTIAN QUARTERLY, April, 1873. (Cincinnati.)-1. Ecclesiastical Polity in the First Age. 2. Paul's Schism. 3. The Basis of Christian Union. 4. Wuttke on the Irrationality of Sin. 5. Church Organization versus Church Government. 6. Christianity on the Planet Mars. 7. The Victory of Faith. 8. Letter, Spirit, Law, Gospel, Written Letter. 9. The Atonement. MERCERSBURG REVIEW, April, 1873. (Philadelphia.)-1. The Roman Question. 2. First Dogmatic Decree on the Church of Christ published in the Fourth Session of the Holy Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. 3. Döllinger's Reply to the Archbishop of Munich. 4. The German Bishops as Witnesses of the Truth. 5. The Old Catholic Movement. 6. Does a Divine Curse Rest Upon the World? 7. The Tendency of Individualism in the German Churches in America. 8. Theological Science in America.

NEW ENGLANDER, April, 1873. (New Haven:)-1. The Religious Element of Education and the Public School System. 2. Moral Intuition versus Utilitarianism. 3. The Gospel in Bible Lands. 4. The Treaty of Washington in 1871. 5. Ou the Law of Mortality that has Prevailed among the Former Members of the Divinity School of Yale College. 6. The Religious Character of Faraday. 7. Auguste Comte aud Positivism.

NEW ENGLAND HISTORICAL AND GENEALOGICAL REGISTER AND ANTIQUARIAN JOURNAL, April, 1873. (Boston.)-1. Memoir of Col. Joseph May. 2. Officers in the Battle of Breed's or Buuker Hill. 3. Harvard College-Public Exhibition, 1795. 4. Brief Memoirs and Notices of Prince's Subscribers. 5. William Claiborne. 6. Genealogical Notes and Errata. 7. Record-Book of the First Church in Charlestown. 8. Gleanings. 9. Will of Francis Champernoun. 10. John Baldwin of Stonington, and other Baldwins. 11. Expedition to Cape BretonJournal of the Rev. Adonijah Bidwell. 12. Manasseh Cutler-The Man who Purchased Ohio. 13. Records of the Presbyterian Church, Westerly, R. I. 14. The Flanders Family. 15. Descendants of William Lane. 16. Address by the Hon. Marshall P. Wilder.

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, April, 1873. (Boston.)-1. The New German School of Music. 2. Evolution of Self-Consciousness. 3. Theophile Gautier. 4. The Indian Question. 5. Herder.

PRESBYTERIAN QUARTERLY AND PRINCETON REVIEW, April, 1873. (New York.)1. The Three Ideas. 2. Crimes of Passion and Crimes of Reflection. 3. The Immediate Cause of the Death of Christ. 4. Dr. Dorner's System of Theology. 5. The Persian Cuneiform Inscription the Key to the Assyrian. 6. An Obituary of Dr. Liebner by Dr. Dörner. 7. The Remnants of the Ten Tribes. 8. Tulloch's Theology. 9. Hamilton's Autology. 10. Notice of Dr. Burns by Dr. M'Cosh.

QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THE EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH, April, 1873. (Gettysburg.)-1. The Conversion of the World to Christ. 2. William Penn, the Founder of Pennsylvania. 3. Close Communion. 4. The German Language in the Educational Institutions of the Lutheran Church in the United States. 5. Religious Faith of Wordsworth and Tennyson as Shown in their Poems. 6. The Intermediate State. 7. Exegetical. Titus ii, 13. THEOLOGICAL MEDIUM, A CUMBERLAND PRESBYTERIAN QUARTERLY, April, 1873. (Nashville, Tenn.)-1. Motion. 2. The Importance of our Colleges to the Church. 3. A Practical Exposition of Zechariah vi, 12, 13. 4. On the Mode of Baptism. 5. The Preparation of Sermons for the Pulpit. 6. Creation. 7. Christian Philosophy. 8. The Function of Prayer in the Economy of the Universe. 9. The Scriptural Doctrine of the Triumph of Christ's Kingdom Distinguished from Millenarianism.

AMERICAN CHURCH REVIEW, January, 1873. (The Church Press, Hartford, Conn.)-1. Thomas Aquinas. 2. The Seventeenth Article. 3. John Skelton. 4. Local Deacons. 5. The Spiritual Essence of Christianity. 6. Conflicts of Church and State. 7. How to Treat Modern Skepticism. 8. Presbyterianism and Episcopacy in Scotland. 9. Protestantism in Germany.

April, 1873.-1. The Seventeenth Article 2. The Controversy About Prayer. 3. The "Dies Ira." 4. The Spiritual Essence of Christianity. 5. Lossing's Life of General Schuyler. 6. Presbyterianism and Episcopacy in Scotland. 7. The First Bishop of Vermout. 8. William of Ockham, the Prereformer. The "American Church Review" is distinguished among our religious Quarterlies, as might be expected, by ability, graceful scholarship, a fine historic spirit, and an elegant external finish. We were particularly attracted by the two articles in these two numbers on "The Seventeenth Article," and with their survey of the share of Calvinism in the English Reformation, taken in comparison with Professor Fisher's account in his valuable History. The two views seriously vary, and those interested in this topic are happily able to check the historian by the reviewer. The two Articles can, we believe, be obtained separate from the Review.

The Seventeenth of the Thirty-Nine Articles, as our readers know, is charged to be Calvinistic. Wesley omitted it from the Twenty-Five which we have accepted as our standards. He did not thereby affirm it to be Calvinistic. Both he and we could doubtless have signed it, and the rest, as "Articles of Agreement," and yet would prefer to omit it in forming a new compact. How far it is necessarily or easily Calvinistic, and how far the English Church was and is Calvinistic, may fairly come up in its turn as a question of historic and theological interest. The conclusion to which it brings us is eminently honorable to the Christian moderation and tolerance of the English reformers. They meant, if we understand them, evangelical comprehensiveness. They desired to give all shades of opinion between Pelagianism and Antinomianism an easy berth, and then to counsel theological forbearance and modesty. The entire Article, doctrinal and cautionary, reads as follows:

"Predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel, secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to ever

lasting salvation, as vessels made to honor. Wherefore, they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God, be called according to God's purpose by his Spirit working in due season: they through grace obey the calling: they be justified freely they be made sons of God by adoption: they be made like the image of his only begotten Son Jesus Christ: they walk religiously in good works, and at length, by God's mercy, they attain to everlasting felicity.

"As the godly consideration of Predestination, and our Election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh, and their earthly members, and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things, as well because it doth greatly establish and confirm their faith of eternal salvation to be enjoyed through Christ, as because it doth fervently kindle their love toward God: so for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God's Predestination, is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation."-Pages 22, 27.

Certainly this is an Article which no Arminian would draw up in an Arminian confession. With the preconceptions of the present day it is difficult to see it less than Calvinistic. But the sharp doctrinal discriminations of the Dutch Arminians and the English Wesleyans had not then been drawn. The great body of Christian thinkers were in the muddle left by the ages of drawn battle in the Western Church between Augustinism and its opponents. The English Church was in the state of undefined "betweenity," neither Calvinistic nor Arminian exactly, and yet both Calvinistic and Arminian inexactly. The authors of the Article meant a "Broad Church;" and, to say the least, the Calvinists had no excuse for being, as too clearly they sometimes were, dissatisfied, and, perhaps, even factious.

The prominent Calvinistic point of the Article lies in the fact that" chosen " is the first term in the series of soteriological facts. "Predestination " is the "purpose" whereby it is "decreed" to deliver the "chosen." First, there has been a choice,

an election; then there comes the predestination, purpose, or decree, all essentially one, to deliver the objects of the choice. The objects of the choice are "those," as "vessels of honor." After this choice and decree "to deliver those" comes "called," "obey the calling," "justified," etc. This is Calvinism without an element of Arminianism included-or excluded either.

The Reviewer says truly that the Article is almost purely a series of Scripture clauses. But what a pity that the authors could not, also, according to St. Paul, have based "predestination" on "foreknowledge;" "whom He did foreknow he also did predestinate;" or, as St. Peter, "elect according to the foreknowledge of God." But, alas! that would have shut out the Calvinists and defeated the comprehension. As it stands the Arminian has a right to interpolate the clause in thought, and the Calvinist has no right from the Article itself, to condemn the mental assumption. If the Calvinist is pleased to say, I believe it all, the Arminian can say, I believe it all, and more too. If the Calvinist can say, It expresses just what I believe, the Arminian can respond, It contains nothing that I do not believe. Then, say the authors, let it stand just so, and all be modest and good, and we shall get along very well. If that was not acting like wise and Christian religious rulers we know not what would be so. An equal forbearance in the Calvinistic rulers of the Netherlands would have saved the direful disgraces of the Synod of Dort. Arminius and his followers were ready to sign the Belgic Confession as "Articles of agreement, not of authority," or to join in drawing articles of clear and broad evangelic.comprehension.

The standard non-Calvinist view of the Article is thus given from Archbishop Lawrence's Bampton Lectures:

"Our Church, on the other hand, always keeping the idea of redemption in view, states it to be the everlasting purpose of the Almighty to deliver from a state of malediction and destruction (a maledicto et exitio liberare') from a guilt which none can themselves obliterate, and to render eternally happy, through Christ or Christianity, as vessels before dishonorable thus formed to honor, those whom he has elected, not as meritorious individuals separately, but as a certain class of persons, as Christians collectively, whom he has chosen in

Christ out of mankind." Again, the same writer says: "In the Institute it is said, 'Prædestinationem vocamus æternum Dei decretum, quo apud se constitutum habuit, quid de unoquoque homine fieri vellet,' (lib. iii, cap. 21, § 5.) Here the effect of God's predestinating decree is plainly asserted to be the decision of every man's individual fate. Our Church, on the other hand, as plainly asserts it to be the salvation of Christians, or a liberation from the consequences of transgression, and an adduction to eternal life, through Christianity, of those who are chosen out of the human race, ex hominum genere."-Page 26. It is, therefore, a collective rather than an individual election. Each individual may, we suppose, by faith, enter the collective body of the elect. At least they would have been willing to let him try.

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On the non-Calvinistic tenor of the Articles generally we give the following very excellent view:

"The five points of Calvinism may be thus stated: (1) Predestination, including (a) unconditional predestination, or election to life eternal, and (b) unconditional reprobation, or predestination to damnation; (2) particular or limited redemption, that is, that Christ. died only for a chosen few; (3) total depravity; (4) irresistible grace; (5) final perseverance. the question before us is this: Leaving out of view, at present, the teaching of Article XVII as to predestination to life eternal, what do the Articles teach on the other points enumerated?

And

"1. As to reprobation, the Articles are pointedly silent. The word itself is not found in them. Nor is there anywhere a statement like that of the Presbyterian Confession of Faith: 'By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life,' and others are foreordained to everlasting death. Yet, beyond all doubt, Calvin considered the theory of reprobation to be essential to his system. For, speaking of those who accept election, but refuse reprobation, he says they do it 'ignorantly and boyishly, since election itself cannot stand unless it is opposed to reprobation.' In such a case omission is surely tantamount to denial.

"2. As against a particular or limited redemption of only the elect, the Articles speak with no bated breath.' Article II