it may be avoided? But such is the self-deceiving power of the sinful heart, that this contemptible evasion of voluntary ignorance, is enough to deaden the inborn solicitude which impels us to shun danger, and to seek for deliverance and protection. But in reality, the persons of whom I speak altogether underrate their own liability to punishment, and consequently undervalue the mercy from which they profess to hope for pardon. They really trust, not so much in the mercy of God, (which is a mere word in their mouths,) as in their own imagined right to enjoy his favour. They may comply with received usage, so far as to call themselves sinners, miserable sinners. But explain to them the force of the word sinners, as the Scriptures, and the conscience which has been enlightened by the Spirit of God, warrant us in explaining it, as the confession in the common prayer exhibits its full import;-and they will immediately disclaim the character which you would assign to them. They have been as good as other people-they have been honest and kind-heartedthey have done no harm to any one. They have loved God with all their heart; and done their best to obey his commandments. They have prayed, and attended the public worship of his people. They have heard his word, and never professed any false doctrine: they are like those whom our Lord represents as saying to him at the last day-" We have eaten and drunk in thy presence, and thou hast taught in our streets." In short, while they call themselves sinners, in compliance with established usage, they virtually deny themselves to be sinners at all. They call Christ, too, their Saviour. But from what is he their Saviour? From eternal punishment? They will not admit that they have deserved it. From the dominion of sin? They think themselves quite sufficiently clean from sin already. These are the people of whom our Lord says "If ye were blind, ye should have no sin but now ye say, we see, therefore your sin remaineth;" and elsewhere-"They that be whole need not a physician but they that are sick." And again-"I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." Some of these insensate and blinded persons do not indeed imagine themselves to be wholly free from guilt and responsibility. Conscience is hard to be completely silenced. But they fancy sometimes that the sufferings and privations of this life, are quite sufficient expiation for the offences of which they have been guilty against God. This monstrous error is unfortunately but too prevalent among our poorer brethren, from their closer intimacy in this unhappy country, with the votaries and dupes of that soul-destroying superstition, which arrogates to itself the authority of Christ, while it denies the sufficiency of the atonement and sacrifice which he made for sin, and degrades him, under the show of peculiar honour, to be merely the first, or one of the first, among the objects of their veneration; betraying him, like Judas, with a kiss.

From the same cause there is, unhappily, too general, in the

same sphere of life, a wretched mistake, that the danger of futture misery to the soul, is done away, or diminished, by the attendance of a clergyman, at the last hour of this mortal existence, and the administration, on their death-bed, of what are commonly called "the rites of their church." In the hurry of their last agonies, people send, in breathless haste, for "their clergy," as the phrase is. The dying sinner leans upon the broken reed of a ceremony; the groundless trust in which has been one of the causes which kept him, during his past life, from seeking the true and only way of reconciliation and peace with an offended God. To call him our hope and our Redeemer, while we really trust in our own obedience to the law of God, or in any thing that the ministers of his church, or others, can do for us, is to do him much the same kind of honour as the Roman tyrant of old, who was moved by the fame of his miracles, to propose his enrolment among the divinities of their idolatrous worship, and the admission of his statue among the gods of the Pantheon. But we need not dwell upon these extreme and revolting cases. Let us consider others less disgusting, but not less fatal. There are many who admit that he is the Saviour of mankind, and that, but for his merits and death, none could hope for salvation. Still, they think that a sort of balance will be struck between their misdeeds and their deservings, and that the excess (which they flatter themselves will be in their favour,) will be received to their account, by virtue of his mediation. And if the result should prove contrary to them, then they reckon on his merits being thrown in, to make the scale preponderate in their favour. This may appear a ludicrous representation of their opinion. But, I grieve to say, it is too faithfully copied from the statements publicly recorded by some who call themselves Christians. It prevails much among our humbler brethren, for the same reason to which I have assigned the spread of some other practical errors in our country. And it is too much the latent feeling of many who would be ashamed to avow it. Time would not permit me to enter into a discussion of this delusion, even if it deserved to be seriously refuted, in the hearing of persons who have heard the truths of the Gospel constantly declared to them. To call upon the name of Christ, as being really our Redeemer, we must acknowledge ourselves to be utterly destitute of any righteousness of our own, we must confess that we have deserved the doom of eternal death; and that our only hope of escaping that sentence, is in his merits and sufferings, made available to us by faith, which is his gift by the instrumentality of the Holy Spirit. Thus, of the entire work of our redemption, the whole glory is due to God. The Father gave his well-beloved Son to be humbled, to suffer, and to die,to die upon the cross for us. The Eternal Son of the Everlasting Father gave himself to fulfil his Father's merciful purpose in our behalf. And the Spirit of God, who is one with the Father and the Son, who, from eternity, proceeded from the Father and

the Son, is freely given to draw us unto the Son of God, that we might believe in him, and that believing, we might have life. It is in this sense primarily, that I would wish the words of my text to be understood. We must not only call him Lord, Lord, -(for that we must not fail to do: we must confess before the world that he is our Lord and our Redeemer)-but we must, besides, and in the first place, believe with our hearts that he is our only hope, and that he is in himself, a complete and sufficient security against the wrath of God, which we have richly deserved. He himself has said, "this is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent." Thus, then, to believe fully and sincerely on him, assigning to him the entire glory of our salvation, is to do the will of God, and to entitle ourselves to be received into the kingdom of heaven. But some one may say, not without apparent grounds for objecting, is not the will of God to be done by obeying his commandments? Is mere belief, without following the precepts of his law, worth any thing in the eyes of God? Doubtless it is not. For, in fact, it is then not belief at all. We assert most positively the same opinion which the objector whom I have imagined would contend for. But then it is not in any degree inconsistent with the statement which I first put forward. I might almost venture to say, that the two statements are in substance the same, and differ only in form. To do the will of God without faith is impossible, since the essence of a good work is, that it be done in faith. Again, to believe, and yet not to do the will of God, is a downright contradiction, if the words be rightly employed. We might as well say that a man was alive and in health, though he neither moved, nor breathed,-though he lay without sense or perception, though he was consigned already to decay and corruption. Sin, indeed, while in possession of the soul, is represented under this very figure of man's being dead,-dead in trespasses and sins. To believe is to live. To continue in wilful disobedience is to be dead. To believe, and, at the same time, to remain ungodly, is as absurd as to be at once in the same sense dead and alive. Hence we see there is no opposition in the two apparently contrary statements, which I have set before you. Thus far I have endeavoured to explain the meaning of my text, in the first great and striking sense in which it presents itself. I have sought to mark the pernicious error, the fatal infatuation of those who trust in the mere name and profession of Christianity, so as to quiet the alarms of conscience, and indulge themselves in a ruinous and unhallowed carelessness and disregard of those things which concern their eternal interests.These persons presume that they shall be saved from all danger in the life to come, by the name of Jesus; and yet they neither care to know his character and office, and the relation in which he stands to them; nor inquire what feelings they should entertain towards him, and what conduct it becomes them to exhibit as his disciples. But besides those who thus substitute the mere

name of Christianity for the knowledge, and practice suited to the knowledge, of their own condition and duties, and of Christ's nature and the purpose of his coming on earth, there are many who fall short in no point of scriptural information, who are fully possessed of all the great truths of the Gospel, and accurately acquainted with all particulars of sound doctrine, who make a high profession of zeal for religion, and are nice judges of all matters of orthodoxy, and warm advocates and champions of the truth: who yet do not offer to Christ that homage which he values more than lip-service; who do not exhibit in their lives, that their hearts are impressed with the convictions which are so well rooted in their heads. There are many who, in a greater or lesser degree, deceive themselves by their correctness in doctrine, and their warmth in advocating it, into a satisfaction with their own spiritual state, when, in reality, they are living in such a way as proves, that their belief is merely intellectual, and not received and cherished in the heart. This important department of my subject I must defer considering for the present. On some future occasion, with the permission of Providence, I may resume it.

P.

CHURCH REFORM.*

Reform of the Church! Awful and portentous words! Such would they seem to us at any period-but in a particular degree is such a project calculated to awaken serious feeling at a crisis of unprecedented public agitation; when "men's hearts are failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming upon the earth;" when a spirit of reckless innovation is abroad, which threatens to unsettle every thing we have been in the habit of regarding with reverence and affection-when, uninstructed by the fearful scenes which have been enacted in a neighbouring country, now reduced by its revolutionary spirit to the lowest ebb of distress-the people of these realms have successfully clamoured for a measure of political power which the people know not how to use without abusing, and our rulers, yielding to that clamour, have evoked a spirit which all their art and ingenuity cannot now extinguish, and when the helm of the state has fallen to the care of a "pilot" too feeble to "weather the storm," although unhappily he has been able to push his vessel within its influence.

With such desponding feelings have we opened the pamphlet which we are about to submit to our readers; but are free to

A Plan of Church Reform, with a Letter to the King. By Lord Henley. London, Roake and Varty, 1832.

confess that much of our alarm has subsided upon observing the pious and humble, and conciliating spirit with which the noble author has disclosed his views; and if our Church is to be subjected to the crucible at all, we devoutly pray that it may be rescued from the profane hands of the Humes, and the O'Connells, and the Shiels of this hour" of rebuke and blasphemy," and its interests confided to men of prudence, men of piety, and of humility, such as Lord Henley's beautiful letter to the King, prefixed to his pamphlet, exhibits him before our eyes.

Here we cannot but regret that an Irish peer who undertakes the discussion of so important a subject, should have wholly omitted all mention of the Irish branch of the Anglican Church. It furnishes some handle to those who are now so anxious to promote a separation of the two islands, (for to this a repeal of the union must come at last) when they find a man of his high rank putting forth a very able pamphlet, written in so popular a style, and relating to so popular a topic, that it has already reached a fifth edition, yet seeming to consider the Church of Ireland beneath his notice. But we shall not cavil upon this point, and proceed to consider his lordship's views as applying to our part of the church, admitting as we do, toto animo, that reform is not less necessary at this side of the channel.

Lord H. has divided his subject into two parts: one as the temporalities of the Church are concerned-the other, as relating "to such changes in the formularies and the liturgy as would be likely to recall within her pale a large portion of the present dissenters." This latter discussion he seems to shrink from the treatment of, as a task "exclusively Theological." But in limine, as it appears to us, he lays himself open to a grave objection, for he assumes what he is pleased to call "evils in the discipline, the confessionals, and the ritual of the Church."

It has always been our opinion that dissent has arisen rather from the neglect or the mal-administration of the Church than from any radical defect in her discipline or her liturgy, which, perhaps from the weakness or the excess of filial love, we shudder at the thought of subjecting to the pruning knife of this reforming age. Our experience, at least in our own land, from east to west, and from north to south, has shewn us that dissent hides its head where a careful zealous pastor of the Church of England puts forth with pure and apostolical and primitive simplicity that form of sound words which our sublime liturgy exhibits; and we fondly anticipate the time when the striking improvement which has recently taken place amongst the Irish clergy will leave no room fer any visionary reformer to lay his unhallowed hands upon that venerable liturgy in which are so faithfully embodied all the saving verities of the everlasting Gospel. Our author admits it is vain to hope that "under the present dispensation of events the dissent of many pious and scriptural men can ever be entirely eradicated, and that the evils of discord and schism must remain as thorns in the side of the Church during the whole course of