fore, be fitted to throw the blame of consequences upon the seceding party, and make us responsible, in the eyes of the country, for a disruption that our own hands have produced. Perhaps it may tend to separate one or two faint-hearted followers from us, and diminish our apparent number. In these circumstances, and with these views, we must regard the course followed by Sir Robert as any thing but high-minded. We might have been spared the pursuit, when we owned that the battle was lost.

"Tis not, however, unexpected treatment. A spiritual claim never will be simply refused. It must be quashed, perhaps atoned for. And we do regard what fell from the Premier, though it has nothing of that in its design, as little less than the first note of active persecution. At least, we must be allowed to say, that there is material enough for active persecution, in the various speeches delivered in connection with our claim in Parliament-principles that lead to it-a spirit that would not shrink from it.

As it regards authority, we are worse off than ever. The short answer now to our arguments will be, Parliament has refused your claims. Why urge them still? We are vanquished, but not subdued. We are beaten, but not routed. We have lost the battle, but the war is not at an end. From man, we appeal to God! We admit that as large an amount of intellect as this country can furnish, was directed to our question. We admit that the same men can wisely solve any common problem. We admit that both parties in the State are against us. We admit that the Church's own advocate did needlessly condemn our policy as to the Veto law. All this we admit, and we see, therefore, our principles and claims all but unanimously disallowed. But the effect of all is only to augment our confidence in the righteousness of the cause. Anything but a spiritual element would have been appreciated by these men who have directed their minds to our question, set forth as it has been with every advantage. And in no way will the opposition it has nevertheless encountered be explained, but by referring it to that carnal mind which cannot discern, and will not savour the things that be of God. The very resistance, therefore, given to our claims, so soon as understood, indicates to us their nature, and attracts us to them more than ever, as the deep things of Jesus. But the more that the truth of our cause, its essence, its godliness, is made to appear, and binds every renewed soul to its avowal and defence, the more will the nations be angry, and the more indignantly will the enemies of Jesus say, through their Courts and their Parliaments, We shall not suffer this man to reign

over us.

This will lead the Church anew into trouble. Yet we cannot but feel that all things look darker for the kingdom than for the Church. This will shortly be seen. Hitherto the aristocracy have

leaned to the Church, and been gracious to its clergy. But simply because they regarded ministers as a cheap constabulary,—an efficient rural police. In so doing, they committed a great sin, and dishonoured God. Christ did not institute a ministry with his blood, and send the Spirit down upon them, that they might protect the houses and estates of the great. The priesthood will ever be the salt of earth, even in a meagre, secular sense. But it must be indirectly, not of purpose. It is not for this they are to be ordained. And when, accordingly, they are esteemed simply for municipal ends, either God will chastise the clergy, or dissolve their unholy alliance with the State. It is on the latter alternative He is now acting towards us. The ministry he remembers in love; the State He punishes. He will not suffer his anointed servants to be kept in the pay of the rich for the wretched ends of this world, and so he calls us forth, that we may walk worthy of our high vocation, as Christ's priesthood, not as the State's police.

Al

It would be well that our nobles and rich men saw this. ready has it been asked, and it will be often asked again, Who is to blame for the schism of the Church of Scotland? From high seats, this blame has undeservedly been cast on us. We solemnly repel the charge. We do more. We lay it upon the aristocracy of our land; and when events open into confusion, amid a lawless mob for whose souls no one careth, and an intolerable pauperism, that wrings the sinews of the country, they may come peradventure to see the truth. At all events, it will come forth one day in the light of the sun. Them who honour Him God will honour. But He who put off all riches for our sake, and became poor, will not serve in the yoke of our selfishness, and uphold his Church for the protection of our wealth.

The multitude of our day are also sharp enough to see the difference betwixt religion for its own sake, and religion for the sake of our property; and when once it does break upon the general mind, that it was under the latter principle that so much was done by the noble and wealthy for the extension of the Church, a new impulse, of vehement current, will be set loose to stimulate the ungodliness, and darken the passions of the masses. The Lord keep us all in that day of evil! Not only may we have Christ's mind in all things, but may we take Christ's side; take it frankly; keep it boldly; abide by it to the close; looking always from amid the strife for Him who will suddenly calm the raging of the sea. In all likelihood we shall not see what the Jews saw, and our fathers saw, a temple superseding the tabernacle we are now raising. The days of our dispensation are hastening to their close. But it is enough, if when the Master comes, he finds us, amid all reproach, following his steps, even without the camp, maintaining his cause.

CRITICAL NOTICES.

The Zeal of Jehu. A Tract, pp. 20. London.

Thinking that there are some things in this tract very suitable to the presents tate of matters amongst ourselves, we extract a few brief passages. They may tend to direct our zeal aright, and prevent its becoming a mere earthly blaze.

There is nothing more fair and plausible than the desire of reformation ; but there is no desire which more often cloaks the selfishness of the human heart. A zeal against public wrongs is found a most convenient screen for the blemishes of private character. And it is far more easy with the eagle-eye of self-interest to detect and expose a thousand faults, than for a man in any one thing to deny himself. In a day like the present, when the spirit of improvement is so widely and so busily stirring, it is no wonder that the same spirit should have arisen in the Church, and have manifested itself in schemes for its reformation. And this especially when the Church's inconsistencies with its pretensions and profession are so glaring as to be the taunt and jest of the infidel, and when many real Christians are groaning under the burthens imposed on them by human traditions. It is good indeed to be zealously affected always in a good thing;' but unless the zeal be according to knowledge, it will just end where the zeal of Jehu ended, in cutting off, it may be, many things which are outwardly offensive, but in leaving entirely untouched the root of the evil, the selfish wisdom of man; for it is this whence has sprung all the disorder in the Church of God. But reformation in the Church is not that which answers the purpose of God. If there were the most awakened zeal, the most decided energy, and the most sincere desire of heart largely engaged in the reformation of the Church, this would not be effectual, because it is not according to the mind of God. In the first place, the very notion of attempting such a reformation is not the confession of our sin and of our failure, but is rather an assumption of our own competence to remedy the Church's failure. But secondly, reformation, simply as reformation, has never been the plan which God has pursued, and it is not the plan which God will pursue. God has never brought back any thing that has fallen to the standing from whence it fell. He has indeed taken the occasion from the failure to magnify his own grace, and to introduce something far more blessed. Now man naturally looks back to some point as the point of attainment, whilst God is looking forward; and hence, supposing it possible that the reformer attains his object (which the revealed wisdom of God forbids us to suppose), he would not attain the object of God. Yet it is to God's object that the Holy Spirit constantly leads, witnessing that in that alone there will be no failure. Hence it comes to pass that the power of real reformation in the Church is not only by the most just apprehension of the Church's original principles, but by acquaintance with the purpose of God as to that which is before it. The effect of attempting to work our way back simply by the apprehension of what the Church once was, would be such disappointment as to constrain us either to give up the attempt as hopeless, or to stop short in some little circumscribed association, and thus to merge into the worst form of sectarianism, or perhaps to assume pretended powers as successionally derived or anew received, and thus to set up official claims as the Church, and effectually to destroy the distinction between the Church and the world. For this has invariably been the effect of the assumption of power, standing in office, and not in the energy of the Spirit. We see in the

case of Jehu an instance of reformation, very great indeed in its immediate result, and carried on by an energy which promised permanent blessing: but whatever apparent zeal for God there was in the matter, the very first element of godly zeal was wanting, and that is the fear of the Lord. There was no humbling of himself before God for his own sins and the sins of the people: there was no recurrence at all to the law of Moses, so as to learn the real extent of their departure from the Lord: there was no acting on faith. The evil was before him, and it was remedied. Baal was destroyed; but the national sin, that which hung over Israel, and awaited the Lord's judgment, the calves of Bethel, was unthought of. It had been tolerated; it had become venerable; so that it had ceased to affect the conscience at all: and the bringing back of the people from Baal to this worship, was quite sufficient to satisfy this great reformer in Israel, and to make him boast of his zeal for the Lord.

"The zeal of the prophets of the Lord was a zeal according to knowledge. They themselves were brought to see the sin and the evil in which the nation was, and to be in their own souls so exercised as became the condition in which they saw the nation to be. However personally exempt from the fearful evils around them, they were led to humiliation and confession of sin, as being themselves part of the guilty body. (Dan. ix.; Is. vi., lxiii., lxiv.) This was zeal for the Lord because he had been dishonoured in Israel. We do not find therefore any self-complacency in exposing or denouncing evil; but while doing this in faithfulness to the Lord, committing their judgment unto him, and appealing to him as knowing the desire of their hearts for Israel, that it might be saved. Such was the spirit of the sorrowful prophet, living in the midst of apostacy, and commissioned to declare God's judgment on it; and this spirit brought him into constant trial from his own countrymen. Yet he could turn to God and say, 'Remember that I stood before thee to speak good for them, and to turn away thy wrath from them.' (Jer. xviii. 20.)

"But there is another thing. We do not find in them any contentedness with any reformation which their own ministry might have wrought: for the same Spirit of Christ, which had shown to them the extent of the evil, testified also unto God's remedy for it, and that was in Christ, who alone would be able to bring the nation into righteousnes, and to sustain them in it. It was by the power of this hope, that their ministry became efficient in sustaining the souls of the feeble remnant amidst abounding evil, and bringing them more and more back to what God had originally constituted. Reconstitution was hopeless: and the spirit of faithful individuals must have sunk within them, had the blessing been suspended on reformation. But it was held out to them in hope: there was no uncertainty in that; neither was it a thing to be compassed by their own powers. Hence in the worst of days, whether of idolatry or of formality, any single individual walking in the ordinances of God would have been sustained, and encouraged to separate from that which was not of God. Such do we find to have been the sustaining power to the very feeble remnant at the period of the coming of Messiah." Pp. 9-12.

Apostolic Christianity; or the People's Antidote against Romanism and Puseyism. By the REV. J. GODKIN. London: Snow. 1842.

Excellent as this volume is in many respects, yet had it been condensed into one half its present size, it would have suited its purpose much more efficiently. It is too diffuse, and at times most painfully flippant. At p. 30, for instance, in assailing the absurd pretensions of the Puseyite apostolics, he speaks of their "fancying that like a Brobdignag, they could dandle the Son

of God on their hand as if he were but a priest's plaything." Again at p. 121, in speaking of some thing which was unknown in the days of the apostles, he tells us that the sacred writer "knew no more about it than a spinningjenny." Many similar examples of irreverence and bad taste might be produced, but we have no wish to bear hard upon our author. When counselling charity to others as he does at the commencement, he should have kept his own counsel more steadily in his eye, and blotted out many offensive expressions throughout the volume. There is much in the book that is worthy of commendation, notwithstanding these deductions, and the rather unmeaning declamation of the introductory chapter. Approving heartily of the author's design, we are sorry that he should have so much defeated it by his own flippant manner of writing. Let the author's tone be more decidedly spiritual, let his style of writing and mode of argument graver and more solemn, and we promise him far greater success than he is likely to have either with Puseyite or Papist.

Bibliotheca Clericalis; A Catalogue of the Clerical Library and Reading Rooms, 21, 22, and 23, Little Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields. London. James Darling. 1843.

This is a theological catalogue really worth the having. It may not indeed be in the power of our readers to take advantage of this splendid library, but its catalogue is of itself a treasure, both on account of its extensive range of authorships and the minuteness with which the titles of each work is given. This latter point makes it very valuable. Indeed in so far as this is concerned, we know of no catalogue like it.

Witnesses for the Truth in the Church of Scotland.
Edinburgh: W. P. Kennedy. 1843.

In our last we had occasion to notice the first two large sheets of this work. Since that two additional ones have been published completing the series. The whole is admirable. These have been also published in the form of books, a cheaper kind for schools and such like, a finer and dearer kind for drawingrooms. In all these different forms we most heartily commend them to our readers. They cannot be circulated too widely. Every family in the land should have them. Sabbath schools also should use them as prize tickets by having them cut into separate pictures. In every way they should be sent abroad as messengers of the truth, memorials of the martyrs, and illustrators of the glorious history of the Church of our fathers.

These are the first numbers of a monthly periodical now publishing at Arbroath, in defence of the Church. It promises well. It contains a mass of most profitable and well-digested information, upon topics both ecclesiastical and religious. We like its variety of contents. We like its general features. We like its principles. We like its tone. We are glad to see that it does not overlook the religious movements that are taking place in our land. Many of our periodicals, engrossed with things ecclesiastical, lose sight of the still more momentous religious impulses which are awakening in many pa rishes. We liked the Watchword for its attention to these; and we are glad to pay a similar tribute to the Presbyterian; and all the more so because it has a title so like our own. May it prosper and spread!