Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB
[blocks in formation]

Our readers will feel much obliged to the writer of this and the preceding paper, for their exposition of the injurious tendency of much of our unsuspected current literature; but truly does one of them remark that it would be impossible for the conductors or the correspondents of any religious periodical publication to notice half the exceptionable matter of this nature which issues monthly and daily from the press; or even from what is considered the more guarded and respectable portion of it. We have had occasion to notice in our pages some things of this kind, even in Dr. Lardner's Cyclopedia; the Family Library has several times been mentioned with due reprehension; as also the Library of Useful Knowledge, which on some occasions has scarcely taken the pains to cover its infidelity. The chief difficulty of detection, and therefore the greatest evil, is where the leaven pervades the mass without being any way prominent; as it will and that without any direct intention-where a person not under the influence of religion writes on subjects which border upon religion, or even of morals, or history, or any thing but simple intellect. Allan Cunningham's life of the sculptor Bacon, in the Family Library, is as unfair and exceptionable a performance, without professing to be infidel,as Gibbon's Roman Empire. We select this as a specimen, because Cecil's life of the same person will afford a ready opportunity for collation. While we are writing we have opened quite casually upon the following passage in the Tour through Holland in the same series. The writer is speaking of lotteries in Amsterdam, and suddenly breaks off: "It was but a mawkish kind of morality that induced a late English Chancellor of the Exchequer to give up a considerable revenue, levelled on the votaries of the vice (of lottery gambling), at the instigation of a class of men who are at great pains to make themselves be thought more righteous than their neighbours." Would not any Christian-minded parent be grieved that his child should meet with such a passage of gratuitous sneer at religious persons, and at common morality and Christian legislation, in a book of rational entertainment. We have elsewhere alluded to the incidental sneers at Christian missionaries, in the life of Bruce, in the same series. The respectable publisher of the Family Library cannot intend to disgust a large class of his readers by such matters, which are in as bad taste as they are exceptionable, and which might be omitted without his gayest readers think

FORMS OF PRAYER AGAINST
PESTILENce.

WE presume that our readers will have perused with much interest, and we would hope edification, the extracts from the Forms of Prayer for Deliverance from Pestilence inserted in the Appendix, published with our last Number. We brought down our notices of these memorials of the piety of our forefathers, to the Thanksgiving after the Plague of 1563; intermixing with them various remarkable facts connected with the general subject.

The truly excellent and appropriate service of 1563 furnished the basis of similar services for more than a century afterwards; and it well merited the ample notice which

we have devoted to it. We will conclude our quotations with a short passage, which we copy from a form of thanksgiving on the cessation of the calamity, to be used on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, manded by the Lord Bishop of Ely

"com

to be used in his cathedral church at Ely and the rest of his diocese, Jan. 12th, 1563." Whether this form was peculiar to this diocese, or whether the diocesan injunction was only the special application of a ge

ing the worse of his volumes. We earnestly entreat the editors and publishers of all the works above mentioned to exercise a most scrupulous vigilance, even were it only for their own interest. The passages which our correspondent has quoted from the volume on the Bounty would preclude its promiscuous admission into any circle where Christian missions are held in reverence.-Mr. Ellis has just published a most convincing reply to the misrepresentations of Kotzebue and others, which will equally serve for the Family Library. We the more regret that any of the works in our cheap popular libraries should be exceptionable, as many of them are of great interest and value. We have several times recommended some of the volumes in Dr. Lardner's and the Family series. Of the Edinburgh Cabinet Library we had never seen more than one volumethat on the Polar Regions-which is one of the cheapest, most instructive, and amusing books of the kind that has issued from the modern press.

neral order, we cannot at this moment ascertain. We copy the passage as another illustration of the humility, the self-abasement, the spirituality, and the filial trust in God which characterise the public devotional formularies of that era of our church; and also for the lesson so impressively conveyed of the connexion between national judgments and national sins. This lesson is so constantly taught in Scripture, and so explicitly adopted in the services of our own national church, that, however necessary it might be, in consequence of the heedlessness of the fallen, and even the imperfection of the renewed, mind, to inculcate it again and again in every possible form, yet we should scarcely have thought it requisite, in a country where Scriptural knowledge is widely diffused, to set about proving it as an abstract question. But we live in extraordinary times; and not the least portentous feature of those times is, that notions the most paradoxical, unscriptural, and deleterious are issued from high and influential quarters, with a degree of confidence and publicity never perhaps before equalled. It is not among men of the world only, or professed sceptics, or open scoffers at the Gospel, that latitudinarian opinions on religion are now boldly avowed; the sacred ranks of the priesthood are not exempt from the baneful influence; nay, the episcopal bench itself is contaminated by its poison. Is this too much to say, when, looking over our last volume, we find two of the writers whose works we felt constrained to notice as filled with novel, paradoxical, and most dangerous positions, now occupying elevated offices in our hierarchy, and one of them suddenly placed, without intervening step, at its highest grade? It behoves us to speak honestly and boldly on the subject. When we reviewed Dr. Maltby's discourses, the learned writer had not attained his present elevation; for we took up his volume when his name was first mentioned, CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 361.

among others, as a clergyman whom the present cabinet might be likely to approve, though in the few weeks' interval which necessarily elapsed between writing our remarks and their meeting the eye of the reader the appointment was announced. His lordship has since published another volume, dedicated with affectionate gratitude and eulogy to Lord Brougham; and though we feel much pleasure in saying that it is not by many degrees as exceptionable as that before noticed, yet it would be disingenuous if we did not add that it is lamentably defective, to say the least, as an exposition of Scriptural truth: nor would his lordship, we presume, think that we did him justice if we asserted that he really intended to palinode any part of his former publications. The avoiding some exceptionable propositions, or using some orthodox phrases, will not give to a system of divinity built upon essentially defective principles, the warmth and vitality of Scriptural, saving, sanctifying truth.

But this only in a parenthesis. We were about to remark, as growing out of our immediate topic, that Archbishop Whately, whose paradoxical and exceptionable notions upon several subjects, and especially on the Christian Sabbath, we were lately constrained, with much pain, to notice, has just published a discourse in reference to " the present crisis," and particularly as regards the expected, and the nowcommenced, pestilential visitation. In this discourse, and its appendix, his Grace endeavours to prove that what the Scriptures call "the sore judgments of God," such as war, plague, and famine, are not intended as national retributions; that nations are not providentially dealt with as nations; that however Scriptural persons may consider the notion of national retribution to be, it is utterly illogical,-a mere figment,—a false construction of sacred history, derived from an incorrect reasoning from the conduct of God towards the Israel

D

ites to his conduct towards other nations. If any seriously minded reader will take the Bible, and, after reading it through from beginning to end with a view to this question, will say that he considers the Archbishop's proposition tenable, it will be time enough to take up the argument. For the present, merging logic in Scripture, the question being one in which Scripture is the only guide-for God only can reveal how God is pleased to act-we leave it to the honest conclusions of every unbiassed student of the sacred word. The only difficulty which such a reader will find will be in the selection of proofs; for the whole fabric of the sacred text, its doctrines, its precepts, its historical details, its prophecies, all speak one language. We would rest the whole argument upon that one chapter, commented on in our View of Public Affairs, in our last Number, the xivth of Ezekiel ; the key to which, we then remarked, little thinking we should so soon find an archbishop to assert the contrary, is “when the land sinneth against me;" not merely the land of Israel, but in the plain spirit of the passage, any land where the warnings of God are known. So also our venerable Reformers, and the bishops, clergy, and pious laity of our church, have ever construed and applied them; for what are our occasional services, our days of public prayer and fasting, or of joy and thanksgiving, our authorised formularies relative to war, famine, and pestilence, nay, the solemn prayers lately issued, and now in constant use, but recognitions of the providence of God towards nations, acknowledgments of national sin, and pleadings for national mercies? The Archbishop of Dublin's doctrine appears to us not only incorrect, but most dangerous: for if God does not regard nations as nations,-if his sore judgments on a guilty land are not castigatory, if he has neither mercies in the one hand, nor vials of wrath in the other, according as a people turn to him or forsake him,

then why preserve any form of public religion? why should kings be nursing fathers, or queens nursing mothers, to the church of Christ? why should any man "sigh and cry for the abominations" of the land? why have prayers for national mercies, or penitential acknowledgments of public guilt? why attempt to put down national sins? why profess one religion more than another? why not equally encourage Protestantism in England, Popery in Ireland, and Mohammedanism in Turkey? and why commit the practical solecism of awarding to archbishops large public revenues to teach men that God is not a moral Governor of nations, since, if he be not, the nation, considered as a nation, had better appropriate the revenues of the see of Dublin to macadamise the streets than devote them to the purposes of a national church establishment? Not so taught our revered forefathers; in proof of which we adduce the extract before referred to from the Thanksgiving service of 1563; and which is but an echo of every similar service in all churches and all ages.

"And as thou hast made us so excellent of nothing, so hast thou restored us, being lost, by thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ dying for us upon the cross, but more marvellously and mercifully than thou didst create us of nothing. Besides, that thou dost continually forgive and pardon our sins, into the which we daily and hourly fall most dangerously, yea, deadly also, damnably, and desperately, were it not for this the present and most ready help of thy mercy. And what have we that we have not by thee? Or what be we, but by thee? All which unspeakable benefits thou hast, like a loving Father, bestowed upon us; that we thereby provoked might, like loving children, humbly honour and obediently serve thee our God, and our most gracious Father.

"But for so much as we have dishonoured thee by and with the abusing of thy good gifts, thou dost

even in this also, like a father correcting his children whom he loveth, when they offend, no less mercifully punish us for the said abuse of thy gifts, than thou didst bountifully before give them unto us; scourging us sometimes with wars and troubles, and sometimes with famine and scarcity, sometimes with sickness and diseases, and sundry other kinds of plagues, for the abusing of peace, quietness, plenty, health, and such other thy good gifts, against thy holy word and will, and against thy honour and our own health, to thy great displeasure and high indignation, as thou now of late terribly, but most justly and deservedly, hast plagued us with contagious, dreadful, and deadly sickness. From the which yet thou hast mercifully, and without all deserving on our parts, even of thine own goodness, now again delivered us and saved us."

To pass on,—we have before us a proclamation by the Lord Mayor of London, dated Sept. 16, 1574, "for avoiding the increase and spreading of the infection of the plague within this city, so much as by a good policy it lieth in us to do;" but we do not remember to have seen any form of prayer issued on the occasion. The Lord Mayor, in the Queen's name, prohibits any person appearing in public from any house in which there had been the plague, till twenty days after it had ceased; and even after this (semi) quarantine, each of the inmates was to carry with him," openly in his hands, a white rod of the length of two feet, without hiding it from open sight," under pain of a considerable fine, or twenty days' imprisonment in the cage. The clerk or sexton of each parish is enjoined to affix to the door of every infected house, a paper, inscribed with the words, "Lord, have mercy upon us," which was not to be taken down till one month after the malady had ceased.

In the year 1604, the second of James the First, and the year of the celebrated Hampton-court Conference, a dreadful plague raged in

London, which swept off within the year, thirty thousand persons, out of a population at that time of only one hundred and fifty thousand; one fifth of the whole population. On this occasion a public fast was enjoined to be kept every Wednesday during the calamity, and a form of

66

prayer and godly meditations " was set forth by the King's authority, most necessary to be used at this time in the present visitation of God's heavy hand for our manifold sins;" for the modern philosophical doctrine had not then been discovered that such visitations are not penal, and that God does not deal with nations after their sins, or reward them after their iniquities. The chief of the prayers for this occasion were taken from the excellent office of 1563, from which having already amply quoted, we shall not make any further extracts. The weekly fast was ordered, as on that occasion, to be very strict; no person (except children, old, weak, and sick persons, and harvest labourers) was to eat on that day more than one meal, and that of the simplest food, and the rich were enjoined to give the value of the meal forborne to the poor. The fast was not to be broken till after the evening's service; and, lest this should be too long protracted, an admonition was issued, that there should be but one sermon at morning prayer, and that not above an hour long," and the same at evening service; in order, says the injunction, " to avoid the inconvenience that may grow by the abuse of fasting; some esteeming it a meritorious work; others, a good work of itself, acceptable to God without due regard to the end; others presuming factiously to enter into public fasts without the consent of authority; and others keeping the people together with overmuch weariness and tediousness a whole day together, which in this time of contagion is very dangerous, in so thick and close assemblies of multitudes."

Annexed to this form of prayer and meditations, is "An Exhor

tation to be used by the Minister, who is not a Preacher;" for even so long after the Reformation as the reign of James the First, a comparatively small part only of the clergy were licensed to make their own sermons, or were considered competent to do so. The authorities, civil and ecclesiastical, were for many years not very willing to trust the clergy generally with the composition of their own discourses; in some instances, perhaps, for fear of Puritanism; in more, from a dread of the lingering remains of Popery, not yet thoroughly eradicated from our universities, cathedrals, or country churches; and in all, from a wish to secure both competency and uniformity. In those days, the notion of every clergyman being his own sermon maker would have been considered preposterous; nay, long after, when licences had become general, we find Addison urging the clergy rather to copy than compose; nor is the doctrine yet extinct, and we have known the advice given to a young man from a high quarter, Do not be such a coxcomb as to pretend to make your own sermons, when there are thousands, infinitely better, made to your hands: it would be most egotistical to set up your own notions of doctrine, and to dip buckets into your own shallow well, when, by judicious selection, you may secure to your parish the learning, orthodoxy, and literary talent, of the best and most able men, to oppose vice and stimulate them to piety and virtue." We strongly protest against this doctrine. A clergyman, especially a young clergyman, ought indeed to pray, study, read, digest, abridge, abstract, and avail himself of valuable materials wherever he can find them; but to be a mere servile transcriber of other men's discourses, is an utter degradation of his office. If he is not sufficiently apt to teach, to be able to make a useful and instructive discourse on a Christian doctrine or precept, with such aids as are at his command, he is not qualified for his

"

function, and ought not to have been ordained to it. Two centuries and a half ago the case was very different; though even then we think that more might have been demanded, and that, had it been demanded, clerical education and reading would have risen to the extent of the demand, and that many who became clergymen without ever becoming preachers would either have shaken their talent, if they had one, out of the napkin which concealed it, or else have been justly consigned to some other vocation which did not require it. But in the present day there is no plea for any man's becoming a clergyman, who is not able, with the ample assistance within his reach, to compose, or, if necessary, compile a suitable discourse, so as to make it honestly his own, while he liberally avails himself of the labours of others; and such a discourse, earnestly prayed over and delivered from the heart, will almost always be preferable, in point of practical effect, to the cold monotony of the most splendid stolen composition. It is not enthusiasm, but a scriptural trust and repose in God, to look to him for guidance, assistance, and blessing, in the diligent and patient exercise of every branch of the ministerial office; and this, in the very proportion in which the minister feels and mourns over, his own weakness and incompetency.

The exhortation above-mentioned is prefaced by an apologetic address, in which it is stated, that the Apostles themselves directed their Epistles to be read by ministers in churches : and that though the name of Homily 'by a misunderstanding con

was

""

[ocr errors]

ceit not acceptable with many, a homily was in fact only an epistle or declaration grounded upon the word of God, and written by Apostolical men, with the approbation of the church. It would seem from this that there had already arisen much distaste to these appointed discoursings, and that the people wished to be addressed directly by their own pastors. This exhortation or homily was introduced with the

« AnteriorContinuar »