ever, for the presence of the Holy Spirit, it becomes us specially to invoke His saving grace on behalf of our younger clergy, and to plead earnestly with God for our universities. But this is not all. To say nothing of the support which is due from the wealthy to the several societies for the education of pious young men of narrow means, great good may be accomplished by the distribution of useful books; such, for example, as the Reformed Pastor. It has its faults, we have admitted, and we regret that it is now republished without an introductory preface by some experienced minister; or that which the late bishop of Calcutta, then vicar of Islington, wrote for it many years ago. But still there are passages in it which must surely touch the cold affections of a thoughtless candidate for orders; and which a devout and pious one cannot read without deep searchings of heart. It is on such points that Baxter is unrivalled.

"Verily, it is the common danger and calamity of the church to have unregenerate and inexperienced pastors, and to have so many men become preachers before they are Christians; to be sanctified by dedication to the altar as God's priests, before they are sanctified by hearty dedication to Christ as His disciples; and so to worship an unknown God, and to preach an unknown Christ, an unknown Spirit, an unknown state of holiness and communion with God, and a glory that is unknown, and likely to be unknown to them for ever. He is likely to be but a heartless preacher, that hath not the Christ and grace that he preacheth in his heart. Oh, that all our students in the university would well consider this! What a poor business is it to themselves, to spend their time in knowing some little of the works of God, and some of those names that the divided tongues of the nations have imposed on them, and not to know the Lord himself, nor exalt Him in their hearts, nor to be acquainted with that one renewing work that should make them happy. They do but walk in a vain show, and spend their lives like dreaming men, while they busy their wits and tongues about abundance of names and notions, and are strangers to God and the life of saints. If ever God awaken them by saving grace, they will have cogitations and employments so much more serious than their unsanctified studies and disputations were, that they will confess they did but dream before. A world of business they make themselves about nothing, while they are wilful strangers to the primitive, independent, necessary Being who is all in all. Nothing can be rightly known, if God be not known; nor is any study well managed, nor to any great purpose, where God is not studied. We know little of the creature, till we know it as it standeth in its order and respects to God; single letters and syllables uncomposed are nonsense. He that overlooketh the Alpha and Omega, and seeth not the beginning and end, and Him in all who is The All of all, doth see nothing at all. All creatures are as such broken syllables; they signify nothing as separated from God. It is one thing to know the creatures as Aristotle, and another thing to know them as a Christian. None but a Christian can read one line of his Physics' so as to under.. stand it rightly. It is a high and excellent study, and of greater use thau many do well understand; but it is the smallest part of it that Aristotle

can teach us..... To see God in his creatures, and to love Him, and converse with Him, was the employment of man in his upright state; this is so far from ceasing to be our duty, that it is the work of Christ by faith to bring us back to it; and therefore the most holy men are the most excellent students of God's works, and none but the holy can rightly study to know them. His works are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein; but not for themselves, but for Him that made them. Your study of physics and other sciences is not worth a rush, if it be not God by them that you seek after. To see and admire, to reverence and adore, to love and delight in God appearing to us in His works, and purposely to peruse them for the knowledge of God, this is the true and only philosophy, and the contrary is mere foolery, and is called so again and again by God himself. This is the sanctification of your studies, when they are devoted to God, and when He is the life of them all, and they all intend Him as their end and principal object." (pp. 299-301.)

:

We must here record our conviction that the universities have not yet succeeded in providing a proper training for our young ministers. We do not complain that they teach too little theology; but that that which they teach is not of the right sort. It is ill chosen; it distracts where it should direct. Instead of concentrating the attention upon a few great essential points, it diverts it to a number of unimportant ones. We wish nothing taken from science or classical pursuits to be thrown into the scale of divinity; but we wish the divinity taught to be more wisely chosen. The pastoral lectures, we fear, we may set aside as practically of little worth for pastoral theology cannot be taught in lectures, unless, indeed, the professor be a pastor too, and takes his pupils round with him, one by one, in his parochial visits, and so gives them clinical lectures in spiritual surgery. But this, we suppose, is impracticable; and a few months' real work in the parish teaches many a young man that college lectures on parochial duties are, after all, of very little use. But, in another direction, much might be accomplished. The books selected for examination might, for instance, be such as to enlighten the conscience and animate the soul. They ought to be such as should lay down, with a clearness to admit of no misapprehension, the broad distinctions between popish and semi-popish error and the pure doctrines of the reformation and the word of God. It is not without authority for the statement, that we say--and we do so with deep regret― that many of our candidates for holy orders have no clear and distinct views, either of the great cardinal doctrines of justification and sanctification, or of the difference between them. They connect baptism with the former in some mysterious way, and have a very confused idea of the meaning of the latter. They confound the spiritual church with the church visible, and apply the promises which belong only to the spiritual members of Christ indiscriminately to the whole body of the baptized. The "sealing of the Spirit" they confound with the scal of baptism; and the

"spirit of adoption" they suppose to mean something essentially connected with, or consequent on, the sacrament of baptism. And this is the case with many zealous and even fervent young men. For of those who merely read for an examination it is needless to speak. Their knowledge, of course, is nothing more than the knowledge of the opinions maintained in the books put into their hands. But there are those of a very different character, who want instruction; who feel their ignorance; who are anxious to be taught; and we complain that they are not provided with the instruction they need ;-clear, precise, evangelical instruction, in the way of salvation, and in the things of God. Their state is that of the Ethiopian eunuch, but no Philip is at hand.

We are not insensible of the improvements which our system of clerical training has undergone of late, nor by any means disposed to underrate them. It is better, no doubt, to read the whole of Minucius Felix, or a single homily of Chrysostom, than to know nothing of the habits of thought which prevailed in the church for centuries after the close of the New Testament. But from this kind of reading no definite views of Christian doctrine, nor yet of ministerial duty, will be gained. Professor Harold Browne's work on the Thirty-nine Articles is, in every respect, a great improvement upon the meagre and often unsound divinity of bishop Tomline. We should be prejudiced indeed, if we did not see much to admire in the execution, and still more in the calm and candid temper, of Professor Harold Browne's volume on the Articles. Yet it is open to serious objections. It does not present the essential, saving doctrines of the Gospel in a clear, bold light. A student in astronomy, just entering on the science, is little the wiser for a course of lectures on the peculiar notions of Kepler, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe, with occasional commendatory notices of Sir Isaac Newton. He wants instruction, not mere information. He wants direction in his studies. What the men have said and thought who, after all, failed in their researches, may one day be interesting. At present, he wishes to be told what to learn, and shown how to learn it. We should be sorry to intimate that Mr. H. Browne, who has preached so well on the atonement, is an unsound teacher; but his pupils are frequently unsound. They present themselves, fresh from the study of his work, before our bishops with the confused notions of baptismal grace and sacramental justification to which we have alluded; and when we turn to the text book they have studied, we are not surprised. We find him speaking of the sealing of the Spirit (Eph. i. 13 and iv. 30), for example, thus: "Seal very probably only signifies the ratifying of a covenant, which is done in baptism." (p. 386.) And of baptism he says "It is a saving ordinance: salvation appears to be attached to it;" qualifying the statement, however, thus:"Yet it is evident, from the whole tenor of scripture, that the title to such salvation is defeasible; that the promise of eternal

life, though sure on God's part, may be made of none effect by us." (p. 628.) The effect of such instruction will naturally be to quiet the conscience with the reflection, that because we are baptized we are therefore justified; and to this conclusion, we presume, Mr. Harold Browne would not object, unless in the case of a person living in gross sin. In another chapter he speaks of justification in what we believe to be a much more correct and scriptural manner; but still with a painful hesitation, very unlike the clear, undoubting statements of one who, by the grace of God, has firmly grasped the truth of God:-" Therefore we may perhaps (1) fairly conclude that salvation is not of works; not merely not as the cause, but not even as the terms or conditions of our justification." (p. 313.) Is it thus that our young clergy are to be taught to set forth the doctrine by which not only churches but souls must stand or fall? The great want of the age is an earnest, evangelical ministry. Is it likely to be fostered by such lackadaisical instructions?

We want the breathing thoughts and burning words of Richard Baxter, and we want the men to utter them. Such men must, however, be taught of God. They must have learned something which no schools can teach. They must have felt their danger as sinners, condemned by a righteous law; and then, by happy experience, their safety as believers, justified by an all-righteous Saviour. They must have "tasted and seen" that "the Lord is gracious." Experience must have shown them wherein lies the difference between the baptism which the church administers and the baptism of the Holy Ghost; between being born of water in the visible rite, and being born again "not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever." They must have learned that to be a new creature in Christ Jesus, implies far more than to be a decent member of any visible church, however pure. Led by the Spirit of God, they will know themselves to be the sons of God, and the works of their Father they will do. Having the Spirit of adoption, they will work with a light and joyous heart; for they will feel that they work beneath the smile of God.

No inconsiderable part of the Reformed Pastor is taken up with arguments to enforce the necessity of a strict church discipline, and with various methods for effecting it. Few will deny that some discipline, more than we now possess, is, as our Prayer Book says, much to be desired. But we have no wish to see it carried further than that "Godly discipline" by which, "in the primitive church, such persons as stood convicted of notorious sin were put to open penance.' But Baxter would have called in the secular arm to punish sinners, and he blames the magistracy of his day for their remissness. He would have carried his sifting of the wheat from the tares to an extent which we think scarcely safe even in

such competent hands as his, most unsafe in the hands of the best meu, if wanting temper, spiritual discernment, and great experience of human nature. The "fencing the tables," as it is termed in the sister church of Scotland, sounds harshly in our ears, and conveys an idea at variance with the fulness and freeness of the invitation, "compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” Ministerial fidelity is of vast importance; but it is chiefly in the pulpit that it must be shown. Attempts at a rigid system of church discipline generally terminate in two evils-a narrow, if not a Pharisaic spirit within the church, and then the exclusion of many who ought to be found amongst the number of professing Christians. The scruples of those who tell us that they cannot enjoy the communion of saints when sinners are present at the table, ought surely to be silenced by the fact, that there was one known sinner at the board when Jesus first brake the bread and gave the wine to his disciples. But, indeed, the pulpit is a sufficient safeguard to the communion-table. Under a faithful ministry, worldly communicants will disappear; conscience will do its work; and it is seldom that a notorious sinner will present himself. If he should, private remonstrance ought of course to be resorted to. For ourselves, we do not regard the want of discipline as amongst the flagrant sins of the church of England; though no doubt there is room amongst us for some improvement. A holy ministry in all our parishes, is our first want; then the more active co-operation of the laity; and the attention of both, more and more withdrawn from the circumstantials of religion, and fixed in hearty faith and love upon its grand essentials. Of such a ministry Baxter, with all his faults-and, as a public man, they were not a few-was an illustrious type; and his parishioners at Kidderminster were, we have no doubt, bright examples to prove how "the gospel" faithfully preached becomes "the power of God unto salvation."

THE COTTON MANUFACTURE: LIFE OF SAMUEL CROMPTON.

The Life and Times of Samuel Crompton, Inventor of the Spinning Machine called the Mule; with an Appendix of original Documents, &c. By Gilbert J. French, F.S.A. Second Edition. London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co. 1860.

WE are not sure that the statement is flattering to our national vanity, but true it is, that every fifth man, fifth woman, and fifth child in England is supported by the cotton manufacture. More than four millions of our countrymen and countrywomen are dependent on this branch of industry. We spin annually, in round numbers, one thousand million pounds weight of cotton wool: a