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A JOYOUS CONSUMMATION.

cast eye, and behold your bosom heaving with heaven-imparted and new-born desires for saving mercy through the merits of Jesus Christ, they will then exult over you with exceeding great joy, and, clapping their glad wings, will urge their way to heaven with emotions of rapturous delight, whilst they thus exclaim, "Satan has another vassal lost-Christ another subject won.”

Thus another soldier of the cross will be obtained, to " contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints," and another gem of incalculable worth added to the Saviour's regal, and mediatorial crown! The writer adds this fervent prayer-" SAVIOUR-CHRIST-and LORD! thus with many sinners, let it be!" And a Triune Jehovah, through eternity, shall have all the honour and glory. AMEN.

PART IV.

CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS.

IN now terminating these remarks, we may observe that, in reference to all the turbulent excitement and various contentions of the times in which we live, that all eventually will be overruled for good by Him who causeth the wrath of man to praise him, whilst the remainder of that wrath he restrains we cannot doubt. That "the faith once delivered to the saints" will ultimately triumph over all the forms of error with which it has to contend, we are assured. And that the divisions of the Church will be finally healed, her corruptions corrected, and her contentions subside, not into the stagnancy of moral death, or into the spiritless observance of humanly-invented ceremonies and anti-christian forms, but into the healthy and onward movement of a gentler, sweeter stream of life and love, we most firmly believe. And these convictions are to us a source of exquisite

H

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EPISCOPAL UNFAITHFULNESS.

consolation and confidence whilst girding on the harness, and exhorting others also to be "valiant for the truth." True, we blush at the unfaithfulness to pure protestant principles of so many of the episcopal clergy-we are utterly confounded on witnessing the precipitate retreat towards popish principles and practices of so many mitred prelates and ordained presbyters in the Anglican Protestant Establishment, who nevertheless still boastingly continue to make the insane avowal, that they alone belong to that privileged order of ministers who are "quite sure" that they are "the ONLY true SUCCESSORS of the Apostles!" Yet, blessed be God, all have not yet bowed down to Baal. And we believe that the day will surely come, in the future history of the Church, when all reflecting and pious minds will wonder at the monomania of the men who, on such frail and untenable grounds, (as have been examined) could urge their questionable claims to the deferential regard of all Christendom, as the empty boast of supposed true apostolical descent involves, whilst they will equally wonder that there ever were any sane or sensible christian men who could have sufficient credulity to entertain, for a single moment, those dogmas and delusions respecting sacramental efficacy, and other topics akin to them, which now so engross and lead astray the minds of

EXCLUSIVE CHURCHISM.

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many men. For of all the pitiable drivellings of our modern school of pseudo-divinity and hyper ecclesiastical polity—a school more distinguished than any other for the union of superstitious veneration for antiquity, with insolent and arrogant assumption of priestly superiority and sacredness-none can match in frothiness and effrontery that principle which, coolly impugning the sufficiency of Holy Scripture, forthwith proceeds to attempt to drive the public mind to a reception of its own dried dogmas and semi-popish chaff, as the only food on which. men's souls should live, and which, they tell us, is the "only authorized" aliment appointed by God himself, through apostolical transmission, for the nourishment and spiritual sustenance of craving millions of mankind in these protestant realms!

Now whilst we hear all this, and are compelled to contend against all this, we are grieved at the warfare in which the Church of Christ is at this day thus painfully involved, and sigh for the repose awaiting her in the latter day glory, and in heaven. And yet, ever and anon, we feel it to be our duty to come forth from our pastoral retreat and, as true soldiers of Jesus Christ, and the sworn enemies of error in all its forms, to oppose the aggressions and inroads of the Papacy, the destructive principles of an

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A FEARFUL CRISIS.

avowed or semi-infidelity, and the no less dangerous but infinitely more specious souldestroying heresies and intolerant assumptions of ill-disguised popish Puseyism (which is only Popery sublimated and etherealized), the partizans and abettors of which, are making a grand struggle for the dominant establishment of an exclusive spiritual hierarchy in this country. And though, in their daring attempts, they are aiming to wield the prerogatives of the Great Head of the Church-to give utterance to the anathemas-to grasp the thunders and direct the lightnings of heaven-though seeking to invest human beings in the name of " priests" with spiritual, with mystic, with fearful attributesyet we trust that He which sitteth in the heaven shall laugh at them-the Lord shall have them in derision. Still, still it is a fearful crisis, through which truth and the church are now passing. For the present controversy is a trial, on the part of the Oxford divines, for the mastery of liberty of opinion and the right of private judgment. All that the Church of God holds dear is fearfully endangered. The beginning of this controversy commenced in insolent and arrogant assumption, and its end (if successful) would be the prostration of men's minds, and the surrender of their liberties at the feet of a tyrannical and antichristian priesthood.

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