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PUSEYISM POURTRAYED.

its miserable deficiency, affix to it this opprobrious yet appropriate brand-"Tekel, thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting."

As almost every age of the Church has apparently been marked by its appropriate visitation of error, so little penetration is requisite to perceive that PUSEYISM is the prevailing and widely-spreading epidemic in the episcopal community of the present day. And all genuine Protestants will acknowledge that it is an evil of deadly malignity, gigantic form, and increasing growth; for it seems to be every day waxing larger and larger, and growing stronger and stronger. It is sowing differences, fermenting feuds, and causing irremediable schisms amongst the ministers and members of the National Church of England, and tearing it with intestine broils and controversies. It is discarding the bread of life, for that which is not bread and satisfieth not, whilst it destroys the vital essence of christianity, and reduces it to a mere affair of outward ceremony. It is turning away the attention of the multitudes who admire it, from the means whereby the soul may be saved, in order to fix the hopes upon unavailing rites, which at best can only gratify the outward senses, and stupify and silence conscience. It is degrading the doctrine of justification by faith, and, in its room, multi

PUSEYISM POURTRAYED.

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plying and exalting various fantastic and popish forms; and, as a necessary consequence, leaving the minds of it votaries without solid scriptural peace, and spiritual culture; seeing that the heated imagination is fed and inflamed by it only with pompous ritual, and bodily exercises which can profit nothing. In the economy of the Christian covenant, the truth as it is in Jesus is the saving instrument; but in Puseyism, salvation is the offspring often of ceremonial observance. In the Scriptures, a faithful manifestation of the truth is sanctified by promises of grace; but for the pompous and semi-popish exhibition, for costly vestments, lighted candles, embroidered altar cloths, stone and wooden crosses, lowly bowings of the head towards the chancel-for all these, where is the promise of a single blessing registered in the whole Bible? These have no life-giving energy at all; they are a Nehushtan; and when there is no ordinance of heaven to clothe them with efficacy, what are they? They are but useless burdens, or interrupting barriers, between the mind and the things that belong unto its peace. Yet these puerilities in worship, these barriers between the soul and God, Puseyism with infinite labour is piling up; for it is superinducing amongst its votaries a love of ceremony, and a return to questionable observances which had long sunk into proper

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PUSEYISM POURTRAYED.

desuetude, in the room of inward, heart-felt spirituality-directing to forms and rites, and rubrical and traditional authority, instead of leading up the human mind to a more reverential and entire submission to the supreme authority of the word of God. It is decking itself more and more in the gorgeous habiliments of the scarlet-coloured harlot of mystical Babylon, instead of prizing the linen clean and white, which is the righteousness of saints, and glorying in the simple garb of pure and unsophisticated Christianity. In fine, it is promulgating most of the leading tenets of popery, whilst still deceptively lisping the "Shibboleth," and retaining a few of the outward characteristics of acknowledged protestantism. This is the system, against which, the calls of Providence at the present day, in a peculiar tone of emphasis, call all christian soldiers to contend. And as, in contending for the faith, it is essentially requisite to know, at least to a certain extent, the Protean forms and ever-changing modifications which Error (chameleon-like, continually altering its hues and aspects) variously assumes; and in order to give the hesitating, uninformed, and unwary, convincing proofs that there is an imperative necessity in the present day to jealously guard the interests of scriptural truth, we shall proceed to bring before the view of the

THIS CONTENTION NOT FRIVOLOUS.

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reader some of the false and dangerous opinions of the pro-catholic school of Oxford divines, and which are being, from the pulpit and the press, widely propagated by a large portion of the bishops and the inferior clergy of the Church of England. And be it distinctly remembered respecting the present contention, that it is not to be classed with those wrangles of party, which amuse ignorant zealots, and disgrace sober enquiry. This is truly a contention for "the faith," and let it be observed, too, that it is not engaged in until after long forbearance under multiplied assaults, insults, and provocations; and not even then, till we feel ourselves called upon by the intimations of Providence, and a most solemn sense of duty, to vindicate the perverted truth, and the abused and grossly dishonoured doctrines and ordinances of our Master in heaven. And so, having girded on the armour of righteousness, we will not lay it aside, till we shall have endeavoured to expose those arrogant pretensions of the Puseyite-priesthood, those popish introductions of the sacramentarians, and those fallacious and anti-scriptural reasonings of the Tractarians, which are calculated grievously to distress the feelings of every genuine protestant, and to deceive and lead onward, by sure though imperceptible degrees, the hearts of the simple and superstitious into

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THE LEADING TENETS OF TRACTARIANS.

all the depths and soul-destroying errors of the Papacy.

For the information, then, of those who have not much examined the heresies of the ninety voluminous numbers of the Oxford "Tracts for the Times," the following enumeration may be regarded as a brief recital of the more prominent doctrines and Romanizing dogmas promulgated and maintained by Dr. Pusey, Professor Keble, the Rev. John Henry Newman, and the other writers of the Tracts, and the numerous disciples of that semi-popish school of divines. All the ministers, and others of the Church of England who hold Tractarian tenets, maintain the doctrine of Apostolical Succession, or the existence of one christian episcopal priesthood, in an unbroken line for eighteen centuries, as an exclusive, unique, and integral caste, who alone have rightful ministerial authority to preach the gospel, or to communicate, through the ordinances, spiritual gifts; that evangelical truth cannot exist apart from the Anglican (which they call the "truly apostolic") Church. They

*

— "in this country (says the Bishop of London, in the charge delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral, October 10, 1842,) the clergy of the national church, and they alone, are entitled to the respect and obedience of the people, as their lawful guides and governors in spiritual things.