the sure standing and continuance of the creature, by grace, IN HIм-"by Him all things consist"-" in Him was life." Thus, in the gospel by St. John, the especial testimony to the Son of God, we are at once led back, by the Spirit, to that which was before the visible creation existed. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John i. 1). "And the Word was made flesh" (ver. 14). This, as the sure foundation of the state of things, thereby to be made known and manifested, and as enduring (ката πро0εow), and that wherein shall be shewn the TRUTH of that said of man," in the image of God,"-and of all things," very good." But redemption required that there should be blood, death, resurrection; and all these intervened, before the full declaration of the hidden mystery could commence, and that He should take his place as the Head of all things, in order to the Spirit's testimony going forth as to what was (John vii. 39). But now is come forth from the Spirit, the full announcement of the mystery of " the dispensation of the fulness of times :" and, surely, to know our place and portion in those arrangements which are to be enduring, and for ever built up securely in God, must be a matter of the highest interest and importance; and also, in knowing that we have a portion therein, to be enabled now to enter into the mind of God, in the revelation of the mystery he has given, should be a subject of interest. This is our present portion, for we have the Spirit, the earnest of our inheritance. It is in the knowledge of what we are in Christ, as before God, and what God is to us in Christ, that we are capacitated to receive the further communications of the mind of God, as to what Christ is to all things, and this in order to our being "filled into all the fulness of God." It should be the subject of our prayers, the object of our unwearied diligence, to be filled with God, and to have his mind in all things. It is the power, ever so regarded in Scripture, of our deliverance from this present evil world, into the world of faith,-God's world,-into that state of things which shall endure with the permanency of God, under the headship of the Lord Jesus Christ. And this, as God's object and purpose, should be our object and desire, in attaining true knowledge and understanding therein. It is, moreover, the true secret of power and facility in the discharge of those duties, which more especially belong to our present position and circumstances as being in the world, as the children of God here, in a place of testimony and service to Him. We may observe that this prayer of the Spirit by the apostle (Eph. iii. 14) is on behalf of those who had been inade partakers of the "riches of his grace," in redemption through the blood of Jesus, and who had been sealed with that "Holy Spirit of promise, the earnest of the inheritance......to the praise of his glory" (Eph. i. 13). It is now on the ground of glory that the apostle prays,-" according to the riches of his glory." It is not only of grace, though all be of grace, but of glory, that we are made partakers," who by Him do believe in God, that raised Him up from the dead, and gave Him glory, that your faith and hope might be in God” (1 Pet. i. 21). The character in which God is recognised and addressed here, is, "the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,"the whole family thus as named of him, standing in the same relationship to God, and the glory of God, as he himself does (Eph. i. 3). And, indeed, in any recognition short of this, the whole character and subject of the prayer would be unmeaning and presumptuous. But this is true, and the character and standing of every believer in Jesus, as known to God, and as being one with and in Christ in resurrection life. Thus, in the declaration of the Lord after His resurrection, “I ascend to my Father, and your Father, to my God, and your God" (John xx. 17). This more fully shewn by the Spirit, as sent from Jesus, returned to the bosom of the Father, as shewing us "plainly of the Father," in the abundant testimony of the Spirit, in the epistles to the churches. "Because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father" (Gal. iv. 6). Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ" (Rom. viii. 16). "Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet (kavwσavri nuas) to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light, who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son" (Col. i. 12, 13). Hereupon the apostle prays, that we may be "strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man," the "new man" in Christ Jesus;-strengthened in that which alone is capable of receiving and understanding farther communications of God,—that which is of God, born of God, begotten of God, a new, a spiritual and "The a holy nature. "That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God." That all that Christ was and is to us, and all that he has done and will do for us, may be constantly and habitually present (karoknoα) with us,—not drawn away by objects of sense, and present attraction, but having Christ as the one great subject of our meditation: and what a blessed field of thought is here!-Bethlehem, Nazareth, Capernaum, Galilee, Judea, Jerusalem, Gethsemane, Calvary, the crown of thorns, the cross, the grave, Emmaus, Mount Olivet, Heaven, the right hand of God," a little while, I will come again." And all this of Him, who is the Eternal Son of God, the Word, in the beginning with God, and God, the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person, yet himself truly man. We sometimes hear of the first principles of the truth,- but the first principles are all; Christ is the way, the truth, and the life; he is all and in all; the beginning and the end, the first and the last; the beginning of faith, the end of faith; wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption; the power of God, the wisdom of God, the glory of God, the love of God; and, O blessed thought! "Ye are complete in Him." It is thus when strengthened in spirit, Christ dwelling in our hearts by faith, our power and capacity to "comprehend" become enlarged and expanded, and this in proportionate measure, progressive and increasing; "the love of Christ that passeth knowledge." We come to know that here is the unfailing stream of love, gushing forth in unabated freshness and fulness, through the ages of a boundless eternity. It is that wherein GoD shall be known to the whole family in heaven and earth, when every cloud of sin for ever removed, the calm and hallowed light of his unveiled glory shall shine forth, to gladden their hearts for ever. The love of Christ is that wherein the boundless infinity, the fulness of God is, and shall be manifested. Its height is hidden in God, coming forth thence, as the counsel of the infinite mind, in the beginning, of which all we can know or say, is, that "God was." Its depth is infinite, it has reached below the lowest possible depth of sin and pollution, and distance from God, even beneath that depth where there was no hope. Its breadth comprises the utmost limits of God's creation, to gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and on earth. Its length too is infinite as God and eternity. When God ceases to be, and eternity comes to an end, then, and not till then, shall we find the limit of the love of Christ. In a word, it is the fulness of God, into which it is our joy, our blessing, our portion present and future, to be filled; and this, in the increasing comprehension of the love of Christ. IT IS THE LOVE OF CHRIST, THE FULNESS OF GOD. "Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto Him be glory in the Church by Christ Jesus, throughout all ages, world without end. Amen." IOTA. [A deeper attention to these things, in a prayerful spirit, would be infinitely more powerful than lengthened argument to prove to the child of God that the things of Jesus are the subjects of inward power and joy, and not of empty speculation.—ED.] GENERAL INTELLIGENCE. 66 ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY." A WRITER in the British Magazine thus expresses his fears of the Oxford party, arising from the exposures made in the above able work. "I have said that Ancient Christianity' is here a profane misnomer. If the author's representations be 'true and exact,' they involve a monstrous contradiction in words and things; they exhibit the essence of hypocrisy in the form of both simulation and dissimulation; they exhibit the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life,' in the most frightful degree; they exhibit the features of a system, in every respect worse than refined heathenism, and all these the attributes of the universal Church! I need not add that, if the author's picture were correctly drawn, it would be impious to call such a society the Church; for the gates of Hades' did actually prevail against itin other words, THERE WAS NO CHURCH AT ALL DURING MANY AGES!" The writer and his friends will find it easier to exclaim than to disprove the statements brought forward by Mr. Taylor. We fear nothing from the inference drawn by this writer. It is most clearly told us, that the mystery of iniquity did already work in the days of the Apostles, and that this should end in "the falling away" spoken of in the second of Thessalonians. The writer's application of the passage regarding "the gates of Hades," is therefore inadmissible. give diligence to make their calling and election sure, he does in effect tell them that it may be forfeited, and lost for want of diligence; and that, therefore, none of them can have been for a surety chosen beforehand of God to be saved. All the other passages in the writings of the Apostles, where election is mentioned, are to be explained in like manner; so that the term elect is never used to distinguish some Christians from others, but to distinguish all Christians in general from those who had not taken up the Christian profession....... All who are baptised into the name of Christ, and profess his saving faith, are elect, and yet may forfeit their election by unchristian conduct. All who disown that holy name, or dishonour it by their practice, are reprobate; and yet, by God's grace, they may be brought back to the truth, and rooted in the faith, and by diligence make their calling and election sure. "St. John called our Saviour the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world, not of the chosen few, the predestinated, but of the whole world; whose sins being thus taken away, they are JUSTIFIED, and may be saved if they please. "There are no doubt some expressions in the writings of St. Paul, which seem at first sight to give some countenance to the doctrine of predestination; but St. Peter has told us that in the writings of that great Apostle there are some things hard to be understood, amongst which we may safely reckon those to which I refer, i. e. Rom. viii. 29."-Sermon on Predestination, intended for the use of country congregations, by Charles James Blomfield, D.D. To say that the Bishop of London is, by these extracts, manifestly an Arminian, would be far below the truth; for no well-instructed Arminian that we ever met with would have ventured to commit himself by publishing sentiments betraying such entire unacquaintance with the first principles of Christian theology. But whilst we have the Bishop of London thus in low places, beneath Arminianism, on the other hand, we have Dr. Copleston, the Bishop of Llandaff, in the high places of reprobation, according to the sentiments which that prelate uttered in a sermon preached at the anniversary meeting of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, in the year 1833. "It is to be feared," said the Bishop, "that some crude and rash efforts have been made among barbarous nations, under a mistaken notion that every moment lost in forwarding the work is a loss of the souls of men, and argues a culpable indifference to their eternal welfare. But we have no scriptural authority, either from precept or example, for this heresy and impatience in the prosecution of so great a charge; and however sinful it may be to neglect our Lord's commission, or to refuse to work in his vineyard, yet there is something not only injudicious in the attempt alluded to, but originally wrong in the conception, that the eternal interests of men are suffering by every moment's delay, on our part, in offering them the terms of Christian salvation. The Lord, I repeat it, knoweth who are his. He will not suffer any to perish because of the gradual development which has all along been made of divine truth. He has founded a Church as the medium through which this blessing is conveyed to men; and the members of that Church (i. e. the Church of England) are bound to carry on, according to the best of their judgments, and in proportion to the means and opportunities offered them, His gracious design. But let them not imagine that, to hasten it, by any means, is necessarily the way to accomplish it; or that to act without system, without method, without regular authority, is to follow the example set us by those who were his first instruments; and let them not repine at the course of Providence, which permits, in the meantime, millions of the human race to be born and die without a possibility of hearing His revealed word." From this merciless fatalism we may gather, that millions of the human race are to be left to perish till the bishops of the Established Church can make convenient arrangements for sending out missionaries of their own sect; and that in the meantime, no one is to repine at this arrangement, or wish it to be otherwise, or make tiny efforts to save souls out of the line of regular authority (i. e. Anglican Episcopacy) because the Lord knoweth who are his; in other words, members of the Church of England will be saved, and all the rest will perish. It might, perhaps, be suggested that the Bishop of Llandaff had not this confined meaning in his views of propaga ting the Gospel. The following sentence will clearly exhibit his real sentiments: -'If we (i. e. Society for Propagating the Gospel) are not aided as before by the Government of our country, the deficiency must be made good by private contributions, or we ourselves shall be justly chargeable with lukewarmness-with contracting instead of propagating the Gospel-with refusing the means of support to that Church which we have ourselves raised up, and which is the sole organ of imparting the word of God, in its unadulterated form, to countless myriads of human beings, dependent, in a great measure, upon our domain." GENEVA. SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY AT M. LE PROFESSEUR MERLE d'Aubigne, has lately done good service to the Church of God, in compiling a deeplyinteresting history of the Reformation, in which full justice is done to the character of that servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, Martin Luther. Many of the views of this extraordinary man would gain little favour from those who profess to tread in his footsteps in the present age, but perhaps least of all acceptable is the almost prophetic sentiment to which he gave utterance respecting universities, that he much feared they would prove to be great gates leading down to hell. We trust that M. d'Aubigné has these words before his eyes in the undertaking now commenced under his auspices at Geneva, yet we tremble for the result, when we find the celebrated champion of the doctrine of the Gospel thus expressing himself in a discourse delivered by him at the opening of the anniversary meeting of that school, May 1, 1834, and now published, under the sanction of Mr. Bickersteth, in "A Voice from the Alps." We find this startling position in p. 123: "Scholasticism has produced great minds; under its influence there was a progress (I do not hesitate to affirm it, though it may surprise many), I will not say in Christianity, but in science and theology." Is it, then, come to this, that the very champions of the doctrines of the Reformation-the men who stand formost in the cause of the Gospel-such as, like d'Aubigné, seem to step forward before the ranks of the Church of God, in order to encounter the giant rationalism which has so laid waste the father land of the Reformation, as to give cause to the Romanists triumphantly to denounce Germany as among the partes infidelium-that such men can find aught to delight them in the scholasticism which Luther denounced as the most fearful foe to the faith of God's elect. Can M. d'Aubigné glory in any progress in theology without a progress in Christianity? We fear much that there does exist a deep and wide spread and growing departure from the simplicity of the faith of the Gospel, even in these very quarters, or what mean such assertions as the following (p. 120): "Theology advances under the influence of God's Spirit, for there is, gentlemen, a progressive advance in theology." P. 101-"There is something in Christianity which does not change its essence; but there is something that changes entirely-its appearance: and it is for want of carefully separating the form from the substance, that so many have mistaken the invariable nature of the religion of Jesus Christ. A man changes his appearance in the different periods of his life, but, nevertheless, he is always the same man. Christianity, at the moment that it was given from above, like every thing that enters the sphere of humanity, was of necessity clothed with a human form." We do not profess to understand the meaning of the writer in this last paragraph. Contented with that "extreme simplicity, which has also its dangers," and which "regards philosophy as the source of gnosticism," and, therefore, 66 begins to cast a suspicious eye on the wisdom and scientific culture of the Greeks," we rest with perfect satisfaction on the declaration of divine wisdom"the Greeks seek after wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified......to the Greeks foolishness......because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men❞—and, instead of being able to say, that "the yvwo is an in-" true science"—of the Alexandrian school, was not such altogether" (p. 107), we are constrained to believe that, while "highly esteemed among men," it was "abomination in the sight of God." M. d'Aubigné sees, in the conflict between the school of Alexandria and the West, "that which powerfully contributed to the prosperity of Christianity. Alexandria creates a theological spirit in the Church: she begins to elucidate and systematise its doctrines; she prevents a gross anthropomorphism from invading the celestial doctrines of Jesus Christ." These passages occur in a review of the four ages, or forms, of christianity which this author considers he discovers in the history of the Church—the living form-the dogmatic form-the scholastic form the form of the Reformation. That which remains, the Professor deems mysterious and unknown, but thinks "it will unite all that was good in those gone by, and this leads (him) to speak upon an error of pious and well-meaning Christians, who speak only of returning to the primitive form, caring little for all that is to be found in the road from us to them. The Church can no more escape the influence of the successive forms through which it has passed, than a tree can despoil itself of the increase with which each spring has clothed it ;" a most just comparison: one would think M. d'Aubigné had before his view the parable (Matt. xiii. 31), "When it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof." The distinctive character of the new coming form our author deems "a universal activity," so that we venture to call it "the bustling form." In this he is probably correct; but let us not omit one sad, but essential feature, distinctly traced for us in the word of God, “Having the form of godliness without the power." We believe that few things in this evil world tend more to this final aspect of the "religious world," than the habit of dividing doctrines from the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, the dry abstract study of systematic theology. Instead of drawing fresh and living draughts of refreshment from the still waters that should make glad the heritage of God, and resting-lying down-in the green pastures of God's word, where do we find the sheep of Christ led by the systematically-instructed shepherds of the present day? Let the very organs of these classes, such as the Eclectic Review for the month (Jan. 1840-p. 103), an swer: "We are deeply and painfully convinced that ignorance of the mind of God in the Scriptures, is the sin of a great majority of Christians; that our |