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cious matter composing the funeral pile of the latter has again caught fire, and that the sparks of smouldering discord have been driven. hither and thither by diverse currents.

I am not disposed to cast invidious reproach upon the infirmities of Christian men. The Apostle Paul says, "Most gladly therefore I will rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me." (2 Cor. xii. 9.) My aim, however, is to shew to others how far the influence of morbid feeling may operate in warping the judgment and perverting the conduct of those who, in the main, are men of Christian worth and integrity.

There are certain apophthegms, which are statedly introduced at the religious meetings of the Trinitarian Bible Society, as follows:

1. "All Societies not so constituted must fall." The best reply to which is, that they are all of them placed and fixed upon solid ground, excepting the Institution which vents this anathema, and which has once already been overturned, and can hardly yet stand erect.

2. "One Bible given away in faith and prayer, is worth a million of the same books not so distributed." This assertion is answered by the fact, that many of them are given away in faith and prayer, if it be true that some are not; nor can any human being ascertain with precision the number. Sometimes this adage is lowered down from a million to ten thousand or a thousand. At present the barometer is very high again, and the naval aëronauts have crossed the channel.*

Our correspondent might justly have assumed a graver tone; for the spirit in which the Trinitarian Society speakers and report-writers speak of themselves and their own proceedings, and prayers, and surpassing purity of motive, and of the bad motives, and want of faith and prayer, of their Christian brethren, is most pharisaical and invidious. Thus Mr. Thelwall, in expressing at the late meeting his "grief and pain" that "one whom he loves and honours" (we suppose he alludes to the Bishop of Winchester) should " have given his sanction" to the Bible Society Report, and "pronounced his verdict of censure" upon the Trinitarian Society, says, "Now if he had been rising from his knees in prayer, I think it would not have been so." So then it is for want of prayer that the Sumners, and Ryders, and Wilsons, and Burgesses, and the Bexleys, Teignmouths, Hugheses, Steinkopffs, Dealtrys, Pratts, and thousands of other eminently wise and holy men, do not join the Trinitarian Society. In the same "stand by " manner the Society's advocates argue as though no person had any conscience but themselves. Thus the Rev. E. Rhodes, in seconding the printing of the Report, "in the humble hope, and with the earnest prayer, that it may tend, under the blessing of God, to promote those principles of Christian union upon which this Society is based," says, "We ask, then, whether their consciences prohibit them from becoming members of our society, as we are prohibited by conscience from joining theirs?" Undoubtedly a mere restriction of membership, though it might be quite superfluous, might not be unlawful. When the Lord's-day Society was being formed, some of the friends of the Trinitarian Society wished to force upon it their test, and had nearly broken up the nascent institution by their well-meant but ill-judged pertinacity; but the majority wisely concluded that its object was its best test; that the No. 11 Exeter Hall test was at once superfluous and defective; superfluous, since anti-Trinitarians were not likely

3. "Money is the prime object of all religious societies, instead of earnest contention for the faith." Without enforcing the argumentum ad hominem, I would observe that money is a necessary appendage to them; and so far from being too rich, there are constant appeals

to wish to aid Trinitarian objects: and defective, if intended as a basis either of spiritual or ecclesiastical union; and that, if they stipulated for it, they ought not, like the Trinitarian Society, to shrink from enforcing it. But though a restriction of membership, however superfluous, might not in itself be unlawful; yet when it comes to be made a criterion of Christian communion, so that all who are not shut out are embraced as true brethren, it was, and is, for that reason, regarded by many persons of tender conscience as unlawful. Such persons would reply to Mr. Rhodes that "they are prohibited by conscience from joining" an institution which professes to be a band of true believers, united in faith and prayer; and yet does not exclude from membership or management, persons of the most notoriously wicked lives, or unscriptural principles or schismatical doings, provided they do not profess to be anti-Trinitarians; nay, boasts that they are united by hallowed spiritual ties, when they do not even ask the question whether their members really are Trinitarians; the sole guarantee being that they know the title and waste-paper resolutions of the society, and contribute a guinea to its objects. Mr. Rhodes must be aware that many of the members of the society have quitted it from conscientious scruples. When it refused to keep out the oppugners of our blessed Lord's holy nature, a large and influential body of its members felt it to be their duty to secede from it, and to publish the strong protests which appeared in the Record newspaper and elsewhere; since that period many Christians have quitted it, on ecclesiastical and spiritual grounds; it being supported by no bishop, and not offering the smallest guarantee by its rules, that it will not to-morrow be altogether in the hands of Irvingites, or Swedenborgians, or violent political Dissenters (if they chose to become members), or that it may not issue sectarian Bibles; or cashier Mr. Secretary Thelwall, and put in an Anabaptist, to inundate the world with his peculiar version. Many very pious men will tell Mr. Rhodes that they can conscientiously contribute to support a hospital, or to distribute Bibles, without a test but that when there is an assumption of the devout spiritual union which he vouches to be the basis of his society, they must ask for far more than a resolution (and that moreover only on paper, and not to be enforced) against one or two kinds of heresy; and must demand the same tests as are necessary to constitute a church, or some such regulations as those of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Mr. Rhodes says, “We ask for no union broader than the church of Christ;" thereby including in that church all that is unscriptural in doctrine and unholy in life, provided there be no direct profession of anti-Trinitarianism. And yet, if we understand him rightly, he does not believe the Trinity to be an old testament doctrine; for he says: "As the unity of the Godhead was the one truth committed to the keeping of the Jewish church; so the Trinity in the Deity, the truth of the three subsistences in one essence, the mystery of three persons in one God-God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost-this is the Name of God committed to the Christian church." We beg leave to inform the Rev. Mr. Rhodes, that "the unity of the Godhead" is not "the one truth committed to the keeping of the Jewish church ;" and that the Seventh Article of the Anglican church (if he is a clergyman) declares expressly, that "both in the Old and New Testament

from one or other of them for an increase of funds in order to enable them to carry on their operations, which is the case with the Church Missionary Society at this moment.

4. " The Bible Society may make men moral, but the Trinitarian Society makes them moral and religious too." There are undoubted and oft-repeated evidences of the effects of the Bible Society, not only in a social respect, but in saving the souls of perishing mortals by the blessing of the Holy Ghost upon those who search his word, and who otherwise, humanly speaking, would have lived and died in ig

norance.

5. "Latitudinarianism of principle will always be followed by latitudinarianism of practice." Certainly a Christian institution, whose branches are ramified over the whole world, is more liable to error from that very circumstance, than one which is circumscribed within the limits of a single household or parish; a well-timed stimulus may therefore serve to augment its energies.

(To be continued.)

THE ATONEMENT A SATISFACTION TO DIVINE JUSTICE; IN REPLY TO AN OXFORD TRACT.

To the Editor of the Christian Observer.

WILL you allow me to draw the attention of your readers to the heading of page 29 of No.73 of the Tracts for the Times, where it is expressly said that the Atonement is not a satisfaction to the justice of God. Now in the Homily of the Nativity, it is just as plainly affirmed to be a satisfaction to the justice of God; and the same is also twice affirmed in the first part of the Homily of Salvation. Take one short specimen.

"The Apostle toucheth specially three things, which must go together in our justification. Upon God's part, his great mercy and grace: upon Christ's part, justice; that is, the satisfaction of God's justice, or the price of our redemption, by the offering of his body and shedding of his blood, with fulfilling of the Law perfectly and thoroughly, and upon our part true and lively faith in the merits of Jesus Christ, which yet is not ours, but by God's working in us. So that in our justification, there is not only God's mercy and grace, but also his justice; which the Apostle calleth the justice of God; and it consisteth in paying our ransom and fulfilling of the Law.'

The second article also affirms that Christ "suffered, was dead and buried, to reconcile his Father to us." Let us then make our choice whether we will receive the teaching of Scripture, (Romans iii. 26), and the Church of England; or the teaching of the Tracts for the Times. It will be seen how possible it is to profess an extravagant regard for the "teaching of the Church," and yet to teach in direct opposition to the Church.

PHOENIX.

everlasting life is offered to mankind by Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and man, being GOD and man." Does Mr. Rhodes seriously believe that only the unity of the Godhead is set forth in the Old Testament; and that Christ, the promised Messiah, is not made known as GOD, as well as man. It is well for Mr. Rhodes that Mr. Thelwall did not find him speaking at Earlstreet, instead of at the "Trinitarian" meeting.

POETRY.

THE WANDERERS OF ISRAEL,

(From "Remember Israel;" poems by a Clergyman.)

O Lord our God, other lords besides Thee have had dominion over us." (Isaiah xxvi. 13.)

On why should Judah's broken vine

So long neglected lie?

Why should her drooping tendrils pine, Where still the skies of Canaan shine, In cloudless brilliancy?

Why does not Syria's palmly plain,

Where Judah's children trod,
Recall her long-lost sons again,
The promised blessing to obtain
From Israel's covenant God?

And why should Salem's warriors tread
The shores of distant lands,
Far from their fathers lay their dead,
Their blood for Gentile tyrants shed
In many a martyr'd band?

Oh why forgotten and opprest

Should Jacob's offspring be
Without a home wherein to rest,
Nor one to utter, "Be ye blest
From far off Galilee."

The Jordan's waters flow as bright
As in departed days;

And Sidon's waves reflect the light
Of all the starry lamps of night
Beneath their silver rays.

By Cedron's stream the olive waves,
As she was wont of old,
Along her banks and mossy caves
Its brow each perfumed flower laves
In streams of living gold.

The Syrian fisher spreads his net
Upon thy sunny shores -

Then Israel, why shouldst thou forget
The country where thy fathers set
Their love in times of yore?

For now the faithless Arabs sleep

Where Abraham's tent arose ; And swarthy wanderers tend their sheep, Or the long midnight vigils keepJehovah's banded foes.

On Calvary's long forsaken hill

The Paynim's crescents gleam,
And idol fanes those deserts fill
Whereon Jehovah's glories still

In mid-day brilliance beam.
Yes! wanderer from a far off clime,

Where shalt thou find thy rest?
When shall the passing breath of time
Efface the memory of thy crime,

And bid thy sons be blest?

When shall the Gentile's iron rule

Relieve thy throbbing heart? When in Bethesda's troubled pool Shall angels bid its waters roll

To heal thy bosom smart?

Too long hath David's royal race,
God's own peculiar line,
Wander'd oppressed from place to place,
With only blood their path to trace-
Gentile that work is thine.

Ye warriors of departed days,

Your names shall rise again;
And the glad tones of joy and praise
Judea's sons again shall raise

O'er Ephraim's rocky plain.

Lords of a long-forgotten time!
We see your day-star rise!
Forgetful of your father's crime,
We hail you chief in every clime
Beneath Jehovah's skies.

"A CHANGE CAME O'ER THE SPIRIT OF MY DREAM.'

(From "Night Scene," and other
WHEN first we tread life's untried way,
The wide world all before us,
Through many a flowery path we stray,
The bright sun shineth o'er us;
The bounding heart-the sparkling eye,
We think will fail us never;
Youth's laughing morn and cloudless sky
Must last with us for ever.

Let others weep-a prey to care-
No cause have we for sorrow;
The sun that shines to day so fair,
Will brighter shine to-morrow;
CHRIST. OBSERV, No. 20.

poems, by the Rev. J. Evans, M.A.)
But years pass on, and with them go
Our airy dreams of pleasure;
And soon we learn that man below
Can have no lasting treasure.

So may you see in some clear stream,
With course unruffled flowing,
The youthful morning's rosy beam,
In life and beauty glowing;
Then fade-as, mourning o'er its mirth,
Some chilly cloud is driven :
'Tis ever thus when things of earth
Deceive with looks of Heaven.

3 R

66

AND MOSES WIST NOT THAT THE SKIN OF HIS FACE SHONE." (Exod. xxxiv. 29.) (From "Sabbation" and other poems, by the Rev. R. Trench.)

Ir that in sight of God is great

Which counts itself for small,!

We by that law humility

The chiefest grace must call; Which being such, not knows itself To be a grace at all.

How glorious was that meekest man

In all eyes save his own,

When from his splendid countenance
On all the people shone
- A glory insupportable,
Unto himself unknown.

REVIEW OF NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE ENGLISHMAN'S GREEK CONCORDANCE.

The Englishman's Greek Concordance of the New Testament; being as attempt at a verbal connexion between the Greek and the English Texts. London: 1839.

We did not anticipate much upon reading this title; for what use, we thought, can a man who knows nothing but English make of a Greek concordance? and when we opened the work, and found side by side with the Greek words their English sounds in Italic characters, our antipathies were rather violent. And yet the book is a very good and valuable work if rightly used; and though we could well dispense with the anglicising of Greek words, which gives the volume an unscholar-like appearance, and is of no practical utility -unless it be to some 66 AGRAMMATOS" (we have taken the hint) young preacher, who wishes to figure in a village meeting-house by a little interlarding of the original," duly mispronounced by means of the English notation, —a vile use to which the English Greek in Henry's excellent Commentary is said to have been perverted. Still the book, as we shall shew, may be of good service even to a "vernacularian," if he be a judicious biblical reader; while to the ripe scholar it will be still more useful, in saving him much time and labour in collating passages. When the object

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is chiefly to discipline the mind, labour is its own reward; as a man digs in his garden for healthful exercise, and might continue to do so though an engine were invented that would trench by the acre; but when it is required to collect the largest harvest at the least expenditure of toil, if the work could be done as well, and more cheaply and quickly, by newly-invented implements, there is no reason why they should be despised.

On this account the many facilities of late years afforded for the prosecution of biblical criticism, ought to be highly prized. The treatises in the Edinburgh "Biblical Cabinet"-rejecting some exceptionable matters-are a most valuable aid to the British student; who has thus at a small charge, and in the vernacular tongue, the whole, or the substance, of many scarce and expensive books; some of which indeed were open to him in his own tongue, or in the universal language of Latin, but others were locked up in German. Professor Robinson's elaborate Greck and English Lexicon of the New Testament-though this also is

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