CAMBRIDGE.

NOTICES TO CORRESPONDENTS.

A paper on St. Paul's Conversion, B. Clericus, &c. have been received.

The article upon Clerical Societies will not suit us. In fact, except in cases of especial merit, the limits of our Journal do not allow us to notice the plans of these and similar projects, which are continually sent to us.

"A.." and "U. Y." in our next.

The French "Code Ecclesiastique" is unavoidably postponed.

"A Staffordshire Curate" will see that part of his request is anticipated. Neither he nor our good friends at Chichester, Bath, and Leicester, shall be forgotten next month.

• These gentlemen, and those in brackets, were equal,

THE

CHRISTIAN

REMEMBRANCER.

MARCH, 1829.

REVIEW OF NEW PUBLICATIONS.

ART. I.-The Life and Times of William Laud, D.D. Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, by JOHN PARKER LAWSON, M. A. In Two Vols. London, 1829. Rivingtons. pp. xxiv. 1138.-price 17. 8s.

FEW characters have deserved more, or received less, at the hands of posterity, than that of the high-minded, conscientious and munificent Prelate, whose eventful and instructive history has afforded the materials for the eloquent and splendid work before us. Living as he did in times of great religious and political asperity, it is fortunate that his biographer should have appeared in the person of a writer, who, from his situation and connexion, is, of all others, best adapted to convey the narrative of the events he treats of, without the risk of being charged with inclinations to defend the rights, or propagate the principles of party. It is doubly fortunate; for independent of any open favoritism, he cannot be even charged with any secret leaning to the opinions he has taken up upon the subject, through the influence of selfish hope, or the prudential fear of future reverses. He enters on his labour, therefore, with no drawback to the credibility of his assertions on the score of personal or party prejudice; and few, indeed, are the historians of the day, who, uniting to such a positive recommendation, the literary and mental qualifications for his task, have exhibited the proofs and the examples of such candid sentiments, such patience and research, such grace of style, and such nervous eloquence of diction. But there is another and a more commanding claim on our attention, which, as the defenders of the Church of whose honour we are jealous, and for whose welfare we are anxious, it would be not only unreasonable, but unjustifiable, to overlook :-the plain, forcible and generous defence which Mr. Lawson has put forward of the Church of England. Nor should we omit to state, with what accuracy of detail he has pointed out, not

only in themselves, but in their reference to the parallels of earlier times, the painful and most perilous neglect of discipline-the heterodox determination to schismatical absurdity-and the impatient tolerance of a due and necessary authority, which, in too many instances, are found to characterize these times, although so far removed by years, so nearly allied by prevalence of variable opinions, to the turbulent and factious days of James and Charles.

It is true, that the same fanatical and boisterous democracy of will, in matters of ecclesiastical privilege, may not, to the same degree, affect us; but now, no less than then, there is an unquiet and a venomous hostility against the laws and rights of Church authority and doctrine, which, if not curbed by proper management, may, one day, break out into as unholy and as unpeaceful an assertion of independence, as that which first declared the object and intentions of the Puritans and Regicides. Whilst too, even at the gates of the commonwealth, there is thundering a Popish faction, who, having braved and defied the spirit and justice of the nation, are, through the cowardly surrender of the authorized guardians of the country's strength, about to be admitted to an insolent and impudent intrusion into the very citadel of our freedom, it is not only an amusing study, but an absolute and imperative duty, to look back to distant times, in order that we may prepare our reasons for the comprehensions of the plans in preparation, and our hearts for the defence of all that is dear to us, by the history of the times of which these are the anti-types, and of the lives of those, whose courage and whose zeal, and whose simple-minded and straight-forward independency of spirit, it should be our pride, as it is our privilege, by opportunity to emulate.

What may yet be in store for ourselves or our descendants, it is not in our power to predict; but these are not times, decidedly, when a man may sit with folded hands, and an unwatchful eye, whilst an affected liberality, like a deadly adder, is insinuating itself into our very vitals, and an arrogant, supercilious foe stands, like the hungry and ferocious tiger, at the very threshold of our public security. In times like these, it is fitting that we look back for counsel and advice, whilst, at the same time, we look forward to consequences, and around to the actual danger and fearful nature of our circumstances. And how can we do better than copy the skill, and imitate the zeal, decision, and constancy of WILLIAM LAUD, who, by his firmness, saved the Church in the time of peril, and who, in the day of ruin, consecrated to her honour, by his death of martyrdom, that noble life which had adorned her in the days of his prosperity. At any rate, whereinsoever the circumstances of this agree with the circumstances of that age, an useful instruction may be gleaned from the narration of a life which, perhaps, more than any other in the list of modern

ecclesiastical worthies, has wherewithal to edify and to interest the candid and dispassionate inquirer into the history of his Church. We doubt not, Mr. Lawson will meet with great and general censure from those against whom he has arrayed himself in undisguised hostility; and that anger on the one hand, and disturbed vanity on the other, will retort with no measured civility of speech. But as the proverb"Magna est veritas et prævalebit," is true under every change of circumstance, so far as his accuracy of detail, and his correctness of reasoning is impugned, the objections will recoil with tenfold force upon the heads of their employers; whilst the startling catastrophe of the accomplished prelate whom he eulogizes, will remain, as an unshaken testimony to the dreadful and calamitous influence of ungovernable licentiousness, and impatient disobedience to prescribed authority. Whether, therefore, in his zeal to vindicate a traduced, reviled, and insulted prelate from the unsparing malevolence of schismatical intolerance, he may have exceeded the limits of the legitimate field of history or not, no specious mode of reasoning from this excess to a denial of the truth of his statements in the gross, will, for an instant, avail the calumniator of the Bishop, or the impugner of this vindication of his life. Mr. Lawson merits well of every loyal member of the Church of England; and he has our warmest and unqualified applause: and we sincerely wish that the Church, of which he is so great an ornament, in the days of her decay, had power or influence sufficient to distinguish him as he deserves.

The whole burden of this most eventful history is the bigotry and rapine of the Calvinistic faction, who, at the close of the Elizabethan era, and in the subsequent reigns of the immediate successors of the Amazonian queen, brought trouble into the Church, discontent into the nation, and ruin on the kingly power. Allowances may be made for the excess of feeling operating in the thousand channels of human prejudice against the mystical abominations of the Church of Rome, from which the kingdom had so recently been freed; and due concessions may be made without a compromise to those who, fearful of ecclesiastical relapses, were jealous of the least connivance at what were, or seemed to be, a leaning to the forms, the customs, or the doctrines of that corrupt and blood-stained Church. But, unhappily for England, this jealousy of Rome was centered not so much in those who, nurtured in the school of the British Reformers, adhered to the discipline and doctrines of those Reformers, as in the bewildered hearts and heated fancies of the disciples of Geneva, whose strange and incoherent rhapsodies, and difficult interpretation of the Scriptures, had begun to find a genial soil in the minds of certain popular divines both southward and northward of the Tweed.