"Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work, to do his will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen." POSTSCRIPT. It has not been our plan, in the remarks offered on this most important subject, to seek for aid from the vast armoury furnished by writers of high celebrity; for though all the venerable names of the theology of the Reformation might be enlisted as affirmative of the views here stated, it has seemed better, on the present occasion, to refer exclusively to Scripture authority. It may, however, be instructive here, in conclusion, to show the sentiments of the judicious Hooker, the great authority of the Church of England, as proving the sentiments of the Established Church in its first era. Thus loftily speaks Hooker on the perseverance of the saints:: 66 "Blessed for ever be that mother's child whose faith has made him the child of God. The earth may shake, the pillars of the world may tremble under us; the countenance of heaven may be appalled, the sun may lose his light, the stars their glory; but concerning the man that trusteth in God, if the fire hath proclaimed itself unable so much as to singe a hair of his head; if lions, beasts ravenous by nature, and keen with hunger, being set on to devour, have, as it were, religiously adored the very flesh of the faithful man; what is there in the world that shall change his heart, overthrow his faith, alter his affection towards, or the affection of God towards him ? ... ... ... ... ... ... " Oh ! the certainty, the perpetuity of the faith in the elect! In this we know we are not deceived, neither can we deceive you, when we teach that the faith whereby we are sanctified cannot fail : if it did not in the prophet [Habakkuk,] it should not in you.”. : They which are of God do not sin, either in this or in any thing, any such sin as doth quite extinguish grace, and clean cut them off from Jesus Christ; because the seed of God abideth in them, and doth shield them from receiving any irremediable wound. Their faith, when it is strongest, is but weak ; yet even then, when it is at the weakest, so strong that it utterly never faileth; it never perisheth altogether, not even in them who think it utterly extinguished in themselves." ............ 66 The tone of the Church of England sadly changed after the Elizabethan age; and, indeed, lapsed towards popery in the reign of Charles I., so that the divines of the court party were all but papists then, both in doctrine and practice. The theology of the Church of England afterwards became Socinian, or something very closely allied to Socinianism. Its tendency is now again to rank popery, if the divinity of the Oxford Tracts should prevail, as seems highly probable. 273 REVIEW. Water Baptism and the Lord's Supper. -Philadelphia, 1837. pp. 100. WE have received from the author a copy of this work, which we hail with pleasure, as coming from a gentleman who has left the Society of Friends there on conscientious grounds, and whose high character in society, and truly Christian spirit, will, we trust, secure attention to the sentiments it contains. In addition to a reprint of treatises by Isaac Crewdson and Elisha Bates on the subject, it contains some interesting introductory remarks, a portion of which we now present to our readers. "Follow Peace with all Men." "TO WM. EVANS AND THOMAS EVANS, "Editors of Friends' Library. "RESPECTED Friends, Ir is, I trust, in the spirit of the apostolic injunction, which I have selected as my motto, and not with any disposition to provoke angry controversy or excite hostile feeling, that I have ventured to address you on the important subject treated in the accompanying pamphlets. Coming, as they do, from those with whom you have long been associated as members of the Society of Friends, and who have occupied the most prominent stations in that Society, esteemed in your own body 'standard-bearers of the truth,' and among other denominations looked up to as firm supporters of your own peculiar views, you cannot refuse to weigh well the arguments by which they seek to justify the change in their own opinions on a subject considered by your Society, if not fundamental, at least of great importance. That it is esteemed of vital importance among you may surely be fairly deduced from the assertion made by Josiah Forster, Samuel Gurney, and George Stacey, that 'they consider the spiritual character of the Gospel of our holy Redeemer to be intimately connected with the disuse of water baptism.'* It certainly is a startling circumstance, and one well calculated to excite an anxious investigation of the soundness of your views, that the author of a work, still referred to as a standard authority among you, and so highly esteemed as to have run through no less than fourteen editions of 1000 copies each, within the short period of ten years, comes forward in the open renunciation of the views which he then advocated, and is followed in the step, not by the young and uninformed, and perhaps unsettled members of your Society, but by those who have been most highly esteemed by yourselves for the soundness of their principles, and among those who are without the pale of your peculiar denomination, for the purity of their lives and the integrity of their characters. When upon the one side you see thousands of those who have professed fellowship with you dropping off into the darkness of mysticism and infidelity, and on the other behold those who have been the instruments in the hand of God for preventing the whole body of the Society rushing into the same destruction, abandoning the ground they then occupied, and inviting you to the examination of the reasons by which they have been induced to take this step, it certainly becomes you to examine well the foundation on which you stand, and to hear patiently and weigh deliberately the arguments they address to you. *** But "I am next to consider an argument which, from the days of Barclay down to the present time, has been esteemed of great weight in this controversy, and which is urged as evidence that the apostle Paul abandoned the use of water baptism. If this fact could be proved, then I admit all my previous reasoning would be of no value. little need be said to convince you how utterly untenable is such an assumption. The following text is commonly adduced as evidence of the fact; I thank God that I baptised none of you, but Crispus and Gaius,' • And I baptised also the household of Stephanus, besides, I know not whether I baptised any other.' Now I would ask by what argument do you prove that the word 'baptise' here means 'to wash with water?' And by whatever argument you prove this, by the same will I prove that the same word in the commission given by our Lord to his apostles, Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature: he that believeth and is baptised shall be saved, he that believeth not shall be damned,' must mean the same thing. There is nothing in the context to limit it in either case. And again I would ask your attention to the fact that while St. Paul thanks God that he baptised none but those whom he names, lest any should say that he had baptised in his own name '-he addresses them all as those who had been baptised, Were ye baptised in the name of Paul?' The argument of the apostle is so simple that it is astonishing how it can be perverted to mean any thing but that which he clearly intended it should. He commences by informing the Corinthians that it had been declared to him that there were divisions among them, one saying, I am of Paul, another I of Cephas, and a third I of Christ. then asks, is Christ divided, was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptised in the name of Paul? (If Paul was not crucified for you, and ye were not baptised in the name of Paul, why He then call yourselves by his name?) He then declares his thankfulness that he had not given even that shadow of excuse for thus designating themselves, which might have been found had he personally admitted them within the pale of the church by the initiatory rite of baptism. Any other use of the passage can only be effected by such arbitrary straining of language as would not be allowed to influence you in other cases. The fact that he had not personally baptised them, (that they were baptised he has before asserted,) and the remark that Christ sent him not to baptise but to preach the Gospel, is sufficiently explained by the history of the baptism of Cornelius and his household, which Peter 'commanded' should be done. An equally authorised construction is put upon the parallel passage in St. Paul's epistle to the Ephesians, where, among other inducements for the maintenance of the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,' he speaks of one Lord, one faith, one baptism. If, as is asserted by those who oppose the use of the external rite of baptism with water, the apostle here intended to affirm that there is but one kind of baptism recognised by the Christian dispensation, he palpably contradicts those passages of the word of God in which are mentioned the baptism of suffering-the baptism of fire-the baptism of the Holy Ghost, not to mention the simple type from which all these figures are drawn. The apostle, however, is not guilty of this contradiction, if we allow the whole scope of the passage to give the key to the use of the word. In truth, the construction you put upon it would take this single member of the sentence out of its just and natural relation, destroy entirely the connexion of the several parts, and weaken a beautiful and forcible argument in behalf of that love which is the badge of our discipleship. "A few words more and I shall then submit the whole matter to your calm and prayerful consideration. When we urge upon you the propriety (may I not say the necessity?) of simple obedience to the plain commandments of the Lord, and the advantage of following the apostles as they followed Christ, we are constantly reminded that this is a spiritual dispensation, as though there was something in the observance of these institutions which was hostile to spiritual feeling. Did the apostles find it so? are we to be more spiritual than they? cannot the assurance of those who participate in the benefit be received, that they do not hinder spirituality, but rather increase it? If the ordinances of religion were unmeaning observances, then might such an objection lie against them, then should I be the last to urge their observance upon any one; but they are not so: on the contrary, they are full of meaning. Nay, I am ready to assert my conviction that they are essential to the church, for the very purpose for which one of them was expressly instituted-" to show forth the Lord's death until he come." I do not assert them to be essential to salvation, as we are often falsely accused of asserting; to this but one thing is essential-' Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.' But they are essential as the means by which the knowledge of the facts of our Lord's incarnation and suffering is to be maintained, and the arguments of opposers refuted; and if not essential, certainly highly important means of keeping alive in the heart of the individual believer the simple trust in the merits and sufferings of Jesus, whereby alone we obtain remission of our sins, and are made partakers of the kingdom of heaven. If half the ingenuity and argument which are necessary for the support of your peculiar views were needful on our side, I, for one, would abandon the views I now uphold; but with the simple letter of the command in our behalf, and the undeniable and undenied practice of the apostles to support this simple construction, we should be abandoning ground on which the whole fabric of Christianity rests were we to coincide with you. "As I have before said, I am far from the disposition to assert, as regards any individual, that he has departed from the faith and made void the foundations of the Gospel, but I do fearlessly assert that the tendency of the principles which are held by the followers of Fox and Barclay is to desolate that church which the Redeemer hath purIchased with his own blood.* In inviting you to examine again the reasons on which we support our conformity to what we believe an imperative commandment of the Lord, we do not ask you to abandon one tittle of 'spirituality; rather we would say to you, 'grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord;' we do not ask you to conform to the world; we would rather say, come still more out from them, and be separate. We do not ask you to renounce the belief in the influence of the Holy Ghost; we only ask you to believe that it influenced apostles and prophets when they laid the foundation of the church, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; Eph. xi. chap., 20 verse.† * Let me reiterate the assurance of my desire that nothing here said may be supposed to have any personal application. It is to me a source of much satisfaction to be able to believe that notwithstanding the natural tendency of the principle to which I allude, there are among you many who hold the simple truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and on whom those truths produce their natural result in great holiness and pureness of living. Yet there is evidence too palpably plain to be misunderstood, that the tendency of the doctrines which distinguish your Society from other Christians is evil. I speak of the distinctive doctrines of your Society, because I am firmly convinced that those which are scriptural are held in common with other sects of Christians, and wherever they are practically held, must produce fruit unto holiness, as they do with you. † We can most readily unite in this entreaty, and earnestly hope that the inquiry commenced will gradually progress, though the opposition from preconceived and long We beg you to recur to first principles,' not, as you too often apply it, to Fox, and Penn, and Barclay, but to Peter, Paul, and John; let them deIcide what was the intention of their Master and Lord, and follow them in the path which they trod. We do not invite you to adopt any human scheme of doctrine or discipline, but we entreat you to lay aside the prejudice of education, and examine for yourselves, searching the Scriptures whether these things are so,' with earnest prayer that the Holy Ghost will enlighten your understandings to receive what these Scriptures certify of Jesus. The Trumpet Blown; or, an Appeal to the Society of Friends. By ISAAC CREWDSON. London, 1838. WE earnestly desire that every member of the Society of Friends may read this pamphlet. The statements advanced by Mr. Crewdson, and proved, as we conceive, to demonstration, do indeed exhibit the nature and tendency of the fundamental Quaker tenet, in a most fearful and affecting light; and whilst we learn with sorrow that great efforts are made to keep the younger members of the Society from reading any publications calculated to give them more scriptural views, we will not allow ourselves to believe that these will be deterred from prosecuting the inquiry, "What is truth ?" on this important subject, either by a morbid fear of controversy, or by an apprehension that the quiet of the Society may be disturbed. They will surely reply established views will undoubtedly be great. At Kendal Monthly Meeting we have a Friend making this most extraordinary statement, that, although he believed his views of Christian doctrine were the same as those of our early Friends, he could say they had not been derived exclusively from them he had become convinced of their correctness upon this point by a careful review of every passage in Scripture in which the word "baptise" occurs.-Eds. : to every one who would discourage the investigation," There may be a false peace as well as a true one, and if we should discover, in the hour when it shall be too late, that our peace has been founded on a delusion, will you shield us from the awful consequences ?" We give the following quotations, in order that the work may speak for itself. 66 1st. As to the Christian spirit which prompted the author to address the Society. After introducing a very apposite quotation from Ezek. xxxiii., " If the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet," &c., he proceeds, p. 4, "In soliciting your attention to the following observations, on a subject of the highest importance, to the full bearing of which I acknowledge my own mind has very gradually opened, I profess my motives to be an affectionate and deep interest in your present and eternal welfare, and the discharge of my duty as a Christian brother. I ask you not to receive my sentiments; but that, divesting yourselves, as much as possible, of educational bias, you will examine the whole subject for yourselves, in that dispassionate and unprejudiced manner which its importance demands, and that the evidence adduced from Scripture may have the full weight which it deserves." 2nd. As to the subject which Mr. Crewdson urges upon the consideration of his readers. At page 14 Mr. C. recapitulates the question at issue in the following terms, having previously adduced a variety of scriptural authorities for his views :— "The one [i. e. the Bible] teaches, that salvation is by faith in the propitiatory sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ; that this faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God; and that this word is not communicated by immediate revelation, or universal inward saving light, to mankind gene |