Pope and his party have all along cried out, that it is dangerous to let the word of God be read indiscriminately by the people. Now we allow that there is some danger in this, but it is as nothing to the certain evil of sealing up the Book of Life-altogether, or even in part. There is danger that the unlearned and unstable will wrest the hard sayings of the Bible unto their own destruction:* but all the good gifts of God may be abused, and the abuse of his best gifts is always the most terrible. We must not guard against the abuse of a thing, by depriving men of its real and important use. Whether we will use the Bible, or abuse it, is one of our trials; and we must remember, that though we allow the right of private judgement, so far as to hold that a man ought not to be punished for a mere opinion by the magistrate, we also hold it to be a duty to listen to the voice of the Church Catholic, and submit our judgement to hers, provided that we can do so conscientiously after due and humble examination. Many parts of the Bible had been translated at different times from the days of the Anglo-Saxons downwards. Even our great King, Alfred, had had a share in this good work of translating the Bible: but still there was but little way made, and Wiclif's translation was the first translation of the whole Bible into English. It was received with great eagerness, and was no doubt a blessing to many; though, as every Bible had to be written with a pen, for printing was not then found out, Bibles remained still but few and dear; especially as the Church forbade men to read the word of God in English, and every man who kept a Bible in his possession, kept it at the hazard of his life. Wiclif now attacked another of the strong-holds of the Papacy, the doctrine she taught on the subject of the Lord's Supper. The Christian believes, that our Lord is in some spiritual sense present in this Sacrament; that he may safely follow his master, in calling the bread his body, and the wine his blood; and that when he eats the bread, and drinks the wine in faith, he not only shows the Lord's death, in the way which He appointed, but really eats the flesh, and drinks the blood of his Saviour, in the very meaning in which He used the words, when he taught that this was universally necessary.‡ In describing the error of the Romanists, we must beware of using irreverent language. It had been unfortunately taught by a Monk, one Radbert, that the bread and *2 Pet. iii. 16. † 1 Cor. xi. 26. Joh. vii. 53. wine were not only, in this spiritual but real sense, the body and blood of Christ, the partaking of them in faith being that very eating his body and drinking his blood intended by Christ, and so not only an act of faith, but a mysterious, appointed, and indispensable means of grace; but also, that they were themselves the very actual flesh and blood of the body that hung upon the cross. He taught that no bread, no wine, remained after the Priest had consecrated them; so that what tasted like bread and wine, were not bread and wine, but had been changed by the Priest's blessing into the body and blood of Christ. This notion, which was not known in England in the time of our Saxon ancestors, was caught at by the Pope, because it was very favourable to the Priests; it clothed them with a mysterious character of holiness and power; so that they came to speak of themselves, and to encourage others to think of them, as men who could work this great miracle at any time; who could, as they blasphemously expressed it, create God, their Creator. When Wiclif touched upon this subject, his powerful defenders fell off. It was against the tyranny of the Pope, against the wealth and extortion of the Papal clergy, that they contended. As to the doctrines, they had never thought for themselves upon such questions, and were still prepared to take them upon trust from the clergy. Wiclif therefore now stood almost alone: the Duke of Lancaster was so annoyed to see him preparing to assail the doctrines of the Pope, that he hastened to Oxford, for the express purpose of forbidding him to stir in such matters. But Wiclif's courage and honesty bore him through this trial. After many preparatory steps had been taken, he was tried by an Assembly held by Courtney, now Archbishop of Canterbury. To this Assembly he presented two confessions of Faith, and the style of one of them at least, that written in Latin, is so hard, and the reasoning so intricate, that it has been imagined that he wished to explain away his opinions, or hide their difference from those of the Roman Church. It is enough to say, that those to whom he addressed this paper, did not so understand it. We must not blame him for splitting straws in an age when all scholars prided themselves upon splitting straws. When he spoke out his mind to the people, he spoke it in a strong, plain, straight-forward way; but when he came to have to do with learned men, he used what was then thought the right way of dealing with such matters learnedly and we : find that, some how or other, he arrives at notions, which were gall and wormwood to the Pope; though we, who are strangers to the ways of thinking and writing then in fashion, cannot follow him through all the dark and winding passages along which he travels. He was condemned by the Council, not however to death, but to banishment from Oxford. He retired to Lutterworth, and after spending two more years in the same eager opposition to the vices and errors of the age, died there of the palsy, on the 29th of December, 1384. "Admirable," says old Fuller, "that a hare so often hunted with so many packs of dogs, should die at last quietly sitting in his form." When his body had slept in its grave about one and forty years, the Council of Constance ordered that, "if it could be discerned from the bodies of other faithful people, it should be taken out of the ground, and thrown far off from any Christian burial." Fuller gives a lively description of the stately procession of officers with hard names who went to execute the sentence of this Council, which disgraced itself to all ages by the murder of John Huss. They took what was left out of the grave, and burnt the bones to ashes, and cast them into Swift, a neighbouring brook, running hard by. "Thus" he says,—and it is a noble passage; "this brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and thus, the ashes of Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over." There can be little doubt that Wiclif was a man of great honesty, full of perseverance, zeal, and courage; and that God had rewarded his study of the Bible, by enabling him to see that many doctrines and practices of the Church of Rome were at variance with revealed Truth. He was the determined opposer of the numberless ways by which that Church had won its way to a tyrannical power, that it could not possibly maintain, without encouraging superstitious notions among the people, and making the Bible a sealed book. He seems to have looked steadily to Jesus Christ, as the only meritorious cause of our salvation, and to have removed far from him the notion of human merit. “Heal us, Lord" he said, for nought; not for our merits, but for thy mercy.-Our flesh, though it seem holy, yet it is not holy.-We are all originally sinners, not only from our mother's womb, but in our mother's womb.-We cannot so much as think a good thought, unless Jesu, the Angel of great counsel, send it; nor perform a good 66 work, unless it be properly his good work. His mercy comes before us, that we may receive grace, and followeth us, keeping us in grace." It is said that the Bohemian Reformer, John Huss, used to pray in his public discourses, that, "on his departure from this life, he might be received into those regions whither the soul of Wiclif had gone: since he doubted not that he was a good and holy man, and worthy of a heavenly habitation." A MINISTER'S LAMENT OVER HIS VILLAGE CHILDREN. ALAS! Alas! we read in books Of childhood's simple years, Its purity, and ready flow Oh! how I love to look upon Christ's little ones! his holy mark Such as he folded in his arms, Growing in grace from year to year, Few are such children here !-Too oft *Teachableness. And many choose that beaten road, Indecent words pollute the air, And childhood wears a reckless brow, Oh! there are times when I could think, But though it's hard to cling to hope, For every plant that is the Lord's, And we must prune the rambling boughs, Though still, as year succeeds to year, THREE WEEKS OF A MISSIONARY'S LIFE IN NEWFOUNDLAND. Ir is a part of my plan to tell you something, from time to time, of the labours of Church of England Missionaries, that you may know how much they do and suffer in the cause of Christ, and how precious the word of God is in many lands, to which every year thousands of our countrymen are forced, by want at home, to remove themselves and their families. Archdeacon Wix has lately published an account of how he spent six months in the island of Newfoundland. I am going to give a few weeks of his journal, nearly in his own. words. I set out on Tuesday the 17th of February, 1835, with a knapsack on my back, to travel over the snow to the southern and western shores of the island. Though I had a guide |