ing, the most industrious, the most conscientious worker beneath the paternal roof, and he shall find from day to day rest as sweet and refreshing as on the day of his return. What, then, is the remedy for our moral disease; what the secret of the believer's rest? Here it is, announced by the lip of truth: "Take my yoke upon you, learn of me.” Do not these words intimate that the greatest impediments to the permanent peace of the christian believer, the chief disturbers of his rest, are self-will, a proud insubmissive spirit, an irritable temper ill controlled, a reluctance to study and imitate the example of Jesus? "I am meek and lowly in heart." I can bear these disagreeable, painful, aggravating things. I can see, hear, and feel, unprovoked, those annoyances and disappointments which so much vex and irritate you. And how? Because I discern my Father's hand in them all, and submit to them as appointed, or as wisely permitted by Him for a good end. I can say even in Gethsemane, "Not my will, but thine be done;" and at Calvary, "Into thy hands I commend my spirit." You cannot do this yet; but you can learn to do it by my teaching and with my aid. I have pardon for thy failures, strength for thy weakness. "Learn, then, of me." Take my yoke, even as I took my Father's. Wear it cheerfully for me. Be like me, meek and lowly in heart; and then you shall find continued to you that heavenly calm, that holy peace, that blissful hope which I gave you at the first. These considerations are offered more especially to those genuine Christians, and they are not few, whose later experience may not have justified their early hopes; whose morning without clouds has since been darkened by frequent seasons of gloom and heaviness. Their complaint is like that of Job in the olden time, "O that I were as in the months past, as I was in the days of my youth, when the secret of God was upon my tabernacle;" and that of the modern poet : "What peaceful hours I once enjoyed, How sweet their memory still: The world can never fill." May it not be that you have been expecting the frequent repetition of that gift of rest which the Saviour bestowed at the outset of your career, instead of seeking and finding His continuous rest in the path of self-subjugation and holy obedience? If His easy yoke be at all irritating, His burden oppressive, there must be some cause of uneasiness within, not yet discovered, or not yet subdued. If instead of meekness there be impatience and vexation at the ills of life; if instead of lowliness in heart there be pride and self-importance in some specious form; if certain weaknesses be allowed or excused instead of being watched against and overcome; if there be a slowness to learn of Christ the lessons He would teach, a want of courage to tread in His footsteps wherever they may lead, how can they expect to find rest unto their soul? He will not give what you ought to find. The blessing remains where He has placed it. His promises, like Himself, are true and faithful. Only we need the wisdom that cometh from above, and of Him we should ask it, that learning to bear His yoke we may enjoy His rest. G. P. ANCIENT CHURCH HISTORY. The Ancient Church: its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution traced for the first Three Hundred Years. By W. D. Killen, D.D. London: Nisbet and Co. 1859. 1 Vol. 8vo. "THE appearance of another History of the Early Church," says Dr. Killen," requires some explanation." We think not. It needs neither explanation nor apology. Nothing worthy of the name has yet appeared in our own or any other age. Church history has never yet been written by any competent hand. The subject is the grandest, it ought to be the most attractive, in the whole field of what used to be termed profane literature, but it has met with unworthy treatment. No man possessing the qualities of a great historian has even attempted it; and the greatest of historians, were he not an enlightened Christian, must fail in the attempt. We have annalists in abundance: some of them acute and clever; many of them profoundly learned; almost all of them verbose and dreary. They often write without selection and without arrangement. As if materials were scanty, they press all they meet with into their service, and thus their pages want relief and their narrative a point. With scarcely an exception, what they write has few pretensions to be styled church history. It is the history of the broils and squabbles which have disgraced the church, of the heresies which rent it, of the fanaticism which degraded it. We ask for the records of a noble family of great antiquity, whose glorious achievements, after a lapse of nearly two thousand years, are still bearing fruit; and we are offered nothing better than a physician's day book, in which the diseases of the old castle are carefully recorded. We wish to know something of the internal economy of the household, and we are told only of the accidents which happened in it. We put it to every reader whether his first impressions, when he began the study of ecclesiastical history, were not something of this description: he was anxious to trace the fortunes of the great household of Jesus Christ; he read only of the follies and wickedness of those who professed to belong to it; at least these were paraded before him as the foreground of the story. It has been said of Mosheim, and with scarcely less truth than point, that it is a church history just as the Newgate Calendar is a history of England. This might be said with some degree of truth of every other church history we have met with. It is chiefly a record of crimes and follies perpetrated under the name of Christianity; but where is the volume which deserves to be called a history of the church of Christ itself? In our own language, the work of Dr. Milner approaches more nearly than any other to the true ideal of what church history ought to be. And the writer who had the manliness to step out of the well-worn track and attempt something on higher principles, must always be respected; but his volumes have not borne the test of time, nor was he in all respects equal to his task. The failure of ecclesiastical historians is due to various causes, some of which lie almost on the surface, while others are of a more recondite character. Every man who can tell a story persuades himself that he can write a history; and if a mere annalist were all that is required, he might do so, perhaps, with some success. But the qualifications which history deniauds are of a much higher kind. A strong love of truth; sagacity, acting like an instinct, to detect its presence even when incrusted with falsehood or distorted by exaggeration; the diligence and patience, which never weary; and learning, without which both are always liable to be misled,-in short, the judicial character must predominate. Without this, nothing worth the name of history can be written, whether merely secular or ecclesiastical. But in church history the temptations to paint and falsify-in other words, to make out a case in favour of some scheme of church government, or some theory of doctrine-seem to be irresistible. We have scarcely a history in which these tendencies are not apparent; in many they are avowed. They are the ground on which the author demands our suffrages. History has not been made the handmaid of truth, but the drudge of faction. Thus it is that each clique has its own little history, lauded as a master-piece within the little circle, and unknown beyond it. An historian must be eloquent; and a fluent tongue and ready pen are the least of the components of true cloquence. Some of the greatest orators indeed, and some of the greatest historians, have been absolutely deficient in both respects. Eloquence includes a large capacity, viewing huge masses of things at once, and not merely in detail; a philosophical mind, tracing effects to their causes, and that still greater quality which enables its possessor to foretell the results of certain combinations long before they have risen to the surface. It includes the love of the picturesque and the power of producing it; and this not by sacrificing truth, but by throwing great truths into the foreground in exact proportion to their dignity and importance, and keeping others subordinate. It is the art of a great painter, only with the difference between the pencil and the pen; their business is the same; namely, to produce the most faithful picture of the past, and at the same time to connect it with the most pleasurable emotions. For this reason alone we reject the German school entirely, as not having yet arrived at the true idea of historical writing. They are admirable in disquisition, profound and acute in criticism, and laborious beyond all the world in patient research; but there is a want of beauty and proportion; they give us a Chinese picture without perspective; they furnish materials for history, they have not yet begun to write it. Ecclesiastical history is but heavy reading; every one feels it. If the fault lie in the subject, no remedy can be applied, except that which at once presents itself to some minds, but which we do not hesitate to describe as a far worse evil than the dulness it attempts to hide. They endeavour by the aid of fiction to throw a charm over the dreary waste. There is the careful retention of names and dates, but the distortion of facts, and the consequent production of an historical falsehood. But we are persuaded that the fault is not inherent in the subject; it belongs to our mode of treating it; and, whatever their learning may have been, to the incapacity of those who have given us church histories. This incapacity has been of two kinds, mental and spiritual. No great mind has yet condescended to a subject which has been written since the revival of letters only in a professional, often in a pedantic, always in a dry scholastic strain. Genius and taste. have fled at its approach, or retired after a short interview, wearied and displeased. Who, but a theologian, cares to read more of Donatists, Manichees, and Sabellians than he can read in the Cyclopedia? Who but a theological student entangles himself in the meshes of the Arian controversy, barren as those eastern deserts inhabited by the first combatants? After works of fiction, history is the most interesting of all literature, even to the young; and when fiction loses its attractions, and the realities of life are felt, history retains her hold; but not church history; it is read as a task, and when we have once left school or college, by most of us it is never read at all. The Somewhere there is a great fault, and the greatest of all is this. There has been in church historians the want of that high mental and moral power and of those spiritual attainments, without which, whatever his qualifications in other respects, no writer can approach the subject with even a tolerable prospect of success. king's daughter is all-glorious within; but her hidden beauty mere critics and scholars are slow to understand. Her clothing is of wrought gold; and they can, it is true, admire her outward bravery. In her seasons of prosperity they dwell enraptured on her charms; driven from society, a persecuted creature, seeking her uncertain home in the wilderness, they lose sight of her altogether. Yet she is still, however desolate, the bride of Christ. Her fortunes govern the fate of empires, concentrate the admiration of angels, and command the sympathies of God. Shunned on every side, or sought only to be insulted, the world itself is dependent on her fortunes, and exists entirely for her sake. She, and she alone, holds constant, mysterious commerce with the prince of the kings of the earth; through her He manifests, and will ever manifest, his power; for he is head over all things for his church, and she the fulness of Him who filleth all in all. Until the world shall be visited by some one who shall combine the highest intellectual powers with the highest spiritual attainments, we shall have no church history worthy of so great a theme. There is a class of writers, who bring to the task many of the requisites, and are yet disqualified for writing church history, especially the history of the primitive church. They are disqualified precisely in the degree in which they are sincere. The greater their earnestness the greater their unfitness; for as in all error so in this, the judgment is perverted exactly in proportion as the conscience is diseased. And they are a class who, unfortunately for the interests of truth, are greatly addicted both to the study and the composition of ecclesiastical history. We speak of those who profess to find in the early church an authoritative supplement to the written word. These men would poison the stream at the fountain. They set out with the dogma that the church is infallible; and they construct a history on this hypothesis. The bible is not made to explain the phenomena of the church; but the church is made to explain the bible, and to complete its revelations. Hence the church is reverenced with a submission of the understanding which only the oracles of divine truth have a right to claim. Her voice is the voice of God; and so, no doubt, it ought to be; and so it is, while she maintains her fidelity. But these writers, unwilling to admit that she can become unfaithful, are under the necessity of defending her conduct at all risks. Is there a variation from apostolic practice; it is the church's doing, and therefore right. Is there an addition to the doctrines contained in holy scripture; it is her tradition, and therefore true. It is a revelation from God; if not through the bible, yet through a channel equally safe. Now we maintain that a history constructed on such a plan is worthless, however learned. The theory of this school is at least a courageous one. Not only is it framed without authority from scripture, it is framed in the teeth of scripture. If we are to believe the ecclesiastical historians to whom we refer, the primitive church was all glorious in her purity. The nearer you ascend to the fountain head,-always stopping short of the fountain itself,-the more truth and purity the church contains. What is ancient is true; what is recent is doubtful, if not false. So they tell us. The Lord Jesus and his disciples tell us just the contrary. They tell us, it is true, that |