now borders on our highway to India; and is about to be occupied by the armaments of our powerful neighbour, who does nothing without a purpose. "French agents in great numbers have been openly proclaiming throughout Syria, that if the Mussulmans and members of the Greek church fall off to the Latin church, they shall receive the most ample protection from the emperor of the French. Forty thousand have already fallen to that church in the island of Candia; and when six thousand French troops go alone, unattended by the troops of any other power, much is done to establish French interests in the East, and to cause the people to fall off by hundreds and by thousands to the Latin church; which will lead to the complete suppression of religious liberty in that country." [Speech of Lord Shaftesbury in the House of Lords, August 6.] The events now in progress in Italy do not render the Latinizing of the East a danger less to be feared; the Pope may be cast out of his ancient possessions, but popery itself is reserved for a more signal destruction, and meantime will not cease from disturbing the nations.

The same prophets of the Old Testament assure us that when Israel shall be gathered again, "their nobles shall be of themselves, and their governor shall proceed from the midst of them," for "I will set up shepherds over them which shall feed them; and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall they be lacking, saith the Lord." (Jer. xxiii. 4.) "I will give you pastors according to mine own heart, which shall feed you with knowledge and understanding." (Jer. iii.)

Who, then, among contending nations will have any respect to the holy covenant of the Lord, except those that have an open Bible, and have made themselves acquainted with its predictions and promises? Not, certainly, the Latin church! nor yet the Greek. And it is more than doubtful whether England would risk a war, or provoke the jealousy of her great rivals, for the sake of our Protestant missions in that region. Here, therefore, we see a foreshadowing of those complications which may result in attempts against the predetermined and revealed purposes of the God of Jacob; such as may bring down the threatened judgments upon the Gentile nations, to be found in all the prophets from Moses to St. John.

RUSSELL'S LIFE OF BISHOP ANDREWES.

Memoirs of the Life and Works of Lancelot Andrewes, D.D., Lord Bishop of Winchester. By the Rev. Arthur T. Russell, B.C.L. of St. John's College, Cambridge; Vicar of Whaddon, Cambridgeshire. 1 Vol. Octavo. Cambridge: Palmer. 1860.

We do not place bishop Andrewes in the first rank of English divines. When he lived, the men of the Reformation were dying

out; and he had run his course before the extravagance of Laud and his admirers had attained its meridian. His character and his theology were of the intermediate cast; partaking largely of the good qualities of the Reformation, but not without a tincture of the imbecilities of his own weak age. He was born in Thamesstreet, in 1555; the year for ever hallowed by the sufferings of the English martyrs: he died in 1626, the year after Charles I. began his melancholy reign. Thus, in his youth, he was under the full influence of the Reformation; but when the fathers of our church had passed away, he being of a pliant temper and incompetent to lead, became the pupil of another school. Thus he was the Edmund Burke of theology; and from his writings may be gathered an array of sentiments worthy of the great evangelical leaders on the one hand, and of the churchmen of the Laudian school upon the other. What has been said of the politician may be said of the divine; the best refutation of his errors is to be met with in his own writings. And yet his errors are rather negative than positive. He did not clearly see the tendency of the Laudian theology, nor its certain development, at some time or other, in a relapse to popery. The clear vision of the reformers, and their masterly hold of the great truths of the gospel, he never had. On the other hand, he would have been shocked with some of those doctrinal opinions on sacramental grace and efficacy which are now entertained by many who think themselves sound churchmen, at a happy distance from the Evangelical party on the one side, and the Romanizers on the other. Mr. Russell is certainly not wanting in reverence for bishop Andrewes; yet he sums up his character with much justice, when he describes him as the most imaginative of all our divines, with a natural bias towards a ceremonial piety; remarkable for pathos as well as for wit and fancy; a man of great learning, an intense student of the fathers and divines of succeeding ages; munificent and pious; perfectly free from pride and covetousness; and a patron of learning and learned men. As a critic, his judgment was often drawn aside by his excessive love of illustration; but his greater infirmity was a want of courage in opposing the unwise and unhallowed counsels of his sovereign, and an undue partiality toward his kindred and friends, whom he loaded with preferments in an age in which pluralities were a grievance to the cause of piety, however they might operate in favour of learning. He sometimes did his sovereign's bidding, where others more faithful refused; and has therefore been represented as an ambitious courtier. But he was rather pliant than either ambitious, or a sycophant. Wanting the Reformers' vigorous theology, he wanted their dauntless courage. The stream could not rise above the fountain. Yet, after all, Andrewes was not an ordinary man; and had he been such, the position to which he attained, and the circumstances of the times in which he moved, would have made his life of some importance to posterity.

His rise was rapid. After an education at Merchant Taylors' school and Jesus college, Oxford, he was appointed catechist in his college at an early age, and his lectures on the Decalogue drew many auditors. They were published after his death under the title of The Moral Law Expounded, and passed through several editions; having the good fortune to please both Puritans and High Churchmen. The first editor, indeed, "John Jackson, preacher at Gray's Inn." was probably the person of that name who was a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. On the ten commandments, with Calvin and Bullinger for his models, the young divine could scarcely go wrong; but his lectures gained him the renown of being a great divine, and brought him under the notice of Walsingham and Lord Huntingdon. They were times in which merit was soon recognized and generally well rewarded; and Andrewes was at once on the way to preferment. In 1563 he was vicar of St. Giles', Cripplegate; in 1589 he was a prebend of Southwell. After this we find him associated with Knewstubs and Chatterton, the great Puritan leaders, in weekly meetings for prayer and expounding the Scriptures, at Cambridge:—

"At their meetings," says Samuel Clarke, in his Lives of English Divines, "they had constant exercises: first they began with prayer, and then applied themselves to the study of the Scriptures. One was for the original languages; another's task was for the grammatical interpretation; another's for the logical analysis; another's for the true sense and meaning of the text; another gathered the doctrines; and thus they carried on their several employments, till at last they went out like Apollos, eloquent men and mighty in the Scriptures: and the Lord was with them, so that they brought in a very great harvest unto God's barn."

Thus the future translator of the Bible, or rather the Pentateuch, was prepared for his great work.

His doctrinal views at this time were those of the Reformation. He preached the Spital sermon in 1588, and in the course of it he takes occasion to mention " divers of the best writers both old and new ;" and he adds, "I name of the new, Mr. Calvin, and of the old, St. Augustine." In this sermon, too, he amply vindicates the protestantism of the Reformation, not only from the false accu sations of the Romanists, but, by anticipation, from the slanders of certain living historians of our own day :

"I will be able to prove," he says, "that learning, in the foundation of schools and increase of revenues within colleges, and the poor, in foundation of alms-houses and increase of perpetuities to them, has received greater help within this realm in these forty years last past, since (not the starting up of our church, as they fondly use to speak, but since) the reforming of ours from the errors of theirs, than it hath, I say, in any realm Christian not only within the self same forty years (which were enough to stop their mouths) but also than it hath in any forty years upward, during all the time of popery. And this,” he adds, “I

speak partly of mine own knowledge, and partly by sufficient grave information to this behalf."

With Sir Francis Walsingham in power, his Puritan acquaintance were no bar to his preferment. The year in which he was made prebend of Southwell, found him also prebend of St. Pancras, London; both conferred upon him by the favour of Walsingham in the same month of May. So that, as he says, in a grateful letter of thanks, "I am bound to acknowledge your honour's great bounty to me in years past, as now for the instant procurement of these two prebends, the one of them no sooner ended than the other of them straight begun." Then were the happy days of manifold pluralities! On the 28th of August died Dr. William Fulke, master of Pembroke Hall; and Andrewes, vicar of St. Giles' Cripplegate, prebend of North Muskham in the church of Southwell, and of St. Pancras in St. Paul's, London, was admitted, on the 6th of September, master of Pembroke college Cambridge. He was now likewise chaplain to archbishop Whitgift; and (we suppose with a gravity which we cannot sufficiently admire) preached his Ad Clerum from Prov. xx. 25,-It is a snare to the man who devoureth that which is holy! We must admit that it was not altogether without reason that the Puritans of those days declaimed against what they were rude enough to term the rapacity and worldliness of the prelatic party.

Early in the next year we find Andrewes, now one of the Queen's twelve chaplains, preaching before her majesty at Whitehall. He was decidedly a court favourite; he preached often before the queen; was appointed a commissioner to inquire into the state of the ecclesiastical courts, of whose tyranny and corruption her majesty's house of commons made loud complaints; and was chosen to confer with Udal, Barrow, and Greenwood, the three puritan martyrs, who lay under sentence of death. He failed to convince them of their errors; and the two last suffered at Tyburn. Poor Udal died in prison, or he would have suffered too upon the gallows. We shudder at these atrocities, and wonder that Andrewes, and such as he, did not solemnly protest against them. Alas, how little are the best men before their age! What a thrill of horror would run through England now, if men were hanged for uttering one-pound notes, and mere children for shoplifting! Yet all this was done in the memory of man, and, as far as we can learn, without one solemn protest even from the best divines of good old George the Third. Robert Hall relieves himself with a passing sigh, and other divines may probably have done as much. We once, in very early youth, heard a sermon on the barbarity and wickedness of thus putting men to death for light offences; but the atrocious system fell at last beneath the protests of the mercantile community, and the advancing force of public opinion; not from the assaults of the clergy, or any com

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bined efforts of strictly religious people. All this now appears to us very strange and unaccountable. It may be wise to ask ourselves from time to time, what posterity will think of some of our own shortcomings as compared with our religious profession; wiser still to consider how we shall stand in relation, not to the opinion of man, but to the perfect law of God.

From this time the name of Andrewes appears in all the great theological controversies and ecclesiastical occurrences of his times. Disastrous times they were. The faith and love of the Reformation had evaporated. Controversies keen and cunning, rather than profound, followed in their place. Instead of heartfelt piety, the speculative exercise of the faculties upon a system of theology; instead of sound criticism, the jargon of the schools; instead of manly action, the quibbles of the sophister, and the wrangling and dry conceits of pedantry,-a noisy religion, and shallow in proportion to its noise. The century closed with the publication of the nine Lambeth articles, generally ascribed to Whitgift the archbishop, but really drawn up by Dr. Whitaker, master of St. John's. The forty-two articles (now thirty-nine), the work of Cranmer and Ridley, were not, it seems, sufficiently exact. Explanations must be added; the nature of election explained; the doctrine of reprobation broadly asserted. Andrewes, who was Whitgift's chaplain, put forth his judgment upon them; he was probably required to do so. Mr. Russell devotes a short chapter to the subject, and it is one of the best in his volume. Andrewes seems to have been anxious to defend his patron, whose nine articles the queen had suppressed, and yet to have had misgivings as to the soundness of several points in the new confession. Neither he nor Whitgift, nor even, in our opinion, their great master St. Augustine himself, were worthy to unloose the shoe latchets of men who knew at once how to be so cautious and moderate, and yet so clear and firm, upon essential points of doctrine, as the framers of the thirty-nine articles. We have often felt that, if other Protestant churches surpassed, as much as we think they fall behind, us in points of church government and scriptural discipline, we should still cling to the church of England in preference to the purest and the best of them, so long as the church of England clings to this admirable confession of her faith.

In A.D. 1600, Andrewes preached at Whitehall his well-known discourse on the power of absolution, from John xx. 23. The sermon is remarkable in more respects than one. It shows, in its first stage, the gradual departure from the catholic simplicity of the reformation; and, at the same time, the suspicion with which the new theology was regarded, not by factious Puritans, but by the court itself. He maintained,

"A ministerial absolution granted to the apostles, not as apostles, but as ministers of Christ, and from them derived to all others; yet not so that absolutely without them God cannot bestow it on whom or when