ble forms and symbols. The doctrine of mysteries comes now into contact with the sensible world. Men are more apt to fancy that they can understand a mystery which has an outward and visible part, than one which is entirely removed from the operation of the senses. The mysteries now under consideration consist in the union of Divine influences with material signs. We learn from Revelation that these two things are united, and that to their effectual operation a third principle is necessary; that of faith in the recipient, where he is capable of faith. This is the sacramental doctrine, as it is called. It consists in the acceptance of the truths of Revelation, without any explanation.

But this will not satisfy the men of Broad Views. They deny that there is any mystery in the case. Sacraments are not mysteries, although the word in the primitive Church meant especially the rites in which spiritual graces are connected with outward signs. Men ask: How can these things be? The only answer is: Through the Omnipotence of GOD. The answer once given is soon used after the manner of such men. The material signs are made the subject of a material miracle, a physical change. This is a question which is entirely within the sphere of sense, and sense denies the miracle. Here the explainers come in with explanations more difficult to be understood than the thing to be explained. But that is not all. The men of Broad Views have introduced the Omnipotence of GOD to cut the knot which they could not untie; they now use it for another purpose-to do away with the necessity of faith.

This brings up another set of men of Broad Views, who reduce the whole matter to faith, denying the connection between the outward visible sign and the inward spiritual grace, because there is no natural connection between external things and spiritual graces. If they are met by the argument that an Omnipotent GOD has established such a connection; they reply that it is equally possible for an Omnipotent GOD to communicate His Grace, without the outward and visible signs. They infer that the signs are valueless, and that Grace is given to faith alone. That is true. But the true question is: Has He not revealed, that it is His will to give it in connection with the signs?

It would seem just now that in this, department the explainers are doing more mischief than even the men of Broad Views. Some of the greatest names in the English Church are setting forth doctrines, which they have deduced logically from premises which presuppose an explanation of the sacramental mysteries. They mistake their own logical deductions for Catholic Truth, and are opening controversies which will be interminable. This has come from a desire to understand precisely the nature and operation of the Holy Communion, and to present a scheme which shall in a certain sense be intelligible. Let us be on our guard against all such explanations, and rest on faith in the Revelation, although it may not be intelligible to us. Surely Hooker was wiser than these men, when he wrote:

This Sacrament is a true and real participation of CHRIST, Who thereby imparteth Himself, even His whole entire Person, as a mystical HEAD, unto every soul that receiveth Him, and that every such receiver doth thereby incorporate or unite himself unto CHRIST, as a mystical member of Him, yea of them also, whom He acknowledgeth to be His own; secondly, that to whom the Person of CHRIST is thus communicated, to them He giveth, by the same Sacrament, His HOLY SPIRIT, to sanctify them as it sanctifies Him Who is their HEAD; thirdly, that what merit, force, or virtue soever there is in His sacrificed body and blood, we freely, fully, and wholly have it by this Sacrament; fourthly, that the effect thereof in us is a real transmutation of our souls and bodies from sin to righteousness, from death and corruption to immortality and life; fifthly, that because the Sacrament, being of itself but a corruptible and earth-born creature, must needs be thought an unlikely instrument to work so admirable effects in man, we are therefore to rest ourselves altogether upon the strength of His glorious power, who is able and will bring to pass that the bread and the cup which He giveth us shall be truly the thing He promiseth. [E. P., V. lxvii. 9.]

This seems to be all that is revealed, and all that we need to know. May we not, in the words of the same Hooker, "consider by itself what cause why the rest in question should not rather be left as superfluous than urged as necessary." These gentlemen may be right, but they can never prove that they are; because they are reasoning from premises which they do not understand, and the limitations of which they cannot know. Yet they are reasoning from them, with an astuteness worthy of schoolmen or medieval lawyers, and treating the conclusions, at which they have arrived, as if they were portions of the premises. All this is done, when it is in the power of the men of Broad Views, who reject alike conclusions and premises, to bring the whole matter before tribunals composed

of men ignorant of theology, and therefore of Broad Views. For in every science it is an invariable rule, that the less a man knows, the broader are his notions. These tribunals may commit, or seem to commit, the Church of England to propositions inconsistent with the premises. This would be an enormous evil. It is not intended to go at all into the questions which these divines have raised; because it is the firm conviction of the writer that they are "unprofitable and vain," and closely connected with "philosophy, falsely so called."

H. D. E.

HISTORICAL SKETCHES OF THE

CHURCH OF

SCOTLAND SINCE THE REFORMATION.

NO. XII.-PROGRESS OF THE RESTORATION OF THE CHURCH.

See Lucifer like lightning fall,
Dashed from his throne of pride;

While answering Thy victorious call,

The Saints his spoils divide,

This world of Thine by him usurp'd too long,

Now opening all her stores to heal Thy servants' wrong.

-Keble's Christian Year.

It is most gratifying to the faithful Churchman to witness the honours paid by all classes of good and true Scottish men to the Bishops of the restored Church when entering on the administration of their sees; and the facts recorded present a complete antidote to the rancorous falsehoods of Presbyterian scribes. For it is very certain that they would never have received these honours had they been the despicable characters represented by their schismatical foes. Archbishop Sharp, the Primate, made his first solemn entry into St. Andrews on the 16th of April, 1662, attended by the Earl of Rothes, and other noblemen (of whom the old Covenanter, David Leslie, now Lord Newark, was one) and large numbers of the gentry of the neighbourhood. These, in all several hundreds, mounted on horseback, made a goodly show, and the congratulations of the inhabitants were loud and cordial. The next day being Sunday, the Primate preached on the text 1. Cor. ii. 2, and introduced in it a spirited defence of Episcopacy, which was listened to with great attention and decorum by a numerous congregation.

What a decisive proof is here afforded of the complete recov ery of men's minds from the fanatical delusions by which they had been possessed.

We might have anticipated some difficulty in Glasgow, as it was infested by too much of the scum and dregs of the Covenanting faction. But nothing of the kind happened, when Archbishop Fairfoul made his first visitation at the beginning of May. The description is given by the Presbyterian Baillie, who would have been too happy had there been a riot to record: "The Chancellor conveyed him, with Montrose, Linlithgow, and Callender; and sundry more noblemen and gentlemen, with a number of our towns folks, both horse and foot, with all our bells a ringing, brought them to the Tolbooth to a great collation. He preached on the Sunday soberly and well." In general the other Bishops received the same courteous treatment and hospitable reception when they commenced the visitation of their sees, and the only opposition they experienced was from the ferocious preachers of the Covenant, and the deluded followers whom they were dragging with them to the pit of destruction.

It is necessary that we should here briefly allude to the calumnies and slanders heaped upon these eminent men by Presbyterian perverters of history and their base imitators in (proh pudor!) the Church of England. As to the former, their hostility is sufficiently accounted for, when we call to mind their insane antipathy to the name and office of a BISHOP, which in their vocabulary means everything noxious and impious: of which the pages of the mendacious Wodrow and the equally infamous Hetherington will afford abundant examples to any one who enters on the nauseous task of examining them. But we are told with great triumph that GILBERT BURNET, some time Bishop of Salisbury, has, in the "History of His Own Times," given most deplorable characters of the Scotch Bishops, except Leighton, and especially of the Primate Sharp. But unfortunately for his admirers, this unscrupulous partisan writer has been weighed in the balance and found wanting on a careful comparison with himself. In his Life of Bishop Bedell, published about 1685, he thus speaks of the Fathers of the Scotch Church:

I shall not add much of the Bishops that have been in that Church since the last reestablishment of the order, but that I have observed among the few of them to whom I had the honour to be known particularly, as great and as exem plary things as ever I met with in all ecclesiastical history. Not only the praetice of the strictest of all the ancient Canons, but a pitch of virtue and piety beyond what can fall under common imitation, or be made the measure of even the most angelical rank of men; and saw things in them that would look liker fair ideas than what men clothed with flesh and blood could grow up to.

But when he penned this high flown eulogium, the Orange revolution had not taken place; the line of Stuarts still sat on the British throne, and the Episcopal Church was still established in Scotland. It was some thirty years afterwards, when by sycophancy and trickery he had gained the mitre-that darling object of his ambition, and beheld the triumph of the political intrigues in which he had so long dabbled, that he changed his notes of praise to those of censure, and ventured to assail the objects of his long cherished malice with all the obloquy and slander that a fertile invention and envenomed hostility could devise or forge. And when we remember that Sharp in particular had incurred his enmity on many accounts, partly by utterly refusing to interpose in behalf of that nefarious traitor Johnstone, of Warriston, who was Burnet's uncle, and again by the administration of a severe reprimand to that worthy himself, for the publication of a pamphlet hereafter to be more particularly alluded to, we shall be at no loss to account for the animus of these attacks on the Primate, and give them no more weight than that to which they are really entitled.

The second session of the first Parliament of Charles II. commenced at Edinburgh on the 8th of May. The first act passed was for restoring the Bishops to their ancient seats in the Legislature. It passed with very little opposition, but among the opponents was that grim old warrior, the defeated of Dunbar. The acerbity and strain of his outburst produced a titter among his auditors, which enkindled to a red heat the fury of Leslie : and he gruffly blurted out, that "he had seen the day when they durst not have laughed at him." Yes, David, those blessed days had gone by; and you were like the old lion in the fable, who, having lost his teeth and claws, was rewarded for his past tyranny and cruelty by many a jibe and kick from the quondam sufferers.