not Lutheran-it is not Calvinistic-it is not Arminian it is Scriptural; it is built upon the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone.""

"Because our Church so signally honours the Bible. How much of the pure Word of God does she bring before the minds of her children every Sabbath-day, and indeed every day of the week-in the Lessons, the Psalms, the Gospel and Epistle for the day! And besides this, how nobly, how plainly does she declare, in the Sixth Article, 'Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation; so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man that it should be believed as an Article of Faith, or be thought necessary to salvation.""

"Because the Church of England is one of the primitive branches of the Christian Church: she can trace back her origin, not as some would represent, to the time of the Reformation, but almost, if not altogether, to the days of the Apostles themselves. She was not formed by our Protestant forefathers, she was only reformed. The wise man has told me, 'Thine own friend and thy father's friend forsake not,'-and I have no reason to forsake her."

"Because I love and pray for Unity. My Saviour loved and prayed for it. The Scrip

tures tell me to mark those who cause divisions, and to avoid them.' I will not, therefore, I dare not, leave the Church of my forefathers, the Church in which I was baptized, and thus promote divisions: convinced, as I am, that she is a true branch of Christ's Catholic Church, whilst other religious communities in this land are, for the most part, offshoots from her."

"Because I find the matchless Liturgy of our Church so plain, so full, so fervent. I have become intimate with the Book of Common Prayer, as with a long-tried friend; I can understand it, I can enter into it so well, that I find nothing like it for public worship."

"Because no Church has produced more able champions for the truth, nor has any furnished a more goodly company in the noble army of martyrs,' than our own."

The boast of Sthenelus, in Homer, is no uncharacteristic motto for the present times: ἡμεῖς τοὶ πατέρων μέγ ̓ ἀμείνονες εὐχόμεθ ̓ εἶναι. How many are heard exclaiming that the collective mind of "all our yesterdays" is as nothing compared with the march and movement of to-day? But the truth is far otherwise to every man that coolly observes the present, and reflects upon the past.

When the intellectual dayspring of the age of the Reformation, the sixteenth century,

Past and
Present Times.

bursts on the astonished mind, the little fireflies, flitting and sparkling through the present day, vanish in insignificance.

But the majority even of readers are too much occupied with the gross and tangible objects of knowledge to contemplate, with attentive thought, the annals of the past: άraλαίπωρος τοῖς Πόλλοις, in the words of the his torian of the Peloponnesian War, ἡ ζήτησις τῆς ἀλήθειας, καὶ ἐπὶ τὰ ἔτοιμα μᾶλλον τρέπονται, 50 impatient are the multitude in the search of truth, and ready to adopt any opinions made to their hands. Because mechanical arts, manufactures, agriculture, and commerce have improved, and every thing that tends to promote our animal comforts, or to multiply the refinements and embellishments of society, has increased, and the elements of political and scientific knowledge are more generally diffused, many sit down well contented with the discovery, and with a strange logic infer that they and their contemporaries are every way raised in the scale of humanity and intellect above those of former days.

is no new thing under the sun.

But there Plato, in the

Hippias Major, says, that the superficial sophists in the days of Socrates made the same inference many hundred years ago.

This dialogue between Socrates and Hippias, viewed in relation to the present times, verifies the words of Guicciardini, when writing to

Machiavelle, "Vedi che mutati sono i visi degli vomini ed i colori estrinseci : le cose medesime tutte ritornano, ne vediamo accidente alcuno, che a altri tempi non sia stato veduto!"

When we contrast the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, those "periods of reviving splendour in the cultivation of the human mind," when thought was thought, not reading,—when the mind of man was stirred, and stirred to its depths, and the aspirations of the human heart were for liberty-not licentiousness, and intellect was absorbed in the contemplation of truths spiritual, eternal, and universal, deeply drinking in the soul of things with an intensity and universality as if it never could be satiated,-when we contrast those periods with the present times, we feel like the traveller, "who, having beheld the Nile, the Ganges, the River of the Amazons, or the mighty Andes,

Turns his gaze

To mark the wanderings of a scanty rill
That murmurs at his feet."

It is remarked by Schiller, in his introduction to the thirty years' war: "Seit dem Anfang des Religionskriegs in Deutschland bis zum Munsterischen Frieden, ist in der politischen Welt Europaens kaum etwas grosses und merkwürdiges geschehen, woran die Reformation

nicht den vornehmsten Antheil gehabt hätte. Alle Weltbegebenheiten, welche sich in diesem Zeitraum ereignen, schliessen sich an die Glaubens Verbesserung an, wo sie nicht ursprünglich, daraus herflossen, und jeder noch so grosse und noch so kleine Staat hat mehr oder weniger, mittelbarer oder unmittelbarer, den Einfluss derselben empfunden."

Can the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries assemble such great names as the following:Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, Beza, Zuinglius, Erasmus, Ecolampadius, Bullinger, Martin Bucer, Tyndale, Knox, Ridley, Hooper, Latimer, Jewell, Hooker, N. Bacon, Raleigh, Vasco de Gama, Bacon, Des Cartes, Gassendi, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Grotius, Salmasius, Wallis, Sir Matthew Hale, Newton (born in 1642,) Shakspeare, Spencer, Milton, B. Jonson, Sir Philip Sydney, Michael Angelo, Titian, Raphael, Rubens, Guido, Domenichino? or such theologians as Hales, Usher, Bedell, Hall, Fell, Hammond, Calamy, Walton, Baxter, Pearson, Barrow, Cudworth, Boyle, Locke, Chillingworth, Stillingfleet, Mede, Parker, Tillotson, the two Buxtorfs, Voet, the Spanheims, Du Moulin, Abbadie, Saurin, Claude, Whitgift, Donne, Herbert, Nowell, Sanderson, Beveridge (born 1638), Sir H.