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tion between the person and the nature in manbetween that which lays hold of the grace offered, and only can receive it, and that which must be rejected and cut off, because it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be,-such as I do not suppose any foregone Father enjoyedsuch as, at the same time, enabled him, while he resisted an existing heresy, to justify the writings of his predecessors, to establish a permanent link between theology and moral philosophy, to show what it is in man that receives that which God imparts,-what it is in him that can eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood.

Augustin appears to me a philosopher or student of humanity, raised up for a particular purpose, in an age which was intended to be chiefly one of mere divines, occupied with those subjects which have reference primarily to the nature of God, and but secondarily to the condition of man. I make this remark, by way of protest against those who depreciate a noble champion of truth, as well as against those who exalt him above his brethren. One class of writers cannot speak of the Bishop of Hippo, without insinuating that he wanted the simplicity of the other Fathers, or had a lower notion of the perfection attainable by man, or introduced puzzling and unnecessary questions; while writers who heap laudations upon him, can scarcely spare a few cold sentences of qualified approbation for the brave and self-denying Athanasius, the narrative of whose heroical deeds makes even the page of Gibbon to

UNFAIRLY PRAISED AND BLAMED.

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glow. If the former will tell me what the theology of the Fathers would have been worth, had not the opposition between flesh and spirit, grace and nature, been asserted by Augustine; if the latter will show me, what the distinctions of Augustine would have availed, if the Catholic idea of a Father, Son, and Spirit had been lost,-I will yield to either of their narrow and partial judgments. But perceiving that it was the purpose of God in this first age, to bring out the one set of truths, and yet, by a particular instance, to demonstrate that they could have no life or meaning without another class, not yet so clearly apprehended; perceiving, that if there had been no Augustine, the great doctrines concerning God would not have been linked in the history of the church, to those which primarily concern man; and, that if all had been Augustines, Arianism, in the simple form which it began to take in the reign of Constantine, and Arianism in the more developed and practical form which Mahomet gave to it three hundred years later, must have destroyed Christianity altogether;-I would rather wonder at the wisdom of the Head of the Church, in distributing gifts to it so exactly suited to its necessities, than idolize or disparage any of the servants and witnesses whom he has from time to time raised up within it.

You may think that I am digressing from my subject; but I warned you, that the doctrine of the Eucharist is worked into the whole tissue of ecclesiastical history. Unless you understand the

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NEW ERA OF THOUGHT.

general vocation of the Fathers, you will not, I believe, understand what side of this doctrine necessarily occupied their minds, to the weakening, though not to the exclusion of the opposite one. Unless you understand the particular vocation of Augustine, you will not understand why the neglected side became afterwards more prominent; what perplexities ensued from the confusion of the two; what loss to Christianity, when, in certain countries, one wholly supplanted the other. No one can fail to perceive, that with the beginning of European society, when the nations that overran the Roman Empire had been converted to Christianity, a new chapter in the providential history of the world commenced,—a new era in speculation and feeling. When those who had heretofore been a set of tribes, distinguished indeed by various peculiar features, but all confounded in the Universal Empire, under the fostering influence of Christianity, and of those ideas of order and justice which Rome had been the means of communicating to them, began to assume the position of distinct, organized nations;—it was reasonable to expect, from the whole analogy of the Divine proceedings, that habits of mind different from those which had characterized the subjects of the great Italian despotism, would be cultivated within them. The great questions which now began to be stirred in men's minds, were questions respecting our own human nature,—what it is; how we are connected with the world around us; with our fel

low-men, and with God? Men seemed now called to commence their upward journey again; and, as they had been taught in the first age after the promulgation of Christianity, by what methods God had sought after his creatures; they were now to inquire what there is in the creature which desires, and is capable of receiving communications from God. This new kind of inquiry, and the attempts to reconcile it with those of the former age, without a clear perception of the difference of the objects proposed in each case, constitute, it seems to me, what is called the Scholastic Philosophy. It connected itself with the human philosophy of Aristotle, as the earlier theology of the Fathers had connected itself with the more transcendent and superhuman philosophy of Plato. But this is an accidental circumstance, with which we are not here concerned. Without taking more than this casual notice of it, we may explain how this philosophy bore upon the religious feelings of the period in which it was pursued, and especially upon the doctrine of the Sacraments.

But, meanwhile, a great alteration had gradually taken place in the external position and the polity of the church, to which we must advert. Your Friends, and the other dissenters, speak of the age of Constantine as that in which the church corrupted herself by entering into alliances with the state. I shall have another opportunity of examining this opinion, and considering its reasonableness. Thus much (and this is all I need say at present), I willingly concede to you, that

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REALITY OF CHRIST'S KINGDOM.

the feeling of Christ having a kingdom upon earth, over which he actually presided, setting visible servants or princes over his people but not the less truly and personally directing every operation of the government, may not have existed in the same clearness and purity after that event as before it. But I will qualify this assertion with two others:-One is, that the submission of the overgrown Roman Empire to Christ, and the new life which that putrid carcase received from the union, was one of the greatest illustrations of the fact, that Christ's kingdom is not a mere name, but a reality, which could have been given to that age, or to the honest thinker of any subsequent age; the second is, that no inference as to the intention of God respecting the connexion of his church with the kingdoms of the earth, can be drawn from the accidents of its connexion with a superannuated military empire, carrying about within it the seeds of predestined destruction, and only kept alive till the new nations of the west were ready to inherit the blessings, which it was the appointed means of transmitting to them. If you would see clearly that the idea of Christianity as a kingdom, and not merely as a set of doctrines, had not been lost in consequence of the act of Constantine, you should trace the history of its reception by the Germanic nations. You will find that those who speculated about it, (the Gothic people in the south, I mean, which embraced Arianism), could not become regular nations, or escape the Isla