and hourly increasing, that we ourselves are continually exposed to the allurements of the world, the seductions of the flesh, and the temptations of the devil, with no weapon but our own puny arm with which to defend ourselves, and no strength but our own infirmity with which to recover and maintain our integ rity. Alas! we know what this is. We know what it is to feel oppressed with the heavy load of guilt, to struggle alone in the world, against all manner of enemies, without faith, without hope, without the help of God's sacraments; we know what it is to feel that we must trust in our own arm and heart, stand on the pride of our own intellect and conviction. We know, too, what it is to feel all these defences fail, all this trust give way; for to us have come, as well as to others, those trying moments when the loftiest are laid low, and the proudest, prostrate in the dust, cry out from the depth of their spiritual agony, "Is there no help? O God! why standest thou afar off? Help, help, or I perish!" Alas! there are moments when we cannot trifle, when we cannot lean on a broken reed, when we must have something really Divine, something on which we can lay hold that will not break, and leave us to drop into everlasting perdition. It is a terrible question this of the salvation of the soul, and no man can prudently put it off. It must be met and answered, and the sooner the better. We urge this upon our Protestant brethren. They have no solid ground on which to stand, no sure help on which to rely Their own restlessness proves it; their perpetual variations and shifting of their creeds prove it; the new and strange sects constantly springing up amongst them prove it; their worldlymindedness, their universal and perpetual striving after what they have not, and find not, prove it; the wide-spread infidelity which prevails among them, and the still more destructive indifferency prove it. Their spiritual strength is the strength of self-confidence or of desperation. They cannot live so. There is no good for them in their present state. Why will they not ask if there be not a better way? If they will but seek, they shall fud,-knock, it shall be opened to them. There is that faith which they deny, and that certainty which they ridicule. But they will find it not in their pride. They will find it not, till they learn to look on him they have despised, and to fly for succour to him they have crucified. But we have been be trayed into remarks, which, though true, would come with a better grace from one whose faith is less recent than our own. Yet we have said nothing by way of vain-glory. If we have faith, it is no merit of ours. We have been brought by a way we knew not, and by a Power we dared not resist; and His the praise and the glory, and ours the shame and mortification that for so many years we groped in darkness, boasting that we could see, and holding up our farthing-candle of a mis guided reason as a light that was to enlighten the world! We have been asked, "How in the world have you become a Catholic?" In this essay we have presented an outline, or rather a specimen, of the answer we have to give. It is inconplete; but it will satisfy the attentive reader, that not without some show of reason, at least, have we left our former friends and the endearing associations of our past life, and joined ourselves to a Church which excites only the deadly rage of the great mass of our countrymen. The change with us is a great one, and a greater one than the world dreams of, or will dream of. At any rate, it is a change we would not have made if we could have helped it, a change against which we struggled long, but for which, though it makes us a pilgrim and a sojourner in life, and permits us no home here below, we can never sufficiently praise and thank our God. It is a great gain to lose even earth for heaven. If, however, we be pressed to give the full reason of our change, we must refer to the grace of God, and the need we felt of saving our own soul. - THE EPISCOPAL OBSERVER VERSUS THE CHURCH 69 THE EPISCOPAL OBSERVER VERSUS THE CHURCH. THE EPISCOPAL OBSERVER, VOL. I., NO. III. BOSTON. That THIS periodical, the recently established organ of the Evangelical division of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in its number for May last, contains an attempted refutation of the article headed The Church against No-Church, in our last Review. The writer after a preliminary flourish or two, says his “purpose is to have the pleasure of refuting" us. We presume from this that his purpose is to have the pleasure of refuting the main position or leading doctrine of the article. position or doctrine, as we stated it, is, that, "with this theory alone (the No-Church theory), it is impossible to elicit an act of faith :" or, in other words, that it is not possible to elicit an act of faith, unless we accept the authority of the Roman Catholic Church as the witness and expounder of God's word. Now, to refute this, it is not enough to invalidate our reasoning in this or that particular, but it is necessary to prove positively that an act of faith can be elicited by those who reject this authority. But this the writer has not done, and, so far as we can see, has not even attempted to do. He cannot, then, whatever else he may have done, have refuted us. All he has done, admitting him to have done all he has attempted, is, to prove, not that we were wrong in asserting the necessity of the authority of the Church to elicit an act of faith, but that it is impossible for any one to elicit an act of faith at all, as we shall soon have occasion to see. But, in point of fact, the writer has not done what he attempted; he has not invalidated our reasoning in a single par ticular; and if he has succeeded in refuting any one, it is himself. He begins by giving, professedly, a synopsis of our argu *July, 1845. ment; but his synopsis is very imperfect. It leaves out several distinct positions we assumed and attempted to establish as essential to the argument we were conducting. If this is by design, it impeaches the fairness and honesty of the writer; if unintentional, it shows that he did not comprehend the article he undertook to refute, and impeaches his capacity. Our readers will recollect that we begin our argument by assuming, that, in order to be saved, to be acceptable to Cod, to enter into life, it is necessary to be a Christian. We then proceed to establish, 1. That, in order to be a Christian, it is necessary to be a believer, to believe somewhat; 2. That this somewhat is TRUTH NOT FALSEHOOD; 3. That the truth we are to believe is the truth Jesus Christ taught or revealed; and, 4. That this truth, pertains, in part, at least, to the supernatural order. Now, the second position, namely, that, in order to be a Christian believer, it is necessary to believe TRUTH, NOT FALSEHOOD, the Observer entirely omits, and takes no notice of it, in its attempted refutation of us. Why is this? The Observer cannot suppose we inserted this proposition without a design, or that it is of no importance to our agument. The position is both positive and negative, and asserts, that, to be a Christian. believer, it is necessary not only to believe truth, but truth without mixture of falsehood. A very important position, and one on which much of our subsequent reasoning depended, and designed to meet the very doctrine contended for by the Observer,—namely, that we have all the faith required of us, if we believe Christian truth, though we believe it mixed with error, in an exact or in a false sense. After having established the four positions just enumerated, we proceed, in the second division of our article, to state the necessary conditions of faith in truths pertaining to the supernatural order, or what we need in order to be able to elicit an act of faith in a revelation of supernatural truth. Under this division, we attempt to establish, 1. That faith demands an authority on which to rest, extrinsic both to the believer and the matter believed 2. That the only, but sufficient, authority . for the intrinsic truth of the matter of supernatural revelation is the veracity of God; 3. That a witness to the fact that God has actually revealed the matter in question, that is, a witness to the fact of revelation, is also necessary; 4. That this witness must be not merely a witness to the fact that God has made a revelation, or to the fact of revelation in general, but to the precise revelation in each particular case in which there may be a question of what is or is not the revelation of God,-therefore an interpreter, as we expressed ourselves, of the genuine sense of the revelation; 5. That this witness must be universal, subsisting through all times and nations; 6. Unmistakable, with ordinary prudence, by the simple and illiterate; and, 7. Infallible. Now, of these seven positions, the writer in the Observer obJects expressly to the fourth, and, by implication, to the seventh. But he takes no notice of our definition of faith, namely, that "it is a theological virtue, which consists in believing, without doubting, explicitly or implicitly, all the truths Almighty God has revealed, on the veracity of God alone,"-on which, he must be aware, rests nearly the whole of our argument for the necessity of an infallible witness to the fact of revelation; for, if faith consists in believing without doubting, it is obvious that it is impossible to elicit an act of faith on the authority of a fallible witness. It can be possible only where there is no reasonable ground for doubt as to what God has actually revealed; and there always is reasonable ground for doubt, where the reliance is on a fallible witness, that is, a witness that may deceive or be deceived. Our conclusion, then, that the witness must be infallible, or faith is not possible, must be admitted, if our definition of faith is accepted. We were not to be refuted, then, on this point, except by a refu tation of our definition of faith. But the writer in the Observer does not refute this definition, for he does not even notice it. How, then, can he claim to himself the "pleasure" of having refuted us? But the writer in the Observer objects strongly to the fourth |