tion purchased by Christ, through working faith in them. As soon as the elect have faith in Jesus Christ, that is, as soon as they give their consent heartily and repentantly, in the sense of deserved condemnation, to the covenant of grace, God justifies them by imputing to them that perfect obedience which Christ gave to the law, and the satisfaction also which upon the cross Christ gave to justice in their name. They who are thus called and justified are by the same power likewise sanctified; the dominion of carnal lusts being destroyed in them, and the practice of holiness being, in spite of some remnants of corruption, put in their power. Good works, done in obedience to God's moral law, are the fruits and evidences of a true faith; and the persons of the faithful elect being accepted through Christ, their good works also are accepted in him and rewarded. But works done by other and unregenerate men, though they may be things which God commands, cannot please God and are sinful. The elect can after justification and sanctification no more fall from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere to the end and be eternally saved; and of this they may, even in the present life, have the certain assurance. Finally, after death, their souls and bodies are joyfully joined together again in the resurrection, and they remain thenceforth for ever

with Christ in glory; while all the wicked are sent away into hell with Satan, whom they have served.

We have here set down the main doctrines of Calvinistic Puritanism almost entirely in words of its own choosing. It is not necessary to enter into distinctions such as those between sublapsarians and supralapsarians, between Calvinists who believe that God's decree of election and reprobation was passed in foresight of original sin and on account of it, and Calvinists who believe that it was passed absolutely and independently. The important points of Calvinism,-original sin, free election, effectual calling, justification through imputed righteousness,—are common to both. The passiveness of man, the activity of God, are the great features in this scheme; there is very little of what man thinks and does, very much of what God thinks and does; and what God thinks and does is described with such particularity that the figure we have used of the man in the next street cannot but recur strongly to our minds.

The positive Protestantism of Puritanism, with which we are here concerned, as distinguished from the negative Protestantism of the Church of England, has nourished itself with ardour on this scheme of doctrine. It informs and fashions the whole religion

of Scotland, established and nonconforming. It is the doctrine which Puritan flocks delight to hear from their ministers. It was Puritanism's constant reproach against the Church of England, that this essential doctrine was not firmly enough held and set forth by her. At the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, in the Committee of Divines appointed by the House of Lords in 1641, and again at the Savoy Conference in 1661, the reproach regularly appeared. "Some have defended," is the Puritan complaint, "the whole gross substance of Arminianism, that the act of conversion depends upon the concurrence of man's free will; some do teach and preach that good works are concauses with faith in the act of justification; some have defended universal grace, some have absolutely denied original sin." As Puritanism grew, the Calvinistic scheme of doctrine hardened and became stricter; of the Calvinistic confessions of faith of the sixteenth century,-the Helvetic Confession, the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism,-the Calvinism is so moderate as to astonish any one who has been used only to its later developments. Even the much abused canons of the Synod of Dort no one can read attentively through without finding in parts of them a genuine movement of thought,-sometimes even a philosophic depth,—and a powerful religious feeling. In

the documents of the Westminster Assembly, twenty-five years later, this has disappeared; and what we call the British Philistine stands in his religious capacity, sheer and stark, before us. Seriousness is the one merit of these documents, but it is a seriousness too mixed with the alloy of mundane strife and hatred to be called a religious feeling; not a trace of delicacy of perception, or of philosophic thinking; the mere rigidness and contentiousness of the controversialist and political dissenter; a Calvinism exaggerated till it is simply repelling; and to complete the whole, a machinery of covenants, conditions, bargains, and parties-contractors, such as could have proceeded from no one but the born Anglo-Saxon man of business, British or American.

However, a scheme of doctrine is not necessarily false because of the style in which its adherents may have at a particular moment enounced it. From the faults which disfigure the performance of the Westminster divines the profession of faith prefixed to the Congregational Year-Book is free. The Congregationalists form one of the two great divisions of English Puritans. "Congregational churches believe," their Year-Book tells us, "that the first man disobeyed the divine command, fell from his state of innocence and purity, and involved all his posterity in the conse

quences of that fall. They believe that all who will be saved were the objects of God's eternal and electing love, and were given by an act of divine sovereignty to the Son of God. They believe that Christ meritoriously obtained eternal redemption for us, and that the Holy Spirit is given in consequence of Christ's mediation." The essential points of Calvinism are all here. To this profession of faith, annually published in the Year-Book of the Independents, subscription is not required; Puritanism thus remaining honourably consistent with the protests which, at the Restoration, it made against the call for subscription. But the authors of the Year-Book say with pride, and it is a common boast of the Independent churches, that though they do not require subscription, there is, perhaps, in no religious body, such firm and general agreement in doctrine as among Congregationalists. This is true, and it is even more true of the flocks than of the ministers, of whom the abler and the younger begin to be lifted by the stream of modern ideas. Still, up to the present time, the Protestantism of one great division of English Puritans is undoubtedly Calvinist ; the Baptists holding in general the scheme of Calvinism yet more strictly than the Independents.

The other great division of English Puritanism is