Huss, John, Letters of, reviewed, 459. Not Passages from the Life of a Daughter at Home,
a Protestant, id.
reviewed, 155.
Hutchison, C. Tidings from the Mountains, Presbyterianism, Slanders on, 396.

Orsini, the Abbot, his Life of the Virgin Zinzendorf, Count, 125.

WILLIAM MACPHAIL, PRINTER, 2 greenside place, edinburgh.

MACPHAIL'S

EDINBURGH ECCLESIASTICAL JOURNAL.

No. I.

FEBRUARY 1846.

THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH AND ITS POSITION.

THE utility of religious Establishments has been tested by the experience of ages. They have been ably defended on the ground of expediency, by many writers, whose opinions on other points were wide as the poles asunder." Warburton and Hume-the very antipodes of the literary world-Burke and Paley-differing as they did, toto cœlo, in regard to most other matters, were unanimous in this. All of them felt a certain horror of fanaticism; and they were sharpsighted enough to perceive that such institutions are the most effectual barriers against its inroads. Of late years, however, it has become the fashion both to attack and defend them, by weapons drawn from the Sacred Writings; but we are not sure that the controversy on either side has been very honestly conducted. Perhaps it would have been better, if the advocates of the Establishment Principle, after shewing, as it was easy enough to do, that their system was neither unscriptural nor antiscriptural, had rested its positive defence not so much on individual texts, susceptible, as many think, of a different interpretation, as on the general spirit of the Bible, and its adaptation to human nature, under whatever circumstances placed. The records of every ecclesiastical controversy are but too fertile in shewing how easy it is to fasten upon detached portions and passages of Holy Writ, a meaning that cannot, without torture, be deduced from them. Satan, himself, as every body knows, can freely enough misquote Scripture to suit his own purposes; heretics and hypocrites, in every age, have done so; and it is not unlikely that, when the feverish excitement of the present time shall have passed away, not those alone who maintained every Ecclesiastical Establishment to be Antichristian, but those also, who denounced the Voluntary Principle as Atheistical, will be deemed alike to have transgressed the rules of sober criticism. "Et extra, et intra muros peccatum est." We are not even sure but that the ministers of the Establishment would have been, both to themselves and others, more ad

vantageously employed in the quiet discharge of official duty among their own parishioners, than in entering the field of polemics at all, and there exhibiting an ostentatious parade of somewhat questionable arguments. To have excelled Dissenters in their public and private ministrations would have been at least as creditable as to have out-roared them on the platform. As the unblemished character of a Christian is the finest of all commentaries on the excellency of his religion, so would the diligence and devotedness of the clergy have been the strongest testimony to the worth of an Establishment. But if the private Christian, his faith being attacked, shall be provoked, in an evil hour, to neglect the duties of his proper sphere, and spend, in vain jangling, the hours which he was accustomed to devote to sacred exercises-if, from being a doer of the word, he shall become merely a disputant— or, which is yet worse, if carried away by a zeal, not tempered by discretion, he shall even go so far as, in Scripture phraseology, to " speak wickedly, and plead deceitfully for God;" it is obvious, that in doing so, he surrenders the stronger part of his armour into the enemy's hand; nor will the effect of a few random shots that he may have scattered among his assailants, be an equivalent for the shield and helmet that he has vilely cast away. And so, in like manner, we fear, that the hot warfare, in which a few years ago, Churchmen were engaged, was on various accounts less servicable to their cause than would have been that nobler strife of good works which might have called forth between Dissenters and them a generous emulation. True, indeed, there had been much foul-mouthed and insolent abuse employed by the Voluntary orators of the day against the Establishment; but this, too, might have been more nobly avenged " by silent magnanimity alone." There is wisdom in the homely observation of Barrington :-" If you wrestle with a chimney-sweeper, you may, indeed, throw your antagonist, but you will be sure to dirty your own coat by the encounter." We are far from meaning, that on no occasion ought the ministers of religion to enter the arena of disputation; neither are we even inclined greatly to blame them for having done so at the time referred to. What we regret is, that too frequently extravagant pretensions were set up, indefensible arguments made use of, texts of Scripture made to utter a meaning neither certainly nor necessarily involved in them, and, by consequence, the extra-essentials of religion elevated into an importance due only to its cardinal doctrines. Often, too, did the adversaries of our common Christianity derive satisfaction from witnessing the disappointment and mortification of the respective combatants, when, after finding their own weapons turned against themselves, they had reason, like some one of Homer's heroes, to lament not only the victory which they had lost, but the spear which they had broken. Certain it is, that much waste of intellectual strength might have been spared-much valuable erudition applied to better use-and much indecent bigotry avoided, if the obvious principle had been admitted, that, if the Divine Author of our religion had willed only one form of Ecclesiastical Polity to be universally binding, it would have been laid down in the New Testament, with all the clearness of a command