Sacraments, it resolved for all time, and for the whole world, to be the witness and conservator of that Order, which demonstrated to be the institution of inspired Apostles, stands in the authority of their Divine Head.

But we cannot conclude these Articles without remarking that the English Reformation has other claims to our affections and our veneration than those we have already enumerated. Consider the rich inheritance of the incomparable Liturgy it produced! The venerable forms of the early centuries, although in some respects adulterated, yet embodied the Christian consciousness of the Primitive Church, and were precious connecting links with all her past history. They at once witnessed the truth, and breathed the Spirit of Jesus Christ our incarnated Gospel. They contained the accumulated treasures of ages. They shone with a superior brilliance, like those worlds nearest the sun. Here, as in everything else, arose the question of abolition or amendment. The Continental divines seemed to suppose that all parts of the edifice imbibed corruption from its tainting excrescences, and were not contented unless they swept away every vestige of the ancient structure. Pillars, dome, foundations, went down in one indiscriminate and overwhelming ruin. The English Reformers, on the contrary, preserved the temple in its majestic proportions, and only removed those unseemly and unauthorized additions which had been made by medieval superstition. While rejecting the idolatries of falsehood they restored the symmetry of truth. The simple responsive recitation of the Psalter carries us back to the days of the Fathers, to the period of the Apostles, to the worship of the Saviour, to the custom of the Synagogue, and finally to the antiphonal service of the Temple, where voice and instrument swelled in one majestic volume of praise, and lifted earth toward Heaven. Our very lessons are arranged on the primitive model. Collect, Epistle, Gospel, connect us with a remote past. We express our thanks, our adorations, our petitions, in the forms which ascended from the hearts, and breathed from the lips of confessors, and martyrs now in glory. With the saints of centuries, our Litany sinks into penitent humiliation, and our Te Deum wings to the circles of the Cherubim crying aloud before the throne of Jehovah. We have embodied as in rock, all the facts and truths of our Religion; and as the one Holy Catholic Apostolic Church extends her sway over our world, this Liturgy growing out of all her Past,

will express all her Future, and be a worthy medium by which the worship of humanity can be addressed through the death of the Son, and the grace of the Spirit, to the universal Father. Who can improve its simplicity? Who can increase its adaptation? Who can intensify its purity? Who can add to its majesty? Does it not express the very soul of reformed Christendom? Does it not embrace the whole of Catholic orthodoxy? Does it not form a common basis for a universal worship in which all believers can unite? Yes! we affirm that it breathes the consciousness of the Church, and will prove a far better foundation for the unity of Christendom, than any modern associations can contrive. And are we to award but a cold and extorted praise to the men who accomplished such a work as our Liturgy? Could "villains" achieve this result? Nay! their darkness and guilt would have everywhere clouded and stained the purity of a service, which saints can use on earth, and which angels may delight to hear in Heaven. We have in our Prayer Books what learning! what wisdom! what piety! what devotion ! However its original compilers may have exhibited the painful traces of a human infirmity, yet will our Liturgy survive their eternal monument; and we suspect not only the loyal disposition, but even the moral nature of any Churchman, who is not disposed with tears to mantle their faults, and with thankfulness to venerate their virtues. And yet even our Liturgy is to be assaulted by the discontent of the age. On the one hand it is made to receive lawless additions intended to teach the doctrine and imitate the service of Rome, by men who would see the majestic simplicity of St. Paul's converted into the flashing, the gorgeous, the sensational magnificence of St. Peter's, and our revered mother arrayed in the gold and scarlet of Babylon. On the other hand, are those so pious, that, in the words of our Lord used in his own Sacraments, and in the language of the Ancient Fathers incorporated into our offices, they perceive the germs of error and of death. They are more conscientious than the Apostles, wiser than their Saviour, teachers of the Church, and instructors of the Almighty.

Nor can we leave this subject without an allusion to the fact that the English Reformation was the parent of the English Bible. The darkness of Christendom is largely traceable to the obscuration of the Divine Oracles. Never otherwise could have arisen a system from the magnificent endowments of Constantine, the

splendid rites of polished Paganism, the rude barbarism of the northern hordes, the glittering remains of a formal Judaism, the revered errors of the ancient Philosophy, artfully mingled with the pure doctrines of Christianity so as to touch every spring of human nature, and reach all classes of the human race; inheriting the seat of the Roman Empire, appropriating its prestige, employing its language, and perpetuating its name, whose sacraments became superstitions, whose purgatory was an agency of avarice, whose confessional wrung the heart to enslave the man, whose worship was idolatry, and whose asserted infallibility and supremacy were at once the degradation and the subjection of Europe. It was the imprisonment of the Bible which made the world a dungeon, and man its tyrant, its oracle, and its God. The Divine Scripture in the hands of an ignorant priesthood and in the letters of an unknown language, necessarily received human additions, and became even the instrument of superstition. Primitive Christianity had indeed the universal diffusion of the Holy Ghost, but not the universal diffusion of the Holy Scripture. Manuscripts transcribed with labor, and extravagant in price, were found only reposing in the libraries of scholars, or chained to the altars of churches. How determined Rome was to keep the Scriptures buried from the multitude will be seen in the terrible which she punished by chain and fire, every man, in cottage or cloister or palace, who dared read the words of eternal life in opposition to her authority. Certainly we are to regard with no ordinary love and reverence, those who defied her power, and, threatened by dungeon, and torture, and death, persevered in their work of translation, and gave the Scriptures to the people, in the language of the people. They deserve more than a cold mention, or a faint praise. They were benefactors. They were heroes. They were martyrs. That work which was consummated in the translation of King James, was begun in the flames of persecution. Its learning, its style, its simplicity, its majesty, need not now be praised. No volume ever translated and printed by man, has gone forth on so wide a mission, in so many lands, to so many nations, as our English Bible, moulding so largely individual life and universal humanity. That alone is a sufficient, an immortal monument of the labors of the Reformed Anglican Church. The nuptials of the steam-engine and the printing-press, by the multiplication of copies, will secure them from future corruptions;

energy

with

and as their light brightens over our earth, with the millennial glory, will more and more be appreciated the sufferings and the labors which gave to humanity such an inheritance.

Neither can we fail to connect the work of the English Reformation with the mission of the English nation. Glance back through a few centuries! See a diminutive island, peopled by barbarians, and smoking with Druidical altars stained in human blood! Who could ever dream such a country would prove a disseminator of language, a centre of civilization, a fountain of religion, a controlling power in the earth? Yet, from a conflict of races, a strife of creeds, and a war of classes, Britain arose into a form of government which was first to guard liberty, and finally to bestow it on the world. Should her aristocracy, her establishment, her throne, go down in ruin, she will be remembered for her prowess, her conquests, her laws, her literature, and, above all, as the great colonizer of the Gospel and the mother of our own Republic, whose mission is to receive into her bosom the populations of our globe, and send back over the world her streams of influence, perhaps for its last and noblest development, in the light of the millennium. Now blot out from history the English Reformation! Cover Great Britain again with the shadows of mediævalism! Let the darkness be projected over her vast colonies! Who can suppose under the burden and gloom of Romish superstitions her genius would have ever been stimulated into its development? Where would have been her Bacon, her Newton, her Shakespeare, her Milton? Where would have been the perfection of her noble language? Where would have been her poets, her orators, her statesmen? Where would have been those treasures of Church literature which are the delight, the admiration, the instruction of the world? Where would have been her constitutional government? Where would have been her laws, her freedom, and her progress? Where would have been her Bible? Where would have been the railway and the telegraph? Where would have been America, the hope of our humanity? Had her Reformation never occurred, England would have been this day an Italy; Scotland would have been a Spain; Canada would have been an Ireland; our Republic would have been a Mexico; Hindostan, and New Zealand, and Australia, and China, and Japan, would have been hopelessly abandoned to Jesuitism and the Papacy; all the forward movements of humanity would

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have been forever arrested. The glory of this light overspreading our world would have darkened into a universal gloom.

ART. II.—THE INTRODUCTION OF CHRISTIANITY IN

AMERICA.

THE SO-called New World is in reality the Old. It is supposed that before the first mountain peak had emerged from the primeval waves of the East, this western continent had become the abode of numerous tribes of living creatures, and in process of time, was fitted, in advance of other portions of the earth, as an abode for man. Yet the crown of creation was wanting, and it is highly probable that long after the plains of Asia had been peopled by dense and prosperous communities, the continent of America did not possess a human inhabitant. If this was not the case, and if the peopling of the West was really synchronous with that of the East, then we must inquire with a keener interest, why the Amer ican branch of the human family was so backward in its growth, and why, at a time when Europe, Asia, and Africa had already attained to a splendid civilization, this vast country, with all its inexhaustible capacities, was left in the possession of roving, barbarous tribes. I do not ask for the remote or final, but the proximate cause, the immediate reason, why, at a period when genius and art, and learning and mechanical skill, had each already endowed the families of the East with appropriate fruits destined to remain the rarest treasure of the whole human brotherhood to the end of time, that America, which was then, as now, a land of unparalleled promise, should have had no regular order of civilization, no culture, physical science, art, or genius, and no settled distribution of the various tribes until about the tenth century of the Christian Era, when the Aztecs descended into Mexico from the North, and founded a permanent home? This fact does not favor the simultaneous creation of several different families, with equal strength, capacity, and endowments, but points rather to the belief that in the course of events an inferior branch was lopped off from the parent Asiatic stock, and planted on the shores of the western world, where, isolated from the best examples, and shut out from the energizing influence that flows from the aggregated