was their portion. Though they seem to have been popular among the lower orders, on the part of their antagonists were arraigned all the powers of the church and state, and their arguments and miracles were confronted by bulls, as if the honour and safety of the papacy depended on their suppression.

The pope condemned the following propositions of Jansenius: That there are Divine precepts which good men are absolutely unable to obey, nor has God given them that measure of grace which is essentially necessary to render them capable of such obedience that no person, in this corrupt state of nature, can resist the influence of Divine grace, when it operates upon the mind that, in order to render human actions meritorious, it is not requisite that they be exempt from necessity, but only that they be free from constraint that the Semi-Pelagians err grievously in maintaining, that the human will is endowed with a power of either receiving or resisting the aids and influences of preventing grace that whosoever affirms that Jesus Christ made expiation by his sufferings and death, for the sins of all mankind, is a Semi-Pelagian. Of these propositions, the pope declared the first four were heretical; the fifth he pronounced rash, impious, and injurious to the Supreme Being.

A respite, however, was afforded to the suffering Jansenists, in the year 1669, by a strong opposition among the French clergy, against the new subscriptions required by the pope. As they conceived that the liberties of their church were violated, they refused to subscribe, and were joined by Anne Généviève de Bourbon, dutchess of Longueville, and sister of Louis XIV. During her life, the Jansenists found a temporary indulgence; but after her death, the influence of a Jesuit confessor prevailed, and they became the objects of a cruel persecution, which many sustained with great fortitude, and some avoided by a voluntary exile. Arnauld, who may be considered as the head of the Jansenists, fled into Holland, and is said to have won over to his persuasion most of the Roman Catholics who resided under the Dutch government; and here they found a shelter from the pope and his Jesuits. But in France, their entire depression was aimed at; their favourite retreat, the Convent of Port-Royal, in the fields in the neighbourhood of Paris, was erased in 1709; and the very bodies of the Jansenists, as well as the living members of the Convent, were removed to other places.

Not only the theological doctrines of the Jansenists were offensive to the Jesuits, but equally so was the strictness that reigns in their moral system and practical religion. They were,

besides, reprovers of the laxity of manners, and of the depravity, that pervaded the sacred order of the Roman church. They encouraged the reading of the Holy Scriptures, and zealously inculcated that piety does not consist in rites and ceremonies alone, but in inward holiness and divine love.

These faithful disciples of Augustin, however, with all their sincerity and undissembled piety, illustrate but too well the importance of a defect in their system-its not including a clear and definite knowledge of justification by faith alone in the merits of Christ — the distinguishing doctrine of protestantism, and the want of which knowledge left them still in subjection to the elements of the papacy. Like the Galatians, to a certain extent, "having begun in the spirit, they would be made perfect in the flesh." They fully maintained the gratuitous and eternal election of God in Christ; but their being perfected for ever by the one sacrifice of Christ, and their privilege to glory in his imputed merits through faith before the effects of their eternal union with him could be fully and personally realised, they did not clearly understand, but sought "to make their calling and election sure," by grace as an infused quality, and by inherent righteousness. Hence," the penitential system of the Jansenists, which seemed to prescribe voluntary sufferings and painful labours, and all the austerities of the ancient monks, almost as a satisfaction for sin. They extolled those who had even shortened their days by excessive abstinence and labour, as "the sacred victims of repentance"-"who had been consumed by the fire of divine love." To such an excess did they carry their notion of the meritoriousness of such persons in the sight of God, that they magnified them into patron saints, procuring blessings upon their friends and the church.

The persecuting hatred of the Jesuits, guides us to the discovery of some good among those who were called Mystics, or Quietists, in the Romish communion. Their favourite maxim -"that religion consists in the perfect calm and tranquillity of the mind removed from all external and finite things and centred in God, and in such a pure love of him as is independent of all prospect of interest or reward"— might indeed, in connexion with other principles, be but a more refined system of selfrighteousness and fantastic delusion. Yet the same language, properly understood and qualified, and grounded upon the truths of revelation, may not unaptly describe the highest aim of the reconciled child of God. We may hope there were some such among these Mystics, though a mysticism of another cast too

frequently appears. Molinos, a Spanish priest, was persecuted to death for these sentiments, by the Jesuits, in 1696. They were about the same time propagated in France by the writings of Madam Guyon, though combated with great severity by the celebrated Bossuet. Fenelon, the amiable archbishop of Cambray, defended the doctrine of" disinterested love;" but he was compelled by the pope to retract. His opinions were condemned by Innocent XII., and the archbishop was compelled to read the sentence before the people, from his own pulpit at Cambray.

During the eighteenth century, popery remained unchanged. The pope, indeed, retained but a shadow of his former greatness, but his pretensions were the same, and the doctrines of the Roman Catholic faith were supposed to have undergone no alterations. The disciples of Augustin, the Jansenists, still continued, and included the greater part of the Roman Catholics in Flanders and the Belgic provinces, who, though they professed great attachment to the communion of the church of Rome, paid but little regard to the authority of the pope, when it condemned their own opinions. In France, the Jesuits were much alarmed by the success of a translation of the New Testament into the French language by Quesnel, which had been published with notes, agreeably to the religious sentiments of the Jansenists. They procured, by the influence of Louis XIV., to have it condemned; and Clement XI. issued the famous bull known by the title "Unigenitus," in which Quesnel's New Testament was censured, and a hundred and one propositions contained in its notes were pronounced heretical. This bull manifested, beyond all controversy, that popery remained unchanged. But it was not only disliked by the Jansenists, as condemning their peculiar doctrines, but by a large body of the French clergy and laity, at the head of whom was the cardinal de Noailles, archbishop of Paris, as being, in some of its provisions, an infringement on the liberties of the Gallican church: They therefore appealed from the bull to the next general council; but the power of the monarch being cast into the scale, the Jesuits and the court of Rome prevailed: a secret schism, however, was produced in the church of France, which was never entirely healed, till all inferior concerns were lost in the late wonderful Revolution.

SECT. III.

THE CHURCHES OF THE LUTHERAN PROFESSION.

Of the fruits of that reformation which Luther began, a small portion only bears his name among posterity, the term Lutheran having become confined to those churches which retain his doctrine of the presence in the sacrament. Unhappily, after the death of the first reformers, the Lutherans became more and more tenacious of this peculiarity; and some of them considered those Protestants who refused to receive it, as heretics, and almost worse than Papists. The authority of Luther had at first established his notion of consubstantiation over all the north of

Protestant Europe. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, not only did Crypto-Calvinism, as it was called -a leaning to Calvin's doctrine concerning the sacrament — create great division among the Lutherans, but whole countries fell off from their confession. In 1604, the landgrave of Hesse went over to the reformed church, and in 1614, the elector of Brandenburg followed his example.

The supremacy of the temporal sovereign is admitted throughout the Lutheran churches. The form of their ecclesiastical government is rather episcopal than presbyterian. Episcopacy however prevails in almost every gradation, till it is nearly lost in the parity of ministers; and the notions since termed Erastian, which confine the ministerial function to persuasion and remon→ strance, and claim communion with the external church as a natural right, soon prevailed so far that all restoration of the ancient discipline was found impracticable.

In respect of doctrine, Luther, during his life, was the oracle of his followers. To the doctrines of grace, as maintained by Augustin against the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians, he added, as we have already seen, a clearer statement of "justification by faith alone." Melancthon fully agreed with Luther, as his "Common Places" and other writings attest; but from the extreme diffidence and yielding nature of his character, he seemed to owe much of his firmness and stability in the truth, to the firmer mind of Luther, on whose support he leaned. After his death, he became like the fruitful vine deprived of its prop, which seemed to hang down upon the ground, and to be trampled upon by the injurious foot. Melancthon's conduct during the INTERIM, was not sufficiently firm. His heart was sound, but the

elector Maurice cajoled him into what seemed a compliance.. When Henry VIII. was Protestant on no other point than the rejection of the pope's supremacy, he was apprehensive that Melancthon would yield it up. In regard to the great doctrine of faith, this reformer was blamed in his latter days, for not boldly and explicitly coming forth with his statements against its opponents. Calvin, in his correspondence, blames him respecting the doctrine of eternal election; not as thinking differently from him and his colleagues, but as "dissembling his sentiments." To Melancthonise seems to have become a phrase among the reformers; and the authority of Melancthon's name has been claimed in the support of very contrary systems of doctrine. In the Synergistic controversy, which respected the co-operation of the human will with the work of grace in conversion, and which, marks the first entrance of Semi-Pelagianism into the Lutheran church, Melancthon suffered the following phraseology to be used, "that there was a corresponding action of the will." This language, though perfectly ambiguous in itself, could not but seem to yield the point in dispute; and it cannot be thought surprising, that the animosity of some men of warm zeal should be provoked against him, perhaps to censure him with injustice.

After his decease, it is certain that the Semi-Pelagian notions began more and more to prevail among the Lutherans. At nearly the close of the sixteenth century, however, Luther's opinions on these points seem to have been still orthodox in his, university of Wittemberg, for Huber, a professor of divinity there, was deposed from his office and banished, for attacking what now began to be called "the Calvinistic doctrine of absolute predestination and unconditional decrees." But at the period of the Synod of Dort1, it was understood that Wittemberg declared against the Calvinists, and claimed the authority of Melancthon on their side.

Though many of the Lutheran clergy, in the seventeenth century, must be allowed to have been exceptions, yet a general deterioration of the Lutheran churches in Germany seems to be acknowledged. Dr. Mosheim accounts for this, by the demoralising effects of "the thirty years' war," both on the magistrates and on the people; by the general neglect of education; and, in the circumstances of the country, from the withdrawing of so many youths of liberal education from the service of the church to the more honourable profession of arms. He notes,