[MARRIAGES.

"A. W." will accept our best thanks. Dr. Hook's noble sermon was noticed in our last.

"D. I. E." The two sermons shall appear in our next two Numbers. Our excellent friend will perceive that his kindness is duly appreciated.

"G. C." Our pages are open to the controversy upon the Oxford Tracts. The valuable article enclosed in our next.

"T." and "N." We do not understand their silence.

"D. D." Is Dr. Hampden now of sufficient importance to be interesting?

We shall give an extra half sheet to enable us to bring up our arrears of correspondence.

THE

CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER.

OCTOBER, 1839.

REVIEW OF NEW PUBLICATIONS.

ART. I.-The Constitution of the Visible Church of Christ considered, under the Heads of Authority and Inspiration of Scripture; Creeds (Tradition); Articles of Religion; Heresy and Schism; StateAlliance, Preaching, and National Education; in Eight Discourses, preached before the University of Cambridge, in the year 1838, at the Lecture founded by the Rev. JOHN HULSE. By the Rev. RICHARD PARKINSON, B.D. of St. John's College, Cambridge, and Fellow of Christ's College, in Manchester. London Parker. Cambridge: Deighton. Oxford: Parker.

8vo. Pp. xxxvi. 260.

:

Manchester: Bancks & Co. 1839.

(Continued from page 520.)

We propose in this article to consider Lecture II. It is occupied with the discussion of the amount and nature of the authority of Scripture. That this is a most interesting inquiry cannot for a moment be denied. At the present time, too, the consideration of this question would seem to possess a tenfold claim upon our attention it is in fact the question of the day. Nor, indeed, is this to be wondered at. If the assertion with which the first lecture opens be true, then this necessarily follows. If these be days for "stirring foundations," it is a necessary result of such a state of things, that the plummet and the line by which the structure is to be re-adjusted should be first agreed upon; there can be no settling of the foundation with any hope of durability, unless we can point to some infallible standard of perfection, and also to some master architect, competent to decide on the agreement of the copy with its pattern. Now the consistent Christian is prepared to look upon Scripture as the plummet and the line, and upon the Church as the hand and eye which Christ on earth uses to apply them. He is prepared to regard holy Scripture as the infallible standard of perfection, and the Church as the means employed by the Saviour to

decide when the standard and the thing tested agree. It will then be in this light that we shall consider Scripture. A subsequent lecture will afford to us material for a review of the measure of authority due to the Church. In this article we will seek to determine how far holy Scripture claims for itself, or enables us to claim for it, a binding authority on Christians. Nor do we know of any better arrangement for the elucidation of this point than that offered by the first of the two lectures under our consideration. Mr. Parkinson, in opening the subject, is naturally engaged, in the first instance, with the marked difference which exists in the relative claims to obedience set up by the elder and newer revelation of God's will to man. Having stated the nature of the Old Testament as a law, in the strict sense of the term, with hereditary administration, he proceeds to say,

But, as far as this definiteness of character extends, we discover little corresponding to it in the new law of the Gospel. We find, indeed, a Lawgiver, of a much more exalted character, and entrusted with powers far less limited and defined than was Moses. But the mode of legislation adopted by him differed in almost every respect from his, who was, in several important characteristics, his forerunner and prototype. He propounded no system to his followers at all approaching, in form, to our notions of a legal code. He not only did not write, or anywhere direct his disciples to write, any systematic account of the rules of his revelation, or the principles and precepts by which his followers were to be guided, but it is only in the most incidental shape possible that we are enabled to collect what these principles and precepts were. The first four books of what we style the New Testament, consist principally of memoirs of his life, with miscellaneous notices of his doctrines, written by men, who nowhere say, like Moses, that they wrote at the express command of their Master, or that their works contain all that it is necessary to know on the subjects which they profess to treat. The book of the Acts is, in like manner, a short record of some leading events in the early history of his Church, and the lives of a few of his disciples, written, as it professes, in continuation of a work, which had been undertaken rather to remind him to whom it was addressed of the main facts of which he had previously been informed, than to comprise a full and complete narrative of the early fortunes of the infant church of Christ. Again, with respect to the Epistles, they would seem to be the most accidental productions in the world. Some addressed to local churches, and some to individuals; apparently occasioned by slight, and not a few of them by forgotten occurrences; mostly confining themselves to the point immediately in hand, and seldom indeed entering formally and systematically on the great and fundamental principles of the gospel-not arrogating to themselves the character

• Of course this assertion will be understood in its literal and broad acceptation, that no writer of the New Testament has informed us that he composed the volume of which he is the author at the express command of his Lord. Nor is any reference made to the book of Revelation-a work sui generis. We can well conceive that in the forty days after the resurrection, during which period our Lord had frequent and familiar intercourse with his apostles, and gave them full instructions with regard to every thing relating to the kingdom of God, this duty, of recording its history and doctrines, would not fail to be prescribed. But such prescription is not asserted by them in their works; it is rather, like many other important truths, taken for granted; it being doubtless concluded, and reasonably so, by the apostles, that all who held their writings to be inspired, would hold, likewise, that they were written from a divine

motive.

of being all-sufficient teachers and expounders of the faith-making no appeals to posterity-and not distinctly professing to have any object beyond the immediate occasion which called them forth. Neither St. Paul, nor any other writer of the New Testament, gives any precept to his readers that his works shall be accurately copied, or carefully treasured up, as a possession for ever to the Church, and as a future standard of religious faith and practice.

And as with the Law, so with the administration of it. We have no family of men set apart, as in the Mosaic dispensation, for the purpose of exclusively guarding or expounding this new religious system; there is as little minuteness in the execution as in the legislation. And though an order of men to whom an analogous and perpetual authority is committed, be carefully instituted, yet their functions are apparently as indefinite, as the law of which they are the constituted guardians and interpreters.-Pp. 31-33.

Nor can a fairer view of the subject be well afforded; though we are bold to confess that we think that, without harshness, a few more, or at any rate, stronger cautions might have been given against the fashionable error of our day,—to suppose that, because the Jewish ordinances are a stumbling-block, and have passed away, that, therefore the christian sacraments, and the rites of the christian church, whose essential impress is humility, are also encumbrances to evangelical holiness, and that because the heralds of the gospel, unlike the administrators of the law, are not hereditary, therefore they are not continuous. The very passage before us, independently of the whole tenor of these lectures, and the reverend author's well-known principles, acquit him from wishing to lower the ordinances, or to un-entail-if we may so speak the ministers of the gospel. But in proportion as a writer is sound in his views, and clear in his enunciation of those views, are we jealous lest he should be led by a desire of appearing candid and impartial to understate objectionable truths, or at all events to overstate current objections to received facts, attested by the church of God. We are not of the number of those who think it necessary to let the spectator view the forces of the enemy through a magnifying lens, and to show him our own staff through a minifying medium, in order that his joy at our triumph may be enhanced by surprise at its achievement. Man is very much a creature of prejudice, and where you will find one man who will let the issue decide the relative merits of the combatants, you will find a thousand who, having viewed the battle field, decide that it is impossible but that a contest, where forces are so unequally matched, must eventuate in favour of the more efficiently-accoutred party; and strong in their own conceit that this must be so, they go away, charged with full news of the battle, and all particulars of the victory, long before a sword has been drawn. In other words, we are inclined to think that an argument addressed to the oi oλλoì is not calculated to be one whit the more effective, because it gives the opponent "every possible concession." We are sure that the concession is often taken, and the consequences rejected. We must not be supposed

to apply these remarks to the work we now have under notice: they are rather aimed at a school of a far different class from that to which our author belongs, though it is true they have been partially suggested by the passage we have just quoted, and another in this lecture, at page 45, where we have it asserted that it is only in "general terms" that a command is given for the performance of that perpetual administration of the sacraments which the gospel enjoins. Now here again we know our author's meaning; but the phrase is such an one as the sectarian would, with much show of reason, pervert; and although we are free to admit the force of the following passage, yet we conceive that the divine and continuous origin of the priesthood is sufficiently deducible from the express words in which the original command to "disciple nations" was issued, and which we have always been wont to look upon as the charter of incorporation securing with particularity the perpetual succession of the christian priesthood. Meanwhile, as a twin argument, the following is very valuable.

Now, as the observance of a perpetual rite necessarily pre-supposes the existence of a perpetual order of men who shall be responsible for the execution of it, nothing would seem to be clearer than that, in his intention, a modified form of priesthood followed as necessarily upon the expiration of the old, as his own significant and spiritual rites did upon the now lifeless ceremonies of the typical law of Moses. We can no more conceive a breach in the succession of the priesthood, than a suspension of the administration of the sacraments.—

P. 45

To return, however, to the thread of our lecture. Having clearly stated to the full all the apparent discrepancy between the Old and New Testament, as regards the authority severally possessed by each, Mr. Parkinson thus goes on to account for it :

In the first place then, it will be perceived, that the differences which we have remarked upon, are chiefly those of omission. The same fulness of detail, accuracy of form, and removal of all ground of mistake, are not observed in the New as in the Old Testament. And the first and most obvious reason for this is, that they were not necessary. Christianity is not a new religion, but a more complete revelation of one already partially disclosed; nor is the form which it assumes, or the books in which it is recorded, intended to supersede, but to continue and complete those which had already been long known to the world. Now that distinctness of statement which is absolutely necessary in the promulgation of any new system, is by no means requisite in a scheme which assumes an earlier one as its substantial basis and general outline. In this latter case, the minuteness required is rather to specify what is not approved and adopted, than to point out what is continued; as all bequests in a human testament are held good and binding, unless specially revoked in the codicil which may be appended to it. Taking then this view of the Gospel, with reference to the Law of Moses, we are not surprised, but, on the contrary, hold it to be just what we ought to expect, that no allusion should be made to those points in which the analogy between them is not broken; and maintain that analogy to be even the more binding, because the new law has not thought it necessary to guard against the possibility of neglecting it. Thus the writers, the books, and the priesthood of the gospel, are not fenced about with the same safeguards,