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ART. XI.-A Charge delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Chichester, August 5, 1851, at the Primary Visitation of the Venerable James Garbett, M.A., Archdeacon of Chichester, and Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. London: Hatchard. 1851.

WE regard this charge of Professor Garbett as a very masterly synopsis of the relative positions of the Churches of England and Rome in the great controversy which is now drawing forth all the might and energy of the two contending parties, who seem, by the confession of all, to be committed to a struggle in these lands from which there is no retreat; but which must be decisive, either by our submitting to the encroachments of Rome and finally surrendering all those liberties, civil and ecclesiastical, for the attainment of which our forefathers contended to the death; or by our beating back the presumptuous foreigner who has thus dared to invade England's birthright, affecting to trample under foot both Church and Throne, and our whole code of law by which these are secured.

There are, moreover, sufficient indications to justify apprehensions, which are very generally entertained, that this assault upon us is only one feature of a very wide-spreading combination or plot againt the liberties of mankind devised by the Jesuits, carried on chiefly by them, who have their agents or emissaries or tools everywhere, and who are capable of assuming all sorts of disguises in order to accomplish their purpose-this purpose being to re-establish Popery in greater power than it has ever been able to attain in past times: to realise all the aspirations of Hildebrand: to place thrones and empires beneath its feet, with their wealth and power multiplied an hundred fold, as they have been in modern times; and to wield themselves all this power, using the Pope as their puppet.

There can be no doubt that the Papacy is at the present time utterly powerless in itself, and that it is a mere tool in the hands of the Jesuits. As little can it be doubted that education and the confessional are both completely under the controul of the Jesuits in all Roman Catholic countries, and even in all Roman Catholic establishments and families located in England or any other Protestant countries. Every Jesuit swears to obey his Superior as "holding the place of God;" and the General of the Jesuits, who is head of the whole Society, promises the same unlimited obedience to the Pope, but the Pope is a mere creature of the Society. Yet this secures a more perfect organization than exists in any other body; and, as their ramifications extend everywhere, and their operations, though con

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ducted in secret are all reported at head-quarters, they have a power which is incalculable, because, while boundless in extent, it is so completely organized.

And the training of a Jesuit is such as to render him wholly passive, having no will of his own, but ready without scruple to do anything at the bidding of his Superior. A Jesuit must be passionless-void of all the common feelings of humanity-and he must give up his reason and senses so as to believe that black is white if his Superior tells him so. One of them has said-"Were God to order me, through the voice of my Superior, to put to death father, mother, children, brothers, and sisters, I would do it with an eye as tearless and a heart as calm as if I were seated at a banquet of the Paschal Lamb." And another, in the Univers, has said, that the not burning of heretics is a proof that modern Romanists have degenerated from the faith of the Church. "For my own part (says he), what I regret is this-and I avow it franklynamely, that they did not burn John Huss sooner than they did, and that they did not also burn LUTHER. I regret that some individual has not started up, sufficiently endowed with piety and policy, to set on foot a crusade against Protestants."

Most pious and most politic Jesuit !-we thank thee in the name of all Protestants for thy frank avowal ! If the Protestants are now found unprepared, they will only have themselves to blame; and, let them not suppose that this is mere gasconade and bravado on the part of the Jesuits; but be assured that it proceeds from a consciousness of their strength, and that the plot against the liberties of mankind is so near its maturity that they think they may now with safety drop the mask and prepare for the execution of their schemes. We, on our part, believe that England is the main hindrance to the execution of this plot, and that therefore they have begun with attacking England; and the assault has commenced on the Church of England, as they well know that, if the Church of England is laid low, the ruin of the Throne will speedily follow. But the other Protestant States ought to know that, if England falls, not one of them will be safe-nay, such Roman Catholic countries as have any civil liberties should be induced, by a sense of self-preservation, to make common cause with us now: for, if the plot of the Jesuits succeeds, the whole world will be placed under the foot of the Pope and his creatures, and the civil rights of all mankind will be utterly subverted.

Archdeacon Garbett seems fully aware of the important crisis we are approaching; and, speaking merely to the clergy, uses the following words:

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"Unless you do, to some considerable extent, apprehend the culiar character of the times, and are filled with a reasonable awe of the indefinite future which is coming upon us, you are not in a capacity to measure the wants, the relations, and the peril of the Church. It becomes us, in a crisis as awful as the world has ever seen, to gird up ourselves to our duties in the field wherein God has set us to labour; and to see that, whatever be his will on those world-wide questions which we cannot controul, we quit ourselves manfully in this contest between good and evil. The most pressing of those duties before God and man is to determine, accurately and at once, the main position and guiding principles on which our death-struggle against the Church of Rome shall be rested. I say main position, because there are several lines of reasoning which may be adopted, and which have in former times, as at the present, been exhausted by Anglican theologians, all more or less conclusive, according to the constitution of individual minds, and all converging to the same issue. None of them ought to be abandoned. Such is the argument from tradition and primitive antiquity, the testimony of history, and so forth, which, though decisive to intellects and habits of thought competent to appreciate them, are neither our strongest bulwark, nor sufficient to sustain us in popular controversy in our imminent peril" (40).

This main position-these guiding principles-which form at once the characteristics and the bulwark of the Church of England, and the absence of which places a gulph of separation between her and Rome is our reception and the paramount honour which we give to the WORD OF GOD, contrasted with a theoretical rejection of Scripture by the Church of Rome as insufficient to determine the canon of the faith, and the practical withholding it from the people, as though it were perilous to their souls.

And it is obvious that this is precisely the issue on which the judgment proceeds in the day of the Lord, when he cometh to take "vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ;" while the spirit of Antichrist appears in "power, and signs, and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth that they might be saved" (2 Thess. i. 8; ii. 10).

The manifest tendency of this age is to that species of excitement which finds its gratification in the mysterious and the marvellous; and this, if it do not expand into its legitimate exercise through the medium of Scripture in contemplating the wonders of redeeming love and the glories of the world to come, will contract itself into petty delusions of the senses, and monkish legends, and relics of saints, and tricks of legerdemain. In a thousand forms, from the stupendous imposture of the

mass, through images and relics, down to the meanest tricks of lying priestcraft, Rome pampers it to the full."

"Such is the enemy-subtle, indefatigable, great and imposing in aspect, with whom, in a thousand shapes and everywhere, we are called upon in these last days to contend. And we are compelled to do so under circumstances of danger and disadvantage, in which the Church of England in former days has never been placed.

"The world, moreover, is now, in every sphere of action and of thought, the scene of gigantic experiments, such as philosophy has never before contemplated. It is in this respect an era without a parallel, quite as much so as in the increasing command of man over the elements, his intellectual cultivation, and the expansion of his material prosperity. How it is regarded depends on men's principles or temperament. We may behold in this dissolution of all ancient systems, and the projection of their elements into the fermenting abyss, only that preparatory chaos out of which a new social order is to spring, the inequalities of human condition are to be redressed, and our lot on earth indefinitely ameliorated. Or we may regard it, as many wise and holy men have done, as the forerunner of the personal coming of Christ to establish a kingdom of millennial peace on the ruins of a world which sin has deformed beyond regeneration by anything less than the direct interposition of its author" (39).

The first of these suppositions is an Utopian scheme which finds no support in Scripture, but is, on the contrary, negatived by its whole tenor, and can be only entertained by those who are imperfectly acquainted with Scripture or disbelieve its contents. The latter view of things is in accordance with all prophecy whether of the Old or New Testament, and these very signs are given to warn us to make preparation. And it is no longer a speculative or theoretical inquiry which a man may take up for his amusement and may lay down at his pleasure; but it is a practical question which will be forced upon every one-which each must decide for himself. Neutrality will not be much longer possible: each will shortly have to take his part -either with the Church of England in resisting the encroachments of Rome, or under the Jesuits in active co-operation against the liberties of mankind.

The preparation must begin in the soul of the individual: he must know the truth, and know that this truth is not of man, but of God, that he may be able to maintain it at all hazards. But it has been the great endeavour of the enemy of the souls of men to turn them aside from this inquiry, and to fix their attention on secondary and accidental things:

"The first question, therefore, to be asked by a Christian reasoner is not so much, which is the true Church, as what is Truth? Yet one characteristic of the controversies of the day is the absorption of men's

minds in the first inquiry; as if we could deduce from its solution the principles on which personal salvation depends more easily and directly than by the opposite process. Assuredly the contrary is the case. And one result has been that the vital point, the ascertainment of the truth, has been made dependent on a preliminary inquiry, which, from its very nature and the mode in which it has been proposed, opens the door to passions and motives essentially hostile to true religion, which contradict its rudimentary conception as an energy in each man's soul, and involve the destruction or perversion of the other (the inquiry after truth). To investigate by the instrument which God has put into our hands, and which all confess to be divine, the written Scripture, is, in fact, to ask what is the truth? To solve the problem by tradition, à priori presumptions, and the testimony of secular history, to the supercession of the first, is to demand, Which is the Church?" Our reformers took the first method-Mr. Newman and his followers the second. The first issued in that purified creed wherewith the Church of England has answered What is Truth,' and vindicated at the same time the reality of her own apostolic commission. The second has led all who have pursued it, by inevitable consequence, to the acknowledgment of the Church of Rome" (18).

The archdeacon forcibly points out a latent fallacy or false assumption involved in the enquiry, "Which is the Church". namely, the postulate assumed, "that some one such society there must needs be authoritative, unchangeable, absorbing, save as a recipient dutiful and passive of truth and grace, all the individuality of man; and that whatever it was, and wheresoever discovered, the means of grace and salvation were tied to it. Out of the Church, no salvation. For beyond its boundaries human virtues might grow, but supernatural graces there could be none :

"Yet assuredly there is nothing in the New Testament from which any certain or even probable conclusion can be drawn in favour of the continuance to the world's end, in visible splendour, infallible teaching, unity, and holiness, of the apostolic Church. The Jewish Church was apostate as a body and as a visible Church. Why not the Christian of which it was the prophetic representative? There was a remnant in the one-why not in the other? It is impossible to prove that more is contained in our Lord's promise. That the Church of Christ is, in one great sense, a visible body, is indeed true; for of the Church invisible, as such, we have no certain cognizance. But to suppose that outward majesty, amidst conflicting claimants, can be a decisive characteristic of the true Church, and that secular sovereignty can be evidence of divinity in the spouse of Christ, is a proof of declension in spiritual vision. It is a conception radically false" (20).

The words of our Lord are, "Fear not, little flock it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. My kingdom is not of this world. The kingdom of God is within