way of approach to that delicate point; else the invectives so carefully restricted to morals would not have always left the doctrines untouched. Submit your understanding to Rome; confess that you cannot hope for salvation out of the Pope's communion; acknowledge that immorality and wickedness do not detract from his supernatural privileges; and, on these conditions, you are at liberty to oppose the corruptions of the church of Christ. Conceit is not, indeed, a word which I should apply to such advice: deceit would seem more appropriate.

Invariableness in doctrine is Bossuet's criterion of the Christian characteristic of unity; but surely any set of men, who agreed on a system similar to that on which Roman unity depends, might equally boast of invariableness and unity: surely there cannot be, at least there cannot appear, any difference of opinion in a society which excludes every member who does not submit his own views to those of one individual, placed at its head; and which lays down, as an indubitable fact, that that individual, whoever he may happen to be, and whatever he may add to the common

doctrines of the society, always speaks the mind of his predecessors, and only gives explicitness to things implied in former decisions. Such is the artful contrivance which the author of the Variations of the Protestant Churches disguises into a miraculous unity of doctrine and belief; the effect, as he pretends, of Christ's promise of support to his church against the gates of hell. Raking up, besides, all the calumnies and atrocious reports with which the character of the opposers of Rome has been blackened at all times, and setting in the strongest light of mutual opposition the theological disputes which divided the reformers, he gives the whole weight of his authority and talents to a delusion, which nothing but an overwhelming combination of interest and prejudice could prevent his acute mind from perceiving. Had the Bishop of Meaux bestowed the ten-thousandth part of the perverse industry with which he followed that argument, in examining the gratuitous assumption on which it is founded, we may hope that his honesty would have directed his pen to some other topic. Instead of availing himself of the inveterate notion that Christ had established

an infallible judge in his church, lest, by the existence of doubt as to the sense of the Scriptures, there should be diversity of opinion among his followers-instead of taking it for granted that the victory of hell depended on the diversity of abstract doctrines among Christians, and not in the prevalence of dark works of wickedness, provided they were wrought in the unity of Papal faith he should, in the spirit of philosophical reasoning, have penetrated to that part of the argument which conceals the gratuitous assumptions whence the whole Roman Catholic theory has sprung. When Catholics have proved, without the aid of church authority, that the church of Christ must be infallible, then, and not before, they may object their variations to the Protestants.

The Protestants have varied in search of the divine simplicity of the Gospel, which Rome had buried under a mountain of metaphysical notions. The Protestants have varied, because they could not at once divest themselves of the habits of thinking which they had acquired in the Roman Catholic schools. The Protestants have varied, because they had the honesty not to imitate the

contrivances by which the Roman church gives to her new decisions the appearance of unity with the preceding. The Protestants have varied, because they would not, upon the fanciful notion of a perpetual miracle, claim for any of their churches the supernatural gift of unerring wisdom, nor counterfeit by obstinacy in error, the conscious certainty of inspiration. The Protestants, in fine, have varied, because, by restoring the Scriptures to their full and unrivalled authority, they perceived the intrinsic power of settled, recorded, invariable revelation; and were aware that, in spite of doubts and divisions, the light of those divine records needed no help to withstand the attacks of the gates of hell.

If mere controversy were my object, I should feel satisfied with having demonstrated that the system of Roman Catholic unity is but an arbitrary contrivance; a gratuitous assumption of a supernatural privilege, which is nowhere clearly asserted in the Scriptures; an endeavour to produce certainty by a standard conceived and planned upon conjecture. A more Christian feeling, however, induces me to dwell still on this subject, and

propose to you what I conceive to be the true scriptural notions on the unity of the church of Christ.

In reading the New Testament with a mind carefully freed from the prejudices of schooldivinity, it is impossible not to perceive that the assemblies of men who are called to obtain salvation through Christ, cannot either singly or collectively constitute the church, whereof the Roman see has tried to appropriate the qualities and privileges to herself. Wherever men assemble in the name of Jesus, there he has promised to be by means of his spirit; and certainly the works of that spirit are more or less visible in the Christian virtues, which never yet failed to spring up in these particular churches, though mixed with the tares, and other evils, which are not separable from "the kingdom of heaven" in this world. But there is a structure of sanctity in perpetual progress, towards the completion of which the Christian churches, on earth, are only made to contribute as different quarries do towards the raising of some glorious building. The churches on earth partake, in various proportions, of the attributes of