ly, at the commencement of his Apostolic career, leaned very decidedly towards this narrow, partial view of his Master's mission and religion; and would, no doubt, have given wholly into it, had it not been for the vision of the unclean beasts and the indignant remonstrances of the great Apostle to the Gentiles. Stephen, on the other hand, seems to have derived from his Hellenistic culture a greater freedom of spirit, and to have been prepared to take higher and more intimate views of the nature and purpose of Christianity; but this we gather only from his death-speech, and his influence could not have been sensibly felt in antagonism to the Judaizing tendencies of the Church. It was reserved for one who "was consenting unto his death," fully to vindicate the independence of pure, spiritual Christianity on ritual obedience. Paul was the earliest Christian Protestant, and that, as we shall see, in virtually the same cause in which the Reformers of the sixteenth century won that name. His Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians were the means under Providence, by which Christianity was cut out of the Jewish stock, and so planted as to strike down its own separate root, and to blossom with a verdure all its own for the healing of the nations. Had not he been raised up when he was, and divinely commissioned as the chief apostle of spiritual freedom, the Christians would have been a mere sect of reformed Jews, without vitality enough to retain their vantage-ground in point of doctrine and morals for more than a single generation. His protest, however, was feebly and coldly seconded among his own countrymen; but it so defined Christianity by distinctive marks of spirituality and of independence on the paraphernalia, whether of ritual or organization, as to drive constantly increasing numbers of Judaizing Christians back into the synagogue, and to circumscribe and early to obliterate the type of pseudo-Christianity, which they represented. Among the Gentiles, the more skeptical portion, with minds not preoccupied by other forms of faith, and with a more active and liberal curiosity than the bona fide idolators around them, furnished many of the earliest converts to the new religion. But no sooner were its attractiveness and power extensively seen, than it won the easy faith and ready homage of multitudes that believed in the gods, and 1846.] Perversion of Christian Doctrines. 9 especially of those who had felt their moral needs and infirmities, and sought in vain for relief. And as they flocked into the Christian fold, though they had vague notions of the spiritual nature of the Gospel, they could not disabuse themselves of the necessity of a fixed and complex religious ceremonial. They knew not how to come to God except in a temple made with hands, or to express sentiments of adoration and submission except by the posture or movement of the body, or by formal offerings at the shrine of devotion. They therefore transferred to the Christian worship many portions of their temple ritual, mutatis mutandis, and dressed up the table, which, without sign or image, had borne the simple elements of the sacramental feast, with all the trappings of their forsaken altars. This process went on the more rapidly, from the natural desire of converts to make their religion appear as inviting as possible to the unconverted. Its destitution of outward form was at first an objection commonly urged as decisive against Christianity. Its disciples therefore felt that they had gained much for its honor, when they could say to the worshippers of Jupiter or Minerva, -Behold our shrines as richly adorned as yours; see our priests in as gorgeous vestments as may be seen on the steps of the Capitol; and the incense of our sacrifice, has it not even gained fragrance, now that the smoke of burning flesh no longer taints it?' Thus did the form of godliness constantly mount towards the ascendant, while its power was rapidly dying out of the heart of the Church. Yet there still remained doctrines, transmitted in the very words of Christ, that were too spiritual in their obvious import, to be easily tortured into any material form of representation and expression. Such were the necessity of inward regeneration, God's pardon to the guilty on the sole condition of penitence, and the mission of the Redeemer to reconcile erring man in heart and character to a God, whose mercy needs no propitiation to render it perfect. So long as these doctrines remained, unperverted, professed Christians could not acquiesce with easy consciences in their new idolatry. They thought their pompous ritual needful and acceptable; but felt that this was not all, that there was a heart-service requisite, to render the worship of lip and posture availing. Yet Christianity was so overloaded with pompous and exacting externals, as to render the route to this heart-service to the last degree obscure and difficult of access. But formalisin had not done its whole work, till it had transmuted by its petrifying touch the doctrines of regeneration, pardon and atonement. Regeneration was accordingly identified with baptism; and the sinner was taught, that if he only dared to postpone baptism till the death-agony, he might lead a life of violence, fraud or licentiousness, might drink his fill of all the pleasures and the gains of sin, and then by the cross of a priest's wet finger on his brow become as pure and innocent as when he first lay in his mother's bosom. Penitence was next transmuted into penance, — compliance with the mandate of the priest instead of the outpouring of a lowly heart; and then pardon was made to depend on the balance, adjusted by artificial rules, between willing and cherished sins and senseless self-torturings; which a farther exercise of ingenuity, seconded by priestly avarice, easily commuted into fines. Atonement admitted of no such transformation. The sense of alienation from God, of the discrepancy between a holy Father and his sinful child, adhered so closely to the hearts of the unreconciled, that they could neither have it washed off by a priest's hands, nor scourged away by their own, nor yet could uncounted wealth furnish a redemption-price for it. The atonement, therefore, was banished from the individual heart, and thrown wholly back upon Calvary, as a past fact in the history of the race, needing neither to be repeated nor appropriated. And, for the still more perfect easement of burdened consciences, the parties in the transaction were shifted, it was God, who needed reconciliation, - the atonement was wholly Heaven's affair, and man might rest assured that the entire work had been wrought for him and without him. Thus were all the great doctrines of the Gospel, while nominally retained, thrust out of the region of the sentiments and affections, and resolved either into forms to be outwardly observed or into technical arrangements between God and Jesus Christ. At this stage of corruption all curiosity and anxiety with regard to religion were suspended; rites, which were all in all, could be best learned by imitation; and the Scriptures were consigned to general neglect and oblivion. When the people had once 1846.] Justification by Faith. 11 thrown away "the key of knowledge," their religious leaders were of course solicitous to keep it out of their hands, and unwilling to restore it; but, had the people of Christendom in general felt any lingering interest in the sacred records, it would have been beyond the combined power of the priesthood to suppress their free transcription and general use, so that the fact of their disuse is to be taken as indicating the previous existence of a state of religious belief and practice, which made them superfluous. Such was the condition of things for centuries before the appearance of Luther upon the stage. The motto of the Catholic Church might well have been, The kingdom of God is meat and drink, [tithe and penance, chant and litany,] not righteousness, and peace, and joy in the holy spirit.' The work set before Christian reformers was, to reverse all this, and to write upon the constitution of the Church and the hearts of its children the true motto, as it came from the pen of the Apostle. The protest of the sixteenth century was, then, against formalism, and in behalf of spiritualism. It adopted "justification by faith" as its watchword, not because that phrase embodied the whole or the chief of the points in controversy, but because it involved the issue that must needs be tried first in the order of time. The people of Christendom in general were reposing an undoubting confidence in God and hope of heaven, on the ground of a ceremonial as heartless as might be enacted in a well trained menagerie; and the first thing of which they needed to be convinced was, that justification or salvation depended on something inward and spiritual, on the state of the affections, in fine, on faith, which one word stood as the Scriptural formula for all right dispositions and feelings towards God, as its converse, works, did for all that was outward and mechanical. Until this point was settled in the affirmative, the questions of the authority and sufficiency of the Scriptures, the right of private judgment, the qualifications, duties and functions of ministers or members of the Church, the place and use of ordinances, were all necessarily in abeyance; for these are questions, the very asking of which implies a conscious responsibleness for the culture of one's own mind and heart, or in other words a personal appropriation of the doctrine of justification by faith. All these and similar issues are involved in the great Protestant question, and one or another will come up with more or less prominence, at different periods and in different countries, according to the predominant type of formalism to be opposed. Thus faith will be set forth as the antagonist to ceremonial mummery, Scriptural authority to tradition, the paramount importance of a Christian spirit to the imposition of human creeds, and the spiritual freedom of all believers to the assumption of official sanctity and supremacy by the priesthood. Following up this view, we might trace the history of Protestantism; but it would be the history of a work in every part unfinished, of numerous branches of the great protest urged on the part of reformers, but of none acceded to by the mother Church, and of few, as to which different bodies of Protestants are not divided against each other. But it may be equally profitable for us at the present time, and will fall more easily within the few remaining pages which we can occupy upon the subject, to inquire what peculiar obligations rest on us as Protestants, or in other words, against what manifestations of formalism we are chiefly to contend. But let it here be remarked, that Protestants must agree in their protest, before they can expect it to be generally received by the Romish Church. Protestant Leagues and Anti-Catholic Alliances of mere fragments of the reformed churches serve only to bring into view the weakness and intestine feuds of the Protestant body, and lead multitudes to prefer the dead cohesiveness of Romanism to the porcupine vitality of its disintegrated foes. Protestants must protest against each other, until formalism is utterly driven from their own borders, - until they all come into "the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace," and are able to present an unbroken front against papacy, prelacy, and whatever else may interpose itself between the individual soul and its God. In looking at the work yet to be done by Protestants, we meet at the threshold with the great doctrine of "justification by faith" still unestablished. In many Protestant denominations, and probably by some members of all, rites are regarded as possessing an efficacy independent of that which belongs to them as the aids of devotion, -as having some inherent and mysterious virtue, apart from the dispositions of mind with which they are used. Thus the |