There is yet a portion of Mr. B. Smith's lectures which we should have wished to notice at some length, for it is one of deep interest; but the space at our command forbids us to do so on the present occasion. It is that portion which touches upon the question why Mohammedanism in former ages made its conquests, when Christianity is said to have failed; and, what is more important still, why, in the present day, when the two meet on common ground, as in Africa, the triumphs of Mohammedanism are so much greater than those of Christianity. From this springs the further question, whether Mohammedanism is necessarily antagonistic to Christianity, or whether, as Mr. B. Smith asserts, it is a step towards Christianity; and whether, as such, its spread should be regarded as a subject of rejoicing by Christians, and its emissaries be hailed as coadjutors in their great work.

When the superior morality of the Christian religion is admitted, as it is by Mr. B. Smith, and its demands on the moral conduct of its followers are uncompromising, the question why a religion which offers salvation on easier terms,-which not only "exhibits a forbearance, a sympathy, and a respect for native customs and prejudices, and even their more harmless beliefs," but allows the retention of the most cherished sinswhich, in short, "makes religion easy,"-the question, why such a religion is more readily accepted by fallen man is, already answered. When we add to this, that in one case a mere nominal adherence to their religion is an admission to the privileges of a race dominant, or rapidly becoming dominant; and that in the other the only motives presented are spiritual, and to be obtained by the abnegation of the carnal, the solution is still more apparent. And the fact that, under such circumstances, Christianity has spread at all, and is spreading, is simply the same irresistible proof of its Divine nature as is afforded by its original conquests over the heathenism of Europe.

That the alleged conversion of many of the Negro race to Mohammedanism is purely nominal-that it is simply a portion of the tenets of Mohammed grafted on, not superseding, the Fetishism of the African-there is abundant proof. And there is equally abundant proof that Mr. B. Smith has been led, by adopting the figures of an avowed enemy of Protestant Missions, to give an entirely erroneous estimate of the progress of Christianity in Africa. As to Mohammedanism being a step towards Christianity, we need only remark that all experience proves that, exactly in proportion to the reality of the Mohammedanismmeaning thereby a belief in Mohammed-exactly in that proportion is it antagonistic to Christianity.

It may be a question whether, if there were no hope of Africa ever becoming Christian, we should rejoice that it should be

come Mohammedan rather than remain as it is. But that we should consider the Mohammedan as doing Christ's work, as Mr. B. Smith asserts that he is; and that we should allow this to make us relax one single effort; or that the Christian should borrow his principles of conversion from the practice of the Mohammedan, as Mr. B. Smith advises he should; will, we may safely assert, be negatived by the Christian Missionary, and by every one who has learnt what the religion of Mohammed is, not from books, but from a residence in a Mohammedan country.

ON THE INTERPRETATION OF THE ENGLISH FORMULARIES.

THE assertion has been made, and is well worthy of consideration, that our formularies ought not to be considered as a compromise, but as embodying a Lutheran meaning. Any such statement must, of course, be taken with reasonable qualifications. Our system of doctrine is identical with that of the Lutheran Church, and it would probably be better to assert that the formularies embody substantially the teaching of Luther. The Lutheran Church developed, after Luther's death, into a harsher form, against which he himself would no doubt have in some respects protested. Nor, again, is the fact to be questioned, that the essence of the doctrine in question fell into an English mould, and was modified by English feelings. It cannot, moreover, be questioned, that in such a struggle as that of the Reformation there must have been a good deal of mutual concession in order to arrive at any settlement. Probably there was less of this than has been sometimes imagined; for authority carried matters with a high hand in those days, and was content to wait for cordial acceptance of its decrees. But some compromise, of course, there was, as in all human affairs. The idea against which I contend is very different from this. Our formularies have, of late years, been constantly described as having no other object than to strike a balance between conflicting parties. This conception of them has been exactly expressed by Dr. Newman in a description of the moderate man of his day. In the present day, he says,—

"Mistiness is the mother of wisdom. A man who can set down half-a-dozen general propositions, which escape from destroying each other only by being diluted into truisms; who can hold the balance between opposites so skilfully as to do without fulcrum or beam; who never enunciates a truth without guarding himself against being supposed to exclude its contradictory; who holds that Scripture is the only authority, yet that the Church is to be deferred

to; that faith only justifies, yet that it does not justify without works; that grace does not depend on the Sacraments, yet is not given without them; that bishops are a Divine ordinance, and yet those who have them not are in the same religious condition as those who have;-this is your safe man, and the hope of the Church; this is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but sensible, sober, well-judging persons, to guide it through the channel of nomeaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No."

Such must, indeed, be the impression left on a mind not specially schooled in such controversies by the discussions of the last few years on most of the cardinal doctrines of the Church. For legal purposes, at all events, it seems as if the formularies might be made to mean anything between two very wide extremes. With the legal method of interpretation we have nothing now to do. It has its own province, which is purely that of law. It does not pretend to determine what is the real meaning of the Articles, but simply whether a given statement can be proved beyond moral doubt to be contradictory to them; in other words, the legal interpretation only offers to determine the extreme possibilities of what the formularies do not mean, and it will be well to leave it perfectly untouched in any attempt to indicate what they do mean. The question is, whether there be discernible throughout both Articles and Prayer-book a main stream of decided principles? Must we consider, according to the common phrase more or less accepted by both sides in the controversy, that the Prayer-book is Catholic and the Articles Calvinistic; or is there a real unity in their point of view? It can hardly be satisfactory to those who desire to be loyal adherents to their Church to be perpetually admitting that her voice is ambiguous, hesitating, and destitute of any strong animating spirit. Now it is no new theory to maintain that her true vindication in this respect is to be found in the fact that the dominant spirit of the English Reformation of the 16th century was given to it in Germany by the animating impulse of Luther. At the beginning of the present century this was an opinion which had the support of the highest authority. A series of Bampton Lectures was preached by Dr. Lawrence, afterwards Archbishop of Cashel, of which this is the thesis, and there was a brief period in which Luther's writings received more attention in England than at any time since the Reformation. But, for some reason, this inclination was only temporary, and every other consideration was soon to be overwhelmed in the storm of the Tractarian controversy. As soon as that controversy arose, the struggle of the disputants on either side seemed to be to discover, not what the formularies meant, but what they might conveniently be made to mean; and a complaint with which Archbishop

Lawrence commences his lectures exactly applies to the present day :

"The scope of every attempt has been rather to discover what constructions peculiar expressions would admit, as applicable to the favourite controversies of a more recent period, than to determine their sense by ascertaining the sources from which they were primarily derived."

Nevertheless the work of Lawrence has not died out. Bishop Browne admits him to have shown that the Lutheran confessions of faith, especially the Confession of Augsburg, were the chief sources to which Cranmer was indebted for the Articles of 1552; and Mr. Procter, with a similar reference to the Archbishop, says that, of all the foreigners who were engaged in the work of the Reformation, Melancthon and Luther had the greatest influence, both on the general reformation of the English Church, and on the compilation of the English Book of Common Prayer. These authorities must be mainly relied on for a justification of the historical element in the proposition, and it would be superfluous to do more than to recall the overwhelming evidence of the dominant influence of Luther during the period in which the great body of our formularies was framed. Cranmer was an undoubted Lutheran in principle. He was connected with Osiander by marriage, and was in constant and intimate consultation with Melancthon. He put forth, in 1548, a Nüremberg Catechism, translated by Justus Jonas, which is a mere echo of Luther's Larger Catechism, and contains in fact the most comprehensive statement of Lutheran doctrine to be found, even at the present day, in English. Calvin's influence was but commencing when the main lines of our formularies were laid down, and it was not till after the Marian persecutions that the English Reformers were imbued with his views. Even after that, it is most remarkable how Lutheran formularies were chosen by preference as the guide for our own. When the Articles were revised under Parker in the reign of Elizabeth, the 2nd, 5th, 6th, 10th, 11th, 12th, and 20th Articles were either partly or wholly copied from the Würtemberg Confession; and these contain the principal additions and elucidations upon doctrinal points (that of the Eucharist alone excepted) which were adopted at that period. Efforts, in short, were made to conciliate the Calvinists on the one side, and the Roman Catholics on the other; but the sources from which the main body of doctrine was drawn continued Lutheran. The next century saw an eclipse of genuine English feeling alike in politics and theology; and the revision of 1662 has thrown an ecclesiastical tinge over some parts of the Prayer-book, which before was wholly wanting. It is most striking and significant, for instance, to remember that the

manual acts of Consecration, on which so much has hinged in recent controversies, were utterly absent from the Liturgy which was used in the century preceding 1662. They are an afterthought, and do but obscure the dominant meaning of the formulary. Since that time, with the exception of the period at the commencement of this century, to which reference has been made, there seems to have been a strange conspiracy to put Luther and his influence out of sight; and it is really difficult to speak with respect of the statements to be met with in the opposing controversialists of recent years. Dr. Blakeney dismisses in a single brief paragraph the evidence of Melancthon's long correspondence with Cranmer; and sums up the remarkable identity between the English and German formularies, just referred to, by the simple statement that our Reformers had the German formularies before them, and borrowed many of their expressions in the composition of the Articles; and he says no more of the singular pressure put upon Melancthon to come to England than that "it appears he was offered the chair vacant by the death of Bucer." But the most extraordinary instance of perversion is to be found in a work issued on the other side by a writer of no little authority. Mr. Blunt, the editor of the "Annotated Prayer Book," has published a book of "Household Theology," which has gone through several editions, and in this he states that

"The influence of the German Reformation under Luther on the Church of England is to be traced in the translation of the Bible, the Dutch or Lutheran version being used by Bishop Coverdale as the guide to his use of the Latin Vulgate.”

It is not too much to say that this is one of the most inexcusable statements, pretending to be a statement of matter of fact, to be found even in theological controversies. As the writer has committed himself in a previous paragraph to the assertion that, except in the matter of Apostolic succession, Luther did not otherwise diverge very far from the Church of Rome, it would be charitable to put down the former statement to ignorance; but, as we shall see, either Mr. Blunt, or somebody who works for Mr. Blunt, knows a great deal better. The time has come when, as a matter of historical fact, these perversions should be pushed aside, and the genuine origin and meaning of the formularies looked in the face, for good or for harm. It would, doubtless, be for good; but the historical part of the matter must now be left, and a few illustrations offered of the key which would be afforded to modern controversies respecting the meaning of the formularies by a freer reference to Lutheran originals.