of Charles the First, Sir Edward Dering, himself holding Puritan principles, when a decree was proposed in the Commons that no one should presume to bow at the name of Jesus, called out to the Speaker with much feeling: "Take heed, sir, and let us all take heed, whither we are going! If Christ be Jesus, if Jesus be God, all reverence, exterior as well as interior, is too little for Him. I hope we are not going up the back stairs to Socinianism!" The neglect of these things, though to some they may appear to be trifling or superstitious-the letting go of the truth, however much it may have been abused and perverted is the certain mode of causing unbelief and contempt of religion in the end. It would be interesting to trace, were is possible, how far the irreverent discussion of things sacred during the reign of Elizabeth, and the renunciation of Catholic (not Papal) truth with respect to the Sacraments and the Church, was the prolific cause of England's infidelity. The first work by Lord Herbert, of Cherbury, was published in 1624. was, of course, acquainted with the theological contentions of his own, and of the age immediately preceding, it would be of interest to know how far they may have influenced his subsequent speculations. For when the Sacraments are looked upon. merely as signs, without a divine efficacy when the universal consent and teaching of christendom, for more than fifteen hundred years, are derided even by those who profess to be ministers of Christ—when the Church and her Sacred Orders are themselves held forth, not, as dispensers of the grace of God, but as mere human instruments what is more natural than, as the next step, to deny all Spiritual influences whatever, and to fall back upon the dictates as well as upon the aids of Nature? But whether this conjecture be correct or incorrect, one thing is certain the sentiments of the Puritans of former days, with respect to the Sacraments and to Orders, were but little higher than those set forth by the better sort of Deists. Lord Boling broke said of the Sacraments: "no institutions can be imagined more simple, nor more void of all those pompous rites and theatrical representations that abounded in the religious worship of the Heathens and Jews, than these two were in their origin. They were not only innocent but profitable ceremonies, because they were extremely proper to keep up the spirit of true natural religion, by keeping up that of christianity; and to promote the observation of moral duties, by maintaining a re * Southey's Book of the Ch. 2, 374. spect for the revelation which confirmed them." "The views of Cartwright and his co-laborers were, we believe, in this regard, very much the same. Not having these works before us, we must depend upon the fidelity of Hooker's quotations for the sentiments we ascribe to them. They held that the Sacraments were mere signs of faith, memorials of facts, and bonds of friendly intercourse between christians. They were nothing, in a word, but outward ceremonies, without having any divine efficiency connected with their administration. Even the reading of good books was useless; preaching was the only means of grace. The study of the Bible itself merely prepared the way for a right reception of the grace of Preaching; and, so far did they carry their dogmas, that, as the author of the Ecclesiastical Polity remarks, "the very chiefest cause of committing the sacred Word of God unto books, was surmised to have been, lest the preacher should want a text whereupon to scholiate!" In the following age they were still more insane. For they held, not only that the Sacraments were unprofitable when administered without Sermons, but that they even tended to farther condemnation; and that sermons must be heard, not read, because the reading of them was without grace!!‡ Many of the follies of Puritanism are now forgotten; but their doctrine of the sacraments is still held by numbers who profess and call themselves christians, and the evil which it has wrought has not yet ceased. Tract No. 73 exposes, in an admirable manner, the tendencies to evil with which the popular theology of the day is fraught. In a criticism of the works of Erskine and Abbott, who hold the sacraments in no other sense than has been set forth, they expose the secret Socinianism and potential infidelity of those writings, and of the common views. But we must bring our article to a close. Our object has been to place before our readers a view of the doctrines of the Oxford Tracts upon the most important points, and negatively to vindicate them against the gross misrepresentations of which they have been the subject. The profound and accurate learning, and the deep and reverential piety, which characterize the writings of the authors of the Tracts for the Times, must strongly impress every competent judge. With most of their sentiBk. of the Ch. v. 2, p. 339. Works, v. iv. p. 301. + Bk. v. § 22. ments we cordially sympathize, and we feel bound devoutly to pray for a divine blessing upon their exertions to revive the spirit and practice of the Primitive Church Catholic, and of the best days of the Reformed Catholic Church of England. We hope these Tracts, and the other writings of their authors, will be speedily republished in this country. We recommend them to the serious and candid study of all- and particularly to the hundreds of those who are now idly, ignorantly, and wickedly clamoring about productions they have never read, and of which they are in no way competent to form a righteous judg ment. Matthias Claudius, Sämmtliche Werke. Hamburgh: 1819. Fr. Perthes 4 Bände, 8vo. It has always been a matter of wonder, especially to minds of a certain order, what it is that gives to some men so despotic a sway over the minds of other men. Let one of these enchanters appear, and all eyes are fixed upon him; let him but whisper, and the sound reaches all ears;-if he chooses, you must laugh; and when he weeps, no force can keep back your tears. He stands in the midst of a multitude, and the electric energy goes out from him to them, and the whole mass is swayed hither and thither at his will. He throws into the ground a small seedit may be in stony ground, or among thorns--but that seed creates for itself a favorable soil and a propitious sky, and spreads into a mighty tree, whose branches fill the whole earth, and whose fruit is for ages. Such an one has no relation to time or place. He may have lived and spoken for the men of a thousand years ago; but he lives and speaks as really and as freshly for you, as if that burning word which thrills through you, had been uttered into your ear alone. He may have sprung up in a far distant corner of the earth; but all people shall hear of him, all nations shall call him blessed. We look at such things, and admire how they should be. We? find that this marvellous power is not to be had for money or for study. A man may be versed in all the sciences, yet have none of it; he may speak a hundred languages, yet be ignorant of this one universal language which reaches all hearts. Nor will it come by philosophy, and prying into the depths of man's nature, for you may know all "the faculties of the human mind" by their names, and have them all nicely labelled and ticketed, "ready for use;" you may talk familiarly of the intellectual, and the sentient, and the voluntary parts of man's nature, and of their laws and operations; yet when you shall want to get at a man's understanding, and persuade him to think with you; or at his sentient nature, and persuade him to feel with you; or at his volitions, and persuade him to will with you ; — he shall coolly turn away, as if he knew not what you were saying. But, in the mean time, there comes along John Bunyan, without any of your philosophy, or your linguistic, but with a little of that mysterious something which you have not, and whispers a word in his ear, and lo! it is done. But at least, if we cannot find out what is this marvellous something, we can give it a name, and then we shall have the comfort of fancying we know it. So we call it Genius. And every new generation comes up and takes a look at it, and walks round and round it, as men do round the pyramids, or as they would round a strange animal, (we have a notion ourselves, that genius is a rhinoceros,) and after all comes back the same question, What is it? We have just given our opinion, but lest this should not satisfy all our readers, we give another. Genius is the lowest depth of every human spirit. It is in every man, and in the most part, not to be got at. So deep is it buried beneath heaps of rubbish, so thickly encrusted with coating after coating of what is not it, nor like it, that few dig deep enough to find out it is there. The surface of their souls is all that most men live with; and it is quite enough to enable them to get comfortably and respectably through life. So the depths below slumber undisturbed, an unemployed capital, a sealed-up storehouse, which perhaps eternity will unlock. Never yet did a voice come up from those depths, but it penetrated all other souls ; and, mighty as the voice of many waters, sounded through the earth. If you draw from the surface of your own soul, your words shall reach but the surface of other men's; but if you go down deep, the depths of other spirits shall re-echo to the sound. In the centre of yourself, you shall find a magnet, mysteriously attractive of every other self in the universe; but this magnet will not act through the crusts and envelopments in which you have encased it. You must bring your naked soul to bear upon the soul you would wish to move. And herein genius differs from talent-that it finds or makes itself, for the time, in all minds that are brought under its influence. The man of talent may talk to you for hours, and after all, he has not imparted himself to you; he has not brought you over to his stand-point. He has operated upon you as an external force, but has found no ally within. On the contrary, when genius speaks, the listener too becomes a genius; at its voice, "the soul of man awakes, and starts up as an exile in a far distant land, at the unexpected sounds of his native language, when, after long years of absence, and almost of oblivion, he is suddenly addressed in his mother tongue, he weeps for joy, and embraces the speaker as his brother." These remarks have been suggested by an attempt to inquire into the secret of Claudius' power over the minds of his readers. We do not assert that this power is very great in degree, but whatever there is, is of the right kind. It is the power, we think, of true genius. It is not attained by any underhand or circuitous means; there is no trickery about it, no manoeuvring or artifice. He is just what he seems, and his power over us is that of a true man, speaking to other men. He has looked at things with his own eyes, and tells us just what he saw, not what he thought it would be most creditable to him to pretend to see. He has listened to the voices of nature, and his own spirit, and tells us what they said to him without any parade of fine language. He has thought his own thoughts, and uttered them in his own words. Indeed, there is no more strongly-marked feature of his character, than his abhorrence of all seeming without being. And is not this too a characteristic of genius, generally? So far as we have observed, it always evinces a peculiar strength of indignation against the artificial, and a peculiar love for the genuine and the true, be it ever so homely. Talent, on the contrary, being something acquired, or at least, improved by culture, seems to have a certain affinity with the artificial and assumed; it wants that nativeness, that primitive freshness, which belong to true genius, and which in its very nature is inveterately averse to all pretences and disguises whatsoever. Who is it that has said-Coleridge we believe genius may consist with the occasional indulgence of low and mean tastes, with coarseness and buffoonery; but "never, no, never," with base and narrow feelings, with sordid trickery and artifice. Let this be as it may, Claudius, with whom our concern is at present, was absolutely free from all such disguises. "Show yourself for what you are," is the one precept which with him well-nigh embraces all others. And we bethink our that |