exemption from what he calls "the curse of proselytism," and "the still darker curse of persecution." It is its mild (might it not be apathetic?) temper, its Asiatic immobility, its freedom from all systematizing, its large toleration of differences, that win from him admiration. How significant is the following passage:

"A respectful reverence for every manifestation of religious feeling has withheld them" (the Eastern Christians) "from violent attacks on the rights of conscience, and led them to extend a kindly patronage to forms of faith most removed from their own. The gentle spirit of the Greek Fathers has granted to the heroes and sages of heathen antiquity a place in the Divine favour, which was long denied in the West. Along the porticoes of Eastern churches, both in Greece and Russia, are to be seen portrayed on the walls the figures of Homer, Thucydides, Pythagoras, and Plato, as pioneers preparing the way for Christianity. In the vast painting of the Last Judgment, which covers the west end of the chief cathedral of Moscow, Paradise is represented as divided and subdivided into many departments or chambers, thus keeping before the mind, even of the humblest, the great doctrine of the Gospel, which has often been tacitly dropped out of Western religion,-'In my Father's house are many mansions.'" (pp. 40, 41.)

We might have imagined here, that we were reading one of the notorious "Essays," of which Dr. Stanley is reported to have put himself forward as the defender in a late article in the pages of the "Edinburgh Review."

There is some truth, no doubt, in the observation, "The ecclesiastical history of the West is full of our own passions, our own preconceived ideas and prejudices." (p. 19.) And again : "It is useful to find that churches and sects are not exactly squared according to our notions of what our own logic or rhetoric would lead us to expect." (p. 51.) One hundred millions of souls professing a different form of the Christian faith from our own, is instructive, and ought to make us pause before we condemn any for non-essential differences.. But it ought not, for this reason, to make us indifferent to fundamentals. Either the Greek church has departed from the purity of the faith, or it has not: if it has not, we ought to be in communion with it; if it has, our duty is to seek to enlighten and reform it. Those who can see no ground of objection to a distant church, generally regarded as corrupt, can isolate themselves in their own, and play Simon Stylytes upon the pointless pinnacle of a temple of their own rearing, realizing the description, "Some characters are self-poised and independent. Loneliness and singularity in the present, the hopes of a remote and ideal future, are to them the notes of a true Church." (p. 51.)

The history of the Eastern church with which Professor

Stanley has furnished us, embraces only three periods the Nicene period, the rise of Mahometanism, and the growth of the Russian church as a branch of the Eastern. His description of the characters who figured in the Nicene council is graphic in the extreme, and may be considered as his masterpiece. This Council and its creed stereotyped the true doctrine of the Trinity for all ages. It is here, properly speaking, the outer history of the Christian church begins. This great Council of Christian bishops, gathered under the presidentship of the emperor Constantine, marks the transition of the Church and the Empire from an inchoate Christianity to one which assumed a positive, and, in one respect, a defined form. The Creed on which they agreed arose out of the necessities of the age, in the increasingly wide spread of the Arian heresy. Its history furnishes us with the most striking example on record of the triumph of one resolute will over the vacillation and indecisiveness of feebler minds. Athanasius had a great soul in a little body. (He was extremely small of stature.) He succeeded in overruling even the emperor Constantine. tention resulted, as it often does, in the close of controversy. As a specimen of Professor Stanley's word portrait-painting, take the following. It is his description of Constantine coming into the council at Nicæa:

Con

"The whole assembly rose, and stood on their feet; and then, for the first time, set their admiring gaze on Constantine, the Conqueror, the August, the Great. He entered. His towering stature, his strong-built frame, his broad shoulders, his handsome features, were worthy of his magnificent position. There was a brightness in his look, and a mingled expression of fierceness and gentleness in his lionlike eye, which well became one who, as Augustus before him, had fancied, and, perhaps, still fancied, himself to be the favourite of the sun-god Apollo. The Bishops were further struck by the dazzling, perhaps barbaric, magnificence of his dress. Always careful of his appearance, he was so on this occasion in an eminent degree. His long hair, false or real, was crowned with the imperial diadem of pearls. His purple or scarlet robe blazed with precious stones and gold embroidery. He was shod, no doubt, in the scarlet shoes then confined to the Emperors, now perpetuated in the Pope and Cardinals. Many of the Bishops had probably never seen any greater functionary than a remote provincial magistrate; and, gazing at his splendid figure as he passed up the hall between their ranks, remembering, too, what he had done for the faith of their church,-we may well believe that the simple and the worldly both looked upon him, as we are told they did, as though he were an angel of God descended straight from heaven. . . The colour rushed to the Emperor's cheeks. . . . . It was the genuine expression of Constantine's excitement and emotion. As he advanced up the hall he cast his eyes down, his steps faltered; and when he reached the throne allotted to him, he stood motionless till the Bishops beckoned to him to be seated. He then sat down, and they followed the example." (p. 141, 142.)

Dr. Stanley has worked out the two principal characters of the age-Athanasius and Constantine-with such admirable vividness, that we seem to see them standing yet before us. We have seen Constantine, now let us look at Athanasius :—

"Close beside the Pope Alexander" (this was Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria, who bore the title of "Pope" long before that title was known at Rome) "is a small, insignificant young man, of hardly twenty-five years of age, of lively manners and speech, and of bright serene countenance. Though he is but the Deacon, the chief Deacon or Archdeacon of Alexandria, he has closely riveted the attention of the assembly by the vehemence of his arguments. He is already taking the words out of the Bishop's mouth, and briefly acting in reality the part he had before, as a child, acted in name, and that, in a few months, he will be called to act both in name and in reality. His humble rank as a Deacon does not allow of his appearance in the conventional pictures of the Council. But his activity and prominence behind the scenes made enemies for him there, who will never leave him through life. Any one who has read his passionate invectives afterwards may form some notion of what he was in the thick of his youthful battles. That small, insignificant Deacon is the great Athanasius." (p. 114, 115.)

Here we see an example of what often occurs unknown in our own day, that the greatest of works which astonish the world are usually wrought by those who are least seen; while others in more public positions go off with the honours. There cannot be a doubt of the masterful character possessed by Athanasius. He had all those kingly attributes of soul which command into obedience and submission the souls of other men. It is such inherently great souls who stamp their own character on the age in which they live.

The doctrine received and established by the Council of Nicæa, under the guidance of St. Athanasius, was probably the means of preserving the Christian world, then only half-enlightened in theology, from falling back into Polytheism. It was at the basis Unitarian, in so far as it maintained the unity of the Divine nature; while the Homoüsian doctrine, which it was endeavoured to substitute in its place, admitted of a division, or, rather, of a different nature in the Father and in the Son, and so divided between them, though it did not deny the godhead, in an inferior sense, of Christ. He was of like nature and essence with the Father, but not Homoüsian, or of the same nature. The former best fell in with the notions of Heathenism, and so found ready currency among half-enlightened, halfconverted converts in the early days of the Church, till it was at length effectually stayed by the sounder views propounded by Athanasius.

One great use of reading such a full and particular account, as Dr. Stanley has given us, of the Nicene council, and its chief

theological point of dispute is, that we learn hereby the true significance of our own creeds-how far-spread Arianism had become, and with what difficulty it was suppressed. This first General Council was the Thermopyla of Theology--the Waterloo of the Church. There, was settled for coming, if not for all ages, the first fundamental point of a Christian's belief. There, also, Representative government found its first precedent and principle; there, the Royal authority in things spiritual was first practically recognized, and the decisive sanction of the Church was given to the doctrine, that free discussion, in a numerous assembly, is the surest channel for arriving at Christian truth.

It has been asserted that sects arise out of creeds, and from this it has been concluded, that when we have no creeds we shall have no sects. This inference is no doubt correct; but then, what does the principle involve?-that we shall have no doctrines. This is the state of things, the approach of which we have to fear in our own day. Darkness admits of no distinctions-it is the light that brings out things in their distinctions. The spirit of the age is quite in favour of merging all differences, from the weak desire for peace at any price. Creeds, doctrines, definitions, must all go, and we are to be content with the general name of Christian, while we part with the very essence of Christianity. Our fathers gave us Christianity in synthesis; their sons would give us Christianity in solution. This is just the difference.

There is too much reason to fear that Professor Stanley is one of those who would gladly abandon many of the fundamental doctrines of the Gospel-being no doctrines of the Gospel at all in his view-for the sake of what he thinks to be a broader and more liberal Christianity. The great blemish in his work is, that he cannot keep out of history his slights and disparagements of certain received doctrines of his own Church-such as "Predestination," "Original Sin," "Prevenient Grace," "Atonement." (p. 158.) It is pretty evident that he regards these as mere theological terms and phrases, party words, and not as the true representatives of doctrinal facts. Even the word "Satisfaction," though used in the most solemn part of our own Liturgy, he mentions only to disparage. To those who are familiar with the Neologian system, such a passage as the following will be darkly but deeply signifi

cant:

"In Scripture and theology, no less than in philosophy and conscience, there is a marked repugnance to the forced oppositions between the justice of the Father and the mercy of the Son, which run through so many modern systems of Redemption. Amongst the various figures (?) which Athanasius uses to express his view, one is that of Satisfaction.' But this is introduced incidentally, and in entire subordination to the primary truth, that the Redemption flowed from

the Indivisible Love of the Father and the Son alike, and that its object was the restoration of man to union with God." (p. 294.)

There is a passage in Archbishop Tillotson, distinguished by his usual good sense, touching the objection of the Socinians (for in his day it was only the Socinians that raised it) to the doctrine of the Atonement, grounded on the notion of its being unjust that the innocent should be appointed to suffer in the room of the guilty to satisfy the justice of God. This passage, as it meets the question here raised by Professor Stanley, it may be worth while to quote:

"If the matter were searched to the bottom, all this perverse contention about our Saviour's suffering for our benefit, but not in our stead, will signify just nothing. For if Christ died for our benefit, so as, some way or other, by virtue of his death and sufferings, to save us from the wrath of God, and to procure our escape from eternal death; this, for aught I know, is all that anybody means by his dying in our stead. For he that dies with the intention to do that benefit for another, or to save him from death, doth certainly, to all intents and purposes, die in his place and stead. And if they will grant this to be their meaning, the controversy is at an end, and both sides are agreed in the thing, and do only differ in the phrase and manner of expression; which is, to seek a quarrel and an occasion of difference, when there is no real ground for it-a thing which ought to be very far from reasonable and peaceable minds."

These are just observations upon the supposition stated"if they will grant this to be their meaning;" but the new school of Negative Theology will hear of no such expressions as "to save us from the wrath of God," which implies His justice. With them, the Divine nature is made to consist of one property or attribute alone-Love. Pretending to exalt the beneficence of the Deity, they would resolve his moral perfection into one blind infinitude of mercy, which must result ultimately in the restoration of all mankind, so that Justice shall have no place in the universe, and Mercy and Love alone shall reign for ever and ever. This view, we need hardly observe, destroys the necessity for Christ's death, while it derogates from the moral dignity of his sufferings, as "dying the just for the unjust to bring us to God." It arises, beyond doubt, from feeble apprehensions of the infinite evil of sin, and false conceptions of what constitutes the moral perfection of the Deity; in other words, of what enters into the very essence of "Love." The thing which, above all others, seems to move the hate of Professor Stanley is the rigid spirit of Protestanism, and the narrowness of modern theology. He calls "Mahometanism," "the extreme Protestantism or Puritanism of the East" (p. 324.); -speaks of the "hard and narrow standard of modern times, (p. 293); and never loses an opportunity of sneering at the "so-called enlightenment and the so-called religious sects, and