the position in another form, there are many doctrines known to modern theologians which ought to be or are regarded as of the greatest, even of fundamental importance, but which can only be connected with the statements of the Creeds, by pressing those "standards of Christian profession," into a service for which they were not designed.

"But to suppose that, because the doctrines of Grace and the Sacraments are not expressed in the Creeds, therefore they are not a portion of the original deposit of the Faith as much as those that are expressed, is (I must think) untenable. What disciple of the Reformation would be content to admit that the doctrine of Justification by Faith only was but a secondary point? What admirer of the Mediæval 'Ages of Faith' (as they have been styled) would be satisfied with silence on the subject of the Real Presence? We have heard much of late concerning Baptismal Regeneration. I suspect it would be but small comfort to some zealous assertors of the dogma to be told, that, instead of the emphatic enunciation of the connexion of Baptism with the remission of sins, which they have imagined in the Creed, the intention of the Fathers of Constantinople was mainly to interdict such practices as that into which S. Cyprian fell, of re-baptizing heretics. Not that they denied the connexion, for they assert it, but incidentally only."-Preface, pp. vii. viii.

Such are the reasons which have induced the author of the book before us, to deviate from the usual plan of adopting the Creeds as the limits of theological summary, and to assume an eclectic line in which, without taking either as an exact model, the Summa Theologia of S. Thomas Aquinas, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and (of the earlier and Eastern Church,) the De Orthodoxa Fide of S. John Damascene, have all in their degree contributed to mould the plan of the work; the latter authority, however, being taken as the chief type.

In carrying out this plan Mr. Owen has divided his book into thirty-one chapters; but we may give our readers some idea of the nature of the work by saying, that these chapters resolve themselves into six principal subjects, or classes of subjects, as follows: In the first place we have two chapters on the sources from which theology is derived, Holy Scripture and the Voice-past or present of the Catholic Church. These chapters are preceded, indeed, by an introductory one on the Definitions and Province of Faith and Theology, which is no doubt very necessary, but respecting which we must warn the reader, that with this volume, as with many others, he must not be discouraged by the introductory pages, or take them as a fair test of the interest attaching to the body of the work. The next subject which forms one of its great divisions is that of which our own Hooker so well said, that our highest knowledge brings us at last to the confession how

little we know, the Being and Attributes of GOD; which is, of course, followed up with the Christian view of GOD in Three Persons, and statements of the received dogma respecting each Divine Person, of which we can only say that we have seldom seen so much valuable matter condensed into a hundred pages. We then come to a consideration of created beings, angels and men, in treating of which many subjects are brought forward that lead us up naturally to that of the Incarnation. This is in the first instance viewed in the abstract, as it relates to the Person Incarnate, rather than with reference to the consequences which flow from the doctrine as relating to the work of salvation; and thus treated the chapters in question form an exposition of a large portion of the Creed. There is then a chapter on the Catholic Church-the doctrine of CHRIST's Body Mystical-following in obvious order upon that of His Incarnation; and after that several chapters, intercalary we may call them, on the subjects indicated in a passage we quoted before from Mr. Owen's preface. The concluding division of the volume is on the Sacraments, and those Articles of the Faith which relate to a future state. The second, fourth, and sixth portions will be found exceedingly valuable.

The exposition of these fundamental verities is given to a great extent in the actual words of ancient writers, and even where passages are not marked as quotations, it is easy to detect the spirit and manner of thought of elder days. We shall give our readers the principle of selection adopted as we find it in Mr. Owen's own words.

"But we may ask, What is Primitive Antiquity, and how is it to be limited? I reject the notion of a peculiar veneration for the first three centuries only. What are we to think of a theory, which deprives us of the example of the Catholic Church at the very juncture when she displays her mission on a large scale and under circumstances analogous to our own? Or which would under pretence of purity deprive us of the four great Fathers of the Greek Church, Epiphanius, Basil, Nazianzen, and Chrysostom, and of the four Doctors of the Latin Church, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory? We come then to Bishop Ken's formula of the Church before the division of the East and West.' This has found considerable favour among us of late. But it will not bear the test of a rigid scrutiny. For we can hardly suppose that those who would make that formula their rallying-point actually mean that they would submit to the dogma of the Church up to the moment of its formal separation into antagonistic communions. They imagine a happy period when all was tranquillity, undisturbed by the ambition of the Popes, undimmed by the gloom of the 'Dark Ages.' But in point of fact, they would have to endorse some of the practices and tenets of the Medieval Church, to which Protestants are most uniformly and determinedly opposed.

"For my part I defer with reverence to the collective voice of the Ancient Church as expressed in its Councils and the publicly-approved

writings of its Theologians, the Fathers (as they are called). It is the only standard, to which the Church of England (of which I am a minister) seems to profess an adherence in her authorised formularies. And, without pretending to rigid accuracy of limitation, I in general cite the writers within the period of the Four General Councils; because (with the exception of S. Gregory the Great's writings) all the important documents of the Church coincide with that period."Preface, p. xi.

"Practically then I confine the appeal to the undivided Church, to the first five centuries. Other and later writers, Medieval, Roman, and Protestant, are freely employed; but for the sake of illustration, or for historical reasons, or because I choose to adopt their language, not as exhibiting the consent of the Catholic Church. Anglican writers are rarely cited; their works are more accessible to the reader. I have only further to say, that where I have followed a single Father, (as has been the case chiefly in the chapters on Grace), I have not done so without authority. The Articles of the Church of England bear me out in deferring to the teaching of S. Augustine. To cite the testimony of another class, it is thus that the thoroughly learned Benedictine, Mabillon, advises students in theology. "The best rule that one can observe in the choice of Fathers is, to prefer those whom God hath singularly applied to clear up particular questions, to those who have only treated them cursorily and incidentally, and at a time when the matter had not yet been agitated nor decided by the Church; and at the same time to prefer the works of a Father which treat of a particular point, to certain passages where the same Father has but spoken of it in passing. It is by this rule that the Church hath always preferred S. Augustine to all the other Fathers on the subject of Grace, that is to say, the works which he has composed against the Pelagians. And in the very year in which the Third General Council was held at Ephesus (A.D. 431,) Pope S. Cœlestine, being consulted by the Gallican bishops about Augustine's doctrine, writes in reply: Augustine, a man of holy memory for his life and merits, we have ever had in our communion: nor hath the rumour at the least of sinister suspicion ever aspersed him, whom we remember to have been long ago of such knowledge as to be esteemed among the best masters, even before, by my predecessors. All therefore in common thought well of him, as one who certainly was to all an object of love and respect.'"-Preface, p. xiii.

The author acts wisely, in our opinion, in thus extending the range of his authorities to later periods, and consequently to the Church at large, rather than absolutely limiting it by any event or series of events arbitrarily chosen for that limit in comparatively recent times. For special purposes, such as the proof of our Blessed LORD's Nature, we shall find the early Fathers as full of argument and illustration as the writers of any period could be. It was the great subject of controversy in the early Church, and was practically settled for ever in the first three centuries, so that

all that has ever been said upon the question since, whether by heretics or Catholics, has been little else than a repetition of what was said previous to the Council of Nice. So too there are points of controversy in which it is of the highest importance to carry our appeal to the Church as it was before the formal separation of East and West, and in which we may fairly claim to be judged by those ages and those alone. But we entirely agree with Mr. Owen, that the consensus of ages subsequent to even the latest of these marked periods is far from being valueless; and will add 'indeed that there is, to our mind, something of affectation in the disposition so current among English Theological writers to limit their submission to the authority of the first three centuries only. One important feature in the testimony of the Fathers is clearly the exact concurrence of those who wrote at a coincidence of time or distance of place, or under other circumstances which make it perfectly certain that they wrote without any communication of their thoughts or opinions to each other. And there may be occasions on which such manifest independence of concurrent testimony in the writers of East and West since the cessation of visible communion may be almost as valuable; when it may be to us almost the same as the voice of the undivided Church, from the extent and character of its witness to truth. And although as a general rule the period embraced by the four great Councils furnishes us with a clear answer respecting the ordinary and constantly repeated heresies of Christendom, it seems to us that when we reject or slight the great writers of ages which followed, we are putting aside what may be of infinite value in the controversies of the modern Church.

To assist our readers in forming an estimate of the manner in which Mr. Owen brings his authorities forward, we shall transcribe a few sentences from his chapter relating to the Sacraments, premising that they lose a large portion of their value in our pages through being dissociated from the multitudinous references given in the footnotes of every page. In the following passage, for example, our author shows very clearly that however desirable it might be (from the peculiar circumstances of our Church and of the day) to have the doctrine of those other five Sacraments which are necessary to Salvation only in special cases as exactly defined in the formularies of the Church as that of the two generally necessary, yet the habit of enlarging upon those "two chief Sacraments of the Gospel" is by no means peculiar to recent times or Anglican teaching, as some are disposed to imagine.

"In this at least,' says Cassander, 'there is no controversy, that there are two chief Sacraments of our salvation, wherein our salvation chiefly consists and is received, to wit, Holy Baptism and the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of the LORD; but we do not read of the other Sacraments being comprehended by the more ancient writers in any certain number; nor likely may you find any one before Peter

Lombard, who set down any certain and definite number of Sacraments; to determine which number (of seven) the mystery of this number, most celebrated even in sacred Scripture, seems to have led later writers.' But he was deceived; for F. Georges de Rhodes, a Jesuit, inveighs against the Lutheran Chemnitz as most impudent in asserting that the Master of the Sentences was the first inventor of this number. That the idea of seven Sacraments had imperceptibly become familiar to men's minds before Lombard's time may possibly be true; but it still remains a fact, that he is the first systematizer of Theology, who has distinctly enunciated the number of seven Sacraments. But de Rhodes refers us to Cardinal Bellarmine as bringing most evident vouchers from the Fathers. I consult Bellarmine, and find that his citations from the Fathers go to the extent of proving, not that any one of them enumerated precisely seven Sacraments, neither more or less; but that some one or more has attributed the name and dignity of Sacrament to one or other of the five commonly called Sacraments,' to wit, Confirmation or Chrism, Penance, Extreme Unction, Order, and Matrimony. But when I examine the statements of a writer, like S. Cyril of Jerusalem, for example, who treats professedly in his Mystagogic Catecheses of the Christian Mysteries or Sacraments, I find that he treats only of Baptism and the Eucharist. He does indeed mention the Chrism, but it is in connexion with Baptism. So also Tertullian. S. John Damascene, in the eighth century, and writing a comprehensive summary of Theology, devotes one chapter to Baptism (c. 86), another to the Holy Mysteries of the Eucharist (c. 90), none to the other Sacraments; and this, while he can find room for the Cross (c. 88), for Praying towards the East (c. 89), for Images, (c. 93), and for the honour due to the Saints and their relics (c. 92). S. Isidore of Seville, in one place, interposes Chrism and Confirmation after Baptism; but elsewhere he couples together only Baptism and the Communion.

But, to exhibit the tradition of classing together these two ordinances as the great Sacraments of the Gospel, it will be enough to give a few examples in different centuries. Thus Augustine writes: "But at this time, after that by the resurrection of our LORD a most manifest proof of our liberty hath shone upon us, we are not burthened by the heavy operation of those signs which we now understand; but our LORD Himself and Apostolical discipline hath delivered to us some few instead of many, and the same most easy to be done, and most august to the understanding, and of most pure observance; as is the Sacrament of Baptism and the celebration of the Body and Blood of the LORD.' So also Paschasius Radbert, Abbat of Corbay, (A. D. 1111,) writing of the Eucharist, says: 'CHRIST hath left to His Church nothing more in a mystery than this and the Sacrament of Baptism, and moreover the Holy Scriptures. In all which, the HOLY SPIRIT, Who is the pledge of the whole Church, inwardly works the mysteries of our salvation to immortality.' So Arnoldus De Bona Valle (A.D. 1162): To the charity of CHRIST which hungers and thirsts after our righteousness the TRINITY beareth witness in heaven, the SON Himself Who justifieth, the SPIRIT Who sanctifieth, the FATHER Who glorifieth; because both our righteousness and holiness and brightness is from above; and the testimony of GOD, which is greater than that of man, commends and