these, most of which are of some efficacy for good, even in a corrupt church, belong no less to the true church, and would there be purely beneficial.  If Mr. Newman’s system attracts good and thinking men, because it seems to promise them all these things, which in our actual Church are not to be found, let them remember, that these things belong to the perfect church no less than to that of the Romanists and of Mr. Newman, and would flourish in the perfect church far more healthily.  Or, again, if any man admires Mr. Newman’s system for its austerities, if he regards fasting as a positive duty, he should consider that these might be transferred also to the perfect church, and that they have no necessary connexion with the peculiar tenets of Mr. Newman.  We know that the Puritans were taunted by their adversaries for their frequent fasts, and the severity of their lives; and they certainly were far enough from agreeing with Mr. Newman.  Whatever there is of good, or self-denying, or ennobling, in his system, is altogether independent of his doctrine concerning the priesthood.  It is that doctrine which is the peculiarity of his system and of Romanism; it is that doctrine which constitutes the evil of both, which over-weighs all the good accidentally united with it, and makes the systems, as such, false and anti-christian.  Nor can any human being find in this doctrine anything of a beneficial tendency either to his intellectual, his moral, or his spiritual nature.  If mere reverence be a virtue, without reference to its object, let us, by all means, do honour to the virtue of those who fell down to the stock of a tree; and let us lament the harsh censure which charged them with “having a lie in their right hand[10].”

[Footnote 10:  The language which Mr. Newman and his friends have allowed themselves to hold, in admiration of what they call reverential and submissive faith, might certainly be used in defence of the lowest idolatry; what they have dared to call rationalistic can plead such high and sacred authority in its favour, that if I were to quote some of the language of the “Tracts for the Times,” and place by the side of it certain passages from the New Testament, Mr. Newman and his friends would appear to have been writing blasphemy.  It seems scarcely possible that they could have remembered what is said in St. Matthew xv. 9-20, and who said it, when they have called it rationalism to deny a spiritual virtue in things that are applied to the body.]

What does the true and perfect church want, that she should borrow from the broken cisterns of idolatry?  Holding all those truths in which the clear voice of God’s word is joined by the accordant confession of God’s people in all ages; holding all the means of grace of which she was designed to be the steward—­her common prayers, her pure preaching, her uncorrupted sacraments, her free and living society, her wise and searching discipline, her commemorations and memorials of God’s mercy and grace, whether