Temple at all worthy to be compared with this, although the Lord declared it to be " a den of thieves," and "a house of merchandize." The doves and lambs that were therein sold, were really necessary for the use of the worshippers, who came from a distance; and so likewise were the tables of the moneychangers but no such excuse can be made for the sale of livings in the Church of England. It is a pure trade in the souls of men (Rev. xviii. 13), distinctly and indelibly marking her as Babylon the Great. It is a very trivial way of looking at this crime, to call it merely a corruption of something that was good and is become bad its present aspect is the only point to be considered. She is found with it, and the Lord hath indignation against her for ever. Nothing in Judah was so bad as this: no such abomination was ever before done on the earth: it did not exist in so barefaced a manner under the Papacy, as it has done under Protestantism: God cannot pass it by, now that He has risen to judgment; He must give her according to her deserts. The priests bear false witness for God, in saying that the office of pastorship in his church may be purchased for money; the whole body is guilty of Simony.

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Not content, however, with this trade, the priests and the bishops all contend that they ought to possess cures of more flocks than one, and at such distances from each other that they cannot be reached in the same day. No person ever yet presumed to ask a king to let him hold two commissions in two regiments, or in two ships. Well may God say, "If I am a Master, where is my fear, saith the Lord of hosts unto you, O priests, that despise my name?" When this matter of pluralities has been pressed upon the bishops, they have tried to pass a hypocritical law, sanctioning the practice in certain cases; their sole reference being to how much of it the voice of public indignation would allow them to retain, not to what they owed God in the matter.

Whilst these have been the practices of the superior clergy, the inferior, or curates, have been treated very cruelly. In most cases they have had an insufficiency for their decent support; and when their condition was attempted to be remedied by the legislature, in a bill brought in by Lord Harrowby, it was opposed by the bishops, until they annexed to it a clause, by virtue of which they could discharge, without assigning any reason whatever, any curate who might happen to be obnoxious to them. This law was entitled, "for the relief of stipendiary curates;" and has proved perfectly inefficacious for that end. The object of the law was to compel the possessors of the revenues, who did not do the duty annexed to those revenues, to allow an income, to those whom they employed as deputies, proportionate to such revenues. In the first place, there is flagrant

dishonesty in any man receiving wages for work which he does not perform himself; and, in the second place, there is great dishonesty in evading the plain and obvious meaning of any law whatever. Yet this law has been perpetually violated. The Evangelical Clergy, although pretending to such superior sanctimoniousness, have violated the law as completely as the rest: and we need not go a hundred miles distant from Clapham to prove the justice of our charge. The Church of England has sinned in this matter against warning, and shall be judged out of her own mouth; for the sin of the Romish clergy on the same point-the luxury of the higher and poverty of the inferior clergy was one of the great causes that led to the Reformation.

We have often alluded to Ireland, and it is not necessary to repeat what has been put forth before. It is the only country in the world, and the Church of England the only church, in which men have pretended to exercise the office of pastors over a people whose language they could not speak nor understand. Most righteous are the judgments which she is now experiencing; and however bad may be the motives of those who are inflicting them, her clergy have not a word to say in their own defence. They bear another false witness for God: they say that He speaks to people in a language they cannot understand, and holds them responsible for obedience to commands so conveyed. Did Christ speak to the inhabitants of Judea in Chinese?

"Holiness becometh the house of God," and ecclesiastical discipline is no longer attempted: it is as completely unheeded in the Church as the laws of the Saxons. The righteous con

stitution of the realm was, that no man should be a servant of the king but one whose outward deportment marked him to. human eyes to be a Christian. It was the duty of the priesthood to give to such, and to such only, certificates of their orthodox conduct. The king, however, frequently appointed men of flagrant immorality; and to these the priests also administered the rite of the Lord's Supper, lest they should fall under the condemnation of the secular arm for being instrumental in preventing any person from receiving temporal emolument. The priesthood ought to have refused; they ought to have rebuked the king and the secular power for suffering them to be punished for their faithfulness to their God: but they preferred to be faithless to God rather than to displease the princes, and there is no such thing as church discipline in the land. Thus, again, is no witness for holiness presented by the Church: instead of shewing God's house to be a holy house, she shews it to be one into which clean and unclean are alike admitted, and alike welcome: she tramples on the rites and ordinances of the house, by giving them alike to the holy and to the unholy; and whether her communicants rightly discern the Lord's body or not, gives her no concern. And

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now, O priests, this word is for you: If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart to give glory unto my name, saith the Lord of Hosts, I will even send a curse upon you, and will curse your blessings; yea, I have cursed them already, because ye do not lay it to heart...... Ye have wearied the Lord with your words: yet ye say, Wherein have we wearied him? When ye say, Every one that doeth evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and he delighteth in them; or, Where is the God of judgment?" Thus does the Church now exhibit another false character of God, even that He is indifferent to the holiness of those who worship therein. As to the power of the keys, to bind and loose in heaven as in earth, we doubt if there be a single clergyman in the whole kingdom who will venture to lay claim to it.

The conduct of the Church with respect to our colonies should not be forgotten in an enumeration of the misdeeds for which the Lord is now bringing her to account. No check, or even remonstrance, has ever gone forth from her to the horrors that have been committed by men-stealers and traders in human blood in the West, nor to the support given to idolatry in the East Indies. For aught that she has ever taught the people, both those systems have been well pleasing in God's sight. When the bustling activity of the sectaries, in this instance righteously exercised, had caused them to send forth missionaries, the Church of England followed at a considerable distance, and only for the emoluments that were annexed to the employment: just as she had bestirred herself in Bible distribution, and schools, after her enemies had begun to alienate the affections of the nation from her by those means. But in none of these cases did she humble herself before God for former neglect of duty: yet, if she were right in the former course, she was wrong in making the change; and if she were wrong in past times, she was proud and unhumbled not to make public confession.

The Church does indeed require reform, but it cannot be effected in the way that it is attempted; nor by any means, except by the Spirit of God. When the Spirit has named a person for the office of bishop, the other elders, (priests, peoßurepoL) ought to set him apart by the laying on of their hands. They are not the electors: the Spirit is the elector. The attempt on their part in the flesh to appoint officers in the church of God, without waiting for the direction of the Spirit, is a sacrilegious meddling with the ark of God; the sin of Uzzah; for which, like him, by whose fate they should have been warned, the heads of the churches have been smitten, from the day when they first committed it, in the third century, unto this hour. So that the Spirit of Christ, the life of God, has not been preserved in the church within their ken, but in retired hamlets, the holes and corners of the earth; where it hath wept and mourn

ed in secret, oppressed by the fat of the flock, the goats, and the chief ones. Neither king nor priests should interfere in the matter, except so far as the former ought to provide the servant of the Lord, so chosen by His Spirit, with sustenance out of the revenues of his realm; and the latter should deposit their own power of eldership on the head of him whom the Spirit has appointed to rule them.

The ordination of ministers, and consecration, or setting apart, of pastors to particular flocks, would then flow in the same channel as the due appointment of bishops. When a congregation or church has lost its pastor, it should pray that the Lord would designate his successor by His Spirit, which prayer would in due time be granted. The elders of that church, and some neighbouring bishops, would also be invited by the same Spirit to lay their hands upon the angel so named. This is all the jurisdiction that any bishop can have over any other church than his own: every pastor, or angel, of every flock, being to all intents and purposes its sole head, overseer, bishop, and ruler.

But not a particle of this can be effected without the voice of God being heard in the churches: this voice the priests and bishops are determined shall not be heard, and therefore they cannot be saved from destruction. They perceive that things cannot remain as they are, and that they must make a great change, which they call reform; but it is made without repentance, it is made in hypocrisy; it is made to please man, and not God; it is a mere compromise with their enemies, to give up a part in order to retain the remainder; and if they could have their own way, they would make no change at all. Why do they then? Are their practices according to God, or not? If the former, why do they not stand to them as to their lives, and give up the one only with the other? This is what the Popish priests in France did; for they, however erring, were sincere. But if the practices of the clergy of the Church of England be not according to the mind and will of God, why do they not humble themselves before Him, in the sight of the nation, and confess their avaricious traffic in the souls of men; their adulterous intercourse with the kings of the earth, by which their bishops have acted a continual fraud in the sight of heaven? No, they will not bend. They long to keep their congé d'elire as it is; they long to keep their pluralities; they long to draw tithes from Ireland without preaching to the people; they long to live in idle luxury, and leave the care of their flocks to half-starved deputies.

Ecclesiastical discipline cannot exist without the Spirit of God. The power is that of God himself, and may not be delegated to any fallen man. The power of consigning to pining sickness, or to sudden death; the power of discerning the fair outside observer of all decencies and moralities, and the eloquent and orthodox preacher of the truth, to be still without the Spirit of

God, without the life from above, is what could be confided to no created being. The Lord has now arisen to make a holy church nothing but the presence of His Spirit in power can effect it: the Church of England will not admit the Spirit of Holiness, and therefore the Church of England must be destroyed. The glory of Jesus cannot be exalted but by her destruction she is setting up a lie for His truth: she is calling an unholy church, a church which does not try to be holy, His church she is calling a church without discipline, His church; His church must testify against her, must cry for her downfall. His Spirit in his people has pleaded with her in vain; has knocked at her door and been rejected; has been mocked at by her priests; has been railed at by her doctors; has been set at nought by her idols, whom the people consult, the divines, the seraphim, before whom they bow. All who love Jesus must spare no arms against her: His Spirit has lifted up the banner: His church is being builded: within its pale only is salvation: this is the Zoar for all the Lord's people who still linger in the doomed city to this must they all resort. Let not the people of God go back into the city of confusion, in the vain hope of mending her: "her sun is gone down while it is yet day:" the word of the Lord is, "Let them return unto thee, but return not thou to them" (Jer. xv. 19).

Of all the extraordinary delusions with which men were ever deceived is that of saying that the Church of England cannot be included in the term Babylon, because her Articles, creeds, and confessions are sound, even if it be granted that the congé d'elire of the bishops, the non-residence of her clergy, the holding of pluralities, the ill-treatment of the curates, and the want of discipline, are wrong. The priests of Judah might have made the same defence: they might have admitted the charge of adultery to be applicable to Samaria, as these do to Popery, but asserted that so long as they worshipped in the true temple all must be right and safe. The word of the Lord has declared, that, so far from their plea being valid, the priests of Judah were worse than those of Samaria; and we have no doubt whatever, that-viewing Popery and Protestantism, as two systems at present existing in the world, in the light of God's Spirit; and measuring them, not by their past acts, but by their present; and comparing them, not with our historical predilections, but with the church which is now building by the Holy Spirit that Popery is a less intolerable abomination in the sight of God than the Church of England. We say "a less intolerable abomination," because we do not wish to use a term which should in any way justify Popery; whilst at the same time we desire to weigh both systems in the balances of the sanctuary alone, and give to each their respective dues.

The error of men who argue in this way is very worthy to be