soon.

The Catholic party were anxious to gain so distinguished a convert, or at least to make him faithless to his own opinions. They endeavoured to wear him out by disputation, and flattered him with a hope that he might save his life and honors by renouncing his opinions. Believing that the same favor would be extended to him as to others, he fully abjured his Protestant faith, and, in several instruments, professed his acquiescence in that religion he had so long opposed. He even applied for a reprieve long enough to show that he had sincerely repented, and to remove the scandal which his heretical life had given. But the infamous council, though they knew that his confessions were dictated by that hope which they had themselves encouraged, refused him the privilege they had offered to Ridley and Latimer, and decreed that nothing should save him.

The wretched man then awoke to a full sense of his dishonor. The ears of Protestant England were stunned with the intelligence that the great apostle of reform had denied the faith. Their eyes were bent reproachfully upon him. They trusted that he would have defied the crown, and borne a testimony in his last hours, which all Europe would have heard. Perhaps it was his consciousness of the general shame and indignation, which restored courage to his heart. He resolved to take the opportunity, which the last hour afforded him, to redeem the honor of his name. A paper was prepared for him to read at the stake, that the spectators might be edified by his confession of weakness; and Catholic historians are malecontent that he should have deceived his tormentors in a matter which they had so much at heart. We cannot join in their censure. We think he was in no wise bound to warn them of his purpose. It would have been the very foolishness of sincerity to have thrown away the last chance of doing justice to his Protestant opinions. It was with no little dismay, that they heard him recall his recantations, one by one, declaring that nothing but the hope of life had wrung them from him. He then held the hand which had written them in the flames till it was consumed, and thus did all that a dying man could do, to remove the reproach of his former weakness. But though the Protestants maintain that the guilt of his apostasy was done away by this act, it is but too evident that he would have clung to life, if submission could have saved him; that he did not resume his fidelity till hope was all gone, and that his courage was borrowed less from religion than despair.

It will be readily inferred from what we have said, that we are no admirers of Cranmer, and we believe that his reputation rests upon party feeling. Still, the reverence for his name is so universal, that we have thought it necessary to dwell principally on the more questionable parts of his character. It would be unjust to deny that there are indications of great kindness in his temper, and occasional generosity in his feelings. He was happy in the affection of his friends, and the attachment of a large and powerful party. But we think we have shown, that, as a public man, he was wanting to his own character and duty; that he sanctioned, and even took part in transactions, which he was bound to condemn without measure, and suffered his attachment to his sovereign and his party to make him unfaithful at times to his country and his God. His errors seem to have been often sins of weakness. He was timid and irresolute, and not the less so for the boldness which he showed, when he was driven to despair. He was easily swayed by gratitude, we fear we must add by interest also, beyond the strict bounds of moral obligation. The truth seems to have been that he was fitted for private life, where the dangers, trials, and temptations were less, and evil was the hour in which he left it to aid in a Reformation which could have gone on as well without him. From that hour, he seems to have drifted upon the stormy tides of party, and to have maintained his ascendant, not by pressing gallantly forward to a certain harbour, but by changing his course as the wind might happen to blow. That he was instrumental in advancing a great religious reform, will not entitle him to the great name of reformer. He did not, like Luther, go out to strive against old abuses with a towering self-devotion. He was not ready to sacrifice everything to the great cause of truth. He did not speak with a voice of deep and burning conviction, which must and would be heard. He was not found to defend his cause, with all the world against him, nor did he master the fear of death, till he found that no submission could save him from the revenge of those who were thirsting for his blood.

The time is come to read history impartially; and such books as this, which, from whatever reasons, attempt to sustain a character which cannot stand by its own merits, will meet the fate they deserve, even though executed by much abler hands. They should have appeared a century ago, when, though an immense majority was on the Protestant side, and no Catholic

felt secure of life, the nation trembled at the very name of Rome, and by their severity against the Catholics created the alarms which disturbed them. Then, such works as these might have seemed acceptable offerings to religion. But now, when the laws injurious to Catholics are universally pronounced absurd by all but a jealous party, when the slow leave with which England lets them go has made her the wonder of the civilized world, it is of no service to any cause to represent the English reformers as irreproachable, in the face of history, and to speak of the Pope as if he were still in all his glory, with the nations at his feet. Every one knows, that Catholics as well as Protestants are changed; that Catholics no more maintain the principles of three hundred years ago, than Protestants believe the real presence as in the times of Henry. In fact, all sects are assimilating, not by any effort of charity, but by the natural effect of time. The Calvinist, instead of election, talks of the unconditional freeness of the gospel. The Methodist leaves his unpainted chapel, and must have his learned preacher with his spire and bell. Even the Shaker substitutes a grave walk for his rigadoon. No sect, however unsocial and exclusive, can possibly remain uninfluenced by the changes of the world. It is only by keeping them out of the reach of improvement, an experiment which has been tried with some success in Ireland, that Catholics can be made to retain their unfavorable distinctions. Remove the ban, and they move abreast with Protestants in the upward march of improvement. Remove the jealousies which it now rests with the Protestants to dispel, and they will join heart and hand with the Protestants, in the great cause of God and man. The Catholics, it must be remembered, have a religion, one of the various forms of Christianity; and there are examples enough to show that Catholics can have all the earnestness, humility, and excellence of the gospel. If their faith led to excesses in past ages, they are not answerable for the deeds of their fathers; and it is not for Protestants to cast the first stone.

ART. III.-Sermons by the late Rev. Joseph S. Buckminster, now first published from the Author's Manuscripts. Boston. Carter & Hendee. 1829. 8vo. pp. 358.

THE history of public preaching might open a fruitful subject of inquiry. To say nothing of its state under the Jewish dispensation, it might be interesting and instructive, could adequate materials be found, to trace its various progress and influence, from its commencement under the gospel, when our Saviour' began to teach and to preach,' when Peter arose in the midst of the assemblies of Jerusalem, and Paul stood upon Mars' Hill to declare to the men of Athens the unknown God,'-through their immediate successors, the early Fathers, as they are called, and the preachers of the Reformation, to the present day.

It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to execute such a work with any good measure of fidelity, without access to more copious stores, than any of our libraries at present supply, and we know not that it has as yet been undertaken. The brief dissertation of Robert Robinson, with which he has prefaced his celebrated notes to Claude's Essay on the Composition of a Sermon, and one or two even smaller works, are the only attempts of this nature in our own language, with which we, at least, are acquainted. But they furnish only the most general hints of what might be accomplished, and leave us to a strong desire, that a subject, so curious and so copious of instruction, may not long be left without faithful investigation. Robinson has spread before us his plan. He has just opened an enchanting field, and told us of the fair fruits that might be gathered; but for want of materials, he has left it almost wholly unexplored. We wish, therefore, that some true lover of ecclesiastical antiquity and diligent reader of sermons, full of learning or willing to become so, would adopt his purpose, and do something towards its accomplishment. He need only lift up his eyes, and he will see a field white already to harvest. From the preachers of the primitive church; from Basil, Chrysostom of Antioch, and Gregory Nazianzen, among the Greeks; from Jerome and St Austin among the Latins, he might collect fair and abundant fruit, not indeed without some dry leaves and painful thorns, yet pleasant to the eye, and good to make wise."

From their day to that of the Reformation, amidst growing corruptions of doctrine and enormities in practice, when many of the clergy were as ignorant and debased as the people they professed to instruct, and some even of the prelates could not read, the history of the pulpit must be very obscure and unsatisfactory. Through the whole of that dark period, it was grossly perverted from its high purposes. It was made to minister to the vanity and ambition of a favorite preacher, and what was worse, to the passions of the people. Robinson tells us, and we learn from other sources, that the people for a time were suffered to express their delight or their disapprobation by the shaking of their heads, or the lifting of their hands, till, at length, it proceeded to loud acclamations or hisses, and the abuse could be tolerated no longer. But even this indecorum of occasional applause was known in the best days of England. It is related of one celebrated divine of the court of Charles II., that he was sometimes obliged to wave his hand to suppress the growing tumult; but of another, no less than Burnett, who, however, has not recorded it in the History of his own Times, that while the 'welcome murmur was breathing around him,' he sat back in the pulpit refreshed and delighted, not willing that any portion of its sweetness should waste itself unheard.

After the labors of Wickliffe, in the fourteenth century, and of Luther and Melancthon, of Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer, in the sixteenth, preaching was restored to its proper province, and was a mighty instrument in the hands of this goodly company of confessors and reformers, of exposing the errors of past times, and of diffusing the light of truth. From this period, at least in Great Britain, its history might without much difficulty be traced to the present day. Either in the sermons themselves of their distinguished divines, or in the authentic records of their lives, its peculiar characteristics and influences might, at successive periods, be distinguished. The ancient folios of Andrews, Reynolds, and Hall of Norwich; of Hooker, Wilkins, and Jeremy Taylor; the discourses of Leighton, Barrow, Tillotson, and South; of the many learned and eminent among the Non-conformists, of whom were Owen and Bates, Charnock, Baxter, and Howe; in those also of a later day, as Atterbury and Clarke, Sherlock and Secker, of the Establishment; with Watts, Doddridge, Grove, Harris, and Lardner, Jennings, and Chandler-in all these and others of the Dissenters, whose names alone would exceed our limits, might the