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THE

CHURCH OF ENGLAND

Quarterly Review.

JULY, MDCCCXLVI.

ART. I.—Justification. Eight Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, in the Year 1845, at the Lecture founded by the late Canon Bampton. By C. A. HEURTLEY, B.D. London: Rivingtons. 1846.

WHEN the Church was young her faith was simple, and, as in the case of Philip with the eunuch-as in the case of Paul with the jailer at Phillippi-a single article sufficed to express it: belief in the Lord Jesus comprehended the faith of the Church. But this one article involved and implied a great deal, for it was well known how ample and how precise the claims of Jesus had been to be both Lord and Christ; and the belief in him admitted the truth of all those claims, and believed in him as the Son of God and as the only Saviour of mankind. This faith implied further that we were in such a lost condition that none but God could help us, and that it was an extremity worthy of his interposition-"dignus vindice nodus;" therefore that the Son of God came, and came to die, because nothing short of such an atonement could restore us to life and to the favour of God.

While the faith of the Church remained steadfast in the allsufficiency of Christ, and while she repudiated the idea of adding to, or detracting from, the efficacy of his meritorious sufferings and intercession, no addition was made to the articles of faith: the true Church needed no other articles, and on her own account would never have made them. But when heresies or mistakes arose, and she was assailed from without, or had

VOL. XX.-B

been troubled in her own members, by doubts concerning Christ on the one hand, and fancies concerning human merit on the other, then it became necessary to declare the true faith on all those points which were questioned, and to assert, in the plainest terms, that salvation was not of works, but was by faith alone.

The additions to, or rather the successive expansions of the creed of the Church, may not be ascribed to a love of speculation on her part, or to a desire of imposing greater burdens upon the consciences of men; but they have arisen from the unhallowed speculations or demoralizing practices of men who opposed themselves to the truth, which assaults it was necessary to meet, not only in order to defend the truth, but also to prevent the simple and unsuspicious members of the Church from being ensnared by errors which have commonly some specious shew of truth. Thus, though belief in the Lord Jesus might still be professed in word, it became necessary to define what these words meant, lest men should be deceiving themselves by using the words in an Arian, or Nestorian, or Eutychian sense, and might be supposing that they were believing in Christ when they were trusting only to their own imaginations; and when men were truly acknowledging Christ as their God and Redeemer, they needed also to be guarded against the many temptations which arose tending to supersede or eke out his work by the law, or human merit, or the intercession of others.

On two former occasions it was necessary, to the preservation of the Church, that the true doctrine concerning our justification in the sight of God should be cleared from mistake, and asserted fully, explicitly, and pointedly; and at the present time it would seem to be as important to the security of the Church of England, from the popular errors of the day, that this great fundamental truth should be clearly held and sedulously inculcated, as the only sufficient counteraction to that undue exaltation of external and ritual observances, which, though differing in its type and form of development, is notwithstanding a disease of the same kind and springs from the same noxious humours which Paul had to correct in the Galatians, and Luther contended against at the Reformation. -a substitution of human merits in place of the merits of Christ.

St. Paul regards the Galatians as under a species of infatuation in endeavouring to perfect, by means of the flesh, a work which had been begun in the Spirit; saying, "O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you? are ye so foolish? having

begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh? Behold, I, Paul, say unto you, that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing. For I testify again to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law. Christ is become of no effect to you, whosoever of you are justified by the law ye are fallen from grace." The Galatians expected additional blessings, and blessings of the same kind, from combining the ceremonial observances of the law with faith in Christ. St. Paul shews them that this is a delusion, and that the two things are incompatible: he shews them that it is folly to expect that the Gospel which was an ulterior work, and was the end and accomplishment of the law, would be carried on and perfected by returning to those elementary and imperfect shadows; and, moreover, that if they persisted in hunting after these vain shadows they would be led astray, and would inevitably lose the substance and the reality.

That generation of the Church with which St. Paul had to deal, being the first generation, was simple in its faith; and having just been emancipated from the law, which was clearly divine in its origin, and had been imperative upon all the people of God up to the very time of the bringing in of the Gospel-this early Church, both from the simplicity of its faith and from the recent abolition of the law, was in continual danger of mixing the two dispensations together-either from feeling their new faith to be cold and naked in comparison with the varied pomp and splendour of the divinely ordered ceremonial of the temple, or from the influence still possessed over them by the Levitical priesthood, whom, before the higher claims of the Church came in, it had been their paramount duty to obey in all things, and whom, after they had become Christians, they were enjoined to reverence in their places, and wherever it was not inconsistent with the new faith of the Gospel. The case was much the same even with those converts who had been gathered from among the heathen; for they also knew the divine origin of the Mosaic ritual; and, though free from the partialities of early association or long habit, were from these very circumstances less able to draw a line of distinction between the law and the Gospel, and in greater danger of corrupting the simplicity of faith by adding the incompatible legal ceremonial.

From the frequent warnings against such a corruption of the Gospel in all the writings of St. Paul, both to Jew and Gentile, it is evident that the tendency is common to all mankind; that all men desire such a religion as will require them to do something towards rendering them acceptable in

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