no explanatory note, is invidious, if not glaringly unjust. The explanation given in the body of the work we shall present in his own words. Free Inquiry, Private Judgment, Rationalism, is the right of every man, to bring the doctrines and institutions of religion to the test of his individual reason, and to adopt or reject them as he finds them in accordance with it.' If, now, by 'right' we are to understand civic right,' Mr. Tayler, the historian, knows very well that the Orthodox are Free Inquirers as truly as the Unitarians. From his using 'Private Judgment,' as synonymous with Free Inquiry,' we are authorized to suppose that civic right' is meant: and if it be, the historian is disingenuous in distinguishing between Puritanism and Free Inquiry. If, however, the 'right' intended is a creature's right towards God, Mr. Tayler, the philosopher, is, to use the mildest censure, very vague and superficial. For, not to speak of the seeming flippancy of such language, and of the wrongful implication that this 'right' is asserted where 'Private Judgment' is maintained, the 'right' itself must be singularly modified, we think, ere Mr. Tayler would like to appear as its pledged champion. If, for 'religion' we read the Bible,' or 'all supposed discoveries of God's will,' the words admit of two interpretations; the one of them supported by the Orthodox as much as by the Unitarians; and the other, such as Mr. Tayler, we believe and hope, would not avow. For according to their idea of the Bible, and of the supposed discoveries,' whether as God's acknowledged revelation, or, at present, as a merely self-styled revelation, of his mind and will, so do the Orthodox profess that the field of their inquiry is limited, or is boundless. On the supposition that as yet we have no assured revelation from our Maker, we bring the doctrines and institutions of the Bible to the test of our individual reason, and we adopt or reject them as we find them in accordance with it. What would have been the consequence had God left us to ourselves while we thus brought these matters to the test of reason; this is not the present question. We so brought them, without doubt; or rather, God in his providence so brought them; and in his righteousness he held us accountable to pass a true and faithful judgment. But for his grace we believe we should have judged amiss and sinfully; or if not, we should have been indifferent to the whole momentous matter, or should have held the truth without understanding, without appreciation, and without consistency. By his grace, we thankfully confess it, we are what we are. But he did not in his grace inhibit 'free inquiry' into the reasonableness and the Divine origin of the doctrines and the institutions of the Bible: though in his grace he kept us from what we now see would have been both foolishness and

crime, from inquiring recklessly, stolidly, or with hostile 'prepossessions.' For he hath given us an understanding that we may know him that is true;' or, in the words of Owen, in the treatise from which Mr. Tayler often quotes with admiration, 'God, speaking in the penmen of the Scriptures, his voice to them was accompanied with its own evidence; and God speaking by them, or their writings, unto us, his word is accompanied with its own evidence, and gives assurance unto us. . . . . For the Holy Ghost communicates light to the understanding, whence it is able to see and judge of the truth as it is in Jesus : and the will being thereby delivered from the dungeon wherein it was, and quickened anew, performs its office in embracing what is proper and suited unto it in the object proposed.'-Owen's Works, v. iv. pp. 401, 427. The difference, therefore, between Unitarians and the Orthodox, is, not that the former only have inquired freely for the mind and will of God, while the latter have been always restricted to a single field: but that the latter, in the course of their inquiries, have met with what they little looked for, satisfaction, and have unexpectedly undergone, through God's rich grace, such a renewal in the spirit of their minds, that the Bible is to them henceforth their sole authoritative teacher; while the former inquire as freely, that is widely, and, according to their own acknowledgment, to as little purpose, as they ever did, and as we ourselves did in our days of blindness. Mr. Tayler is too earnest-minded a man to suppose that while we thus testify to the truth in relation to ourselves, we wish to speak offensively to him. He will cheerfully acknowledge, that with our experience and belief we can write none other than we do. For, as Owen says, on p. 421, of the same masterly treatise, 'If men, who are blinded by the god of this world, will yet deny this light, (the self-evidencing light of the Scripture,) because they perceive it not, it shall not prejudice them who do.'

If, however, we acknowledge that the Orthodox are no longer free inquirers, whatever they may once have been, we use not the word 'free' in respect to conscious liberty, but merely in respect to the comparatively larger range which once we explored in search of religious truth. Once, in our freedom, we went every where; now, in that same freedom, assured that to go everywhere is vain, we turn to the Bible only as the revealer of the will of God. We are as free as ever, though we travel not so far. And if our range, in one aspect, be more limited, it is less so in another; for to us the Bible is a universe of truth, infinitely richer and more vast than it had entered into our hearts to conceive as even possible.

And even in our treatment of the Bible we exert, haply a

spirit of much more 'free inquiry' than Mr. Tayler would suppose. For he says, speaking of the first Latitudinarians,' Cudworth, Whichcot, Wilkins, and More, who adopted in their studies and practice the maxims of free inquiry already enunciated by Chillingworth and Hales; They traced out the broad coincidence of Christian truth with the eternal laws of nature and providence; and brought to bear on its illustration and enforcement all the treasures of heathen poetry and philosophy.... ... They had no sympathy with the Calvinistic sectaries.' (p. 109). Mr. Tayler tells us somewhere, that he has not read many of Owen's works: but the portion of them that he has read; the state of the university of Oxford, applauded by himself, when beneath the care of Owen; and the 'Living Temple' of John Howe, with which Mr. Tayler is evidently acquainted; these should alone have caused another kind of notice of the Calvinistic sectaries' in connexion with the Latitudinarians. For, if we except the word 'enforcement,' at least in somewhat that it implies, there is nothing asserted of the Latitudinarians in the foregoing passage, but what might with equal justice be asserted of the Calvinistic sectaries,' at all events of the eminent among them, of both that and every age. On pages 359, 360, Mr. Tayler says:

'A mode of exegesis was introduced by Locke, quite different from that which had prevailed among the Puritan divines of the preceding century, who looked immediately to edification, and neglected the principles of rational criticism and exposition. . . He constructed his own commentary on the principles. . of endeavouring to throw himself back into the circumstances and feelings of the writer, apprehending from this point of view his particular line of argumentation, and bringing all separate phrases and detached observations into connexion, by their common relation to it. This was rationalizing the Bible, by putting the interpretaton of it on the same footing with that of other ancient books. It was employing the aids of history, and the ordinary rules of grammar and logic, to find out what the Bible said; where mere feeling and imagination, and notions already in the mind, had been allowed to decide.'

We assert now, that what is here called rationalizing the Bible,' has been in all ages eminently distinctive of the 'orthodox,' by whatever name they have been temporarily called; and we remind Mr. Tayler of what he had written on page 344, that Locke' was entered of Christ Church, Oxford, . . at the time when Owen was dean, and the university under the rule of the Independents. We deny, however, that the mode of exegesis described is what is commonly called 'rationalizing the Bible.' To rationalize the Bible, it seems to us, is to 'allow feeling and imagination, and notions already in the mind, to decide what

the Bible says; and where this operation is not consciously performed, much less avowedly, it is sometimes done by those even who endeavour to throw themselves back into the circumstances and feelings of the writer.' For a mind filled with 'prepossessions,' is not likely to estimate a writer's circumstances and feelings otherwise than in accordance with its wishes. The mode in which in these, and in other portions of his volume, Mr. Tayler shows that Rationalists and Free Inquirers profess to investigate the scriptures, is precisely that professed by the Orthodox as well. We, then, are Free Inquirers, in this meaning of the title, quite as much as they. They, however, or they are often much misrepresented by themselves, include in 'Free Inquiry,' and state it when it suits them, something, and not a little, more than this.

We have not a doubt that Mr. Tayler has inquired more widely and more candidly than Unitarians in general, respecting the principles and the philosophy of Orthodoxy; but our readers will already have surmised that even he has not successfully endeavoured to throw himself into the circumstances and feelings' of the orthodox writers, whose productions he has studied. Occasionally, too, though not very often, we meet with odd expressions of his; such as, no one who had thus 'successfully endeavoured' could possibly, we think, employ. Thus he says, on page 262, that Calvinism ascribes salvation to the influence of faith on the heart.' On page 138, too, he seems to trace, (but his language is remarkably obscure,) the doctrine of election by grace' to the consciousness of men who have risen from a deep decay of faith and morals, that their rise was experienced while intensely concentrating their feelings upon God as the sole and immediate source of spiritual power. For he adds, The individual must first be purified and renovated, before he can beneficially exchange a promiscuous sympathy with the whole human race. While he is himself engaged in the process of self-renewal, and feels how difficult and critical it is, how easily it may be stayed and frustrated, and how awful must be the alternative, he cannot as yet with safety to himself regard the mass of his fellow-creatures as otherwise than reprobates.' The last sentence in the book, too, page 563, describes 'the views of Watts, Cudworth, Baxter, and even Owen, when reduced to their essence,' as seeking the true source of faith in inward feeling and conviction.' On all this we need offer only the following remarks. As Mr. Tayler uses the word 'salvation,' we are forced to understand by it, not the actual rescuing of a man from the rule of sinful principles, but his deliverance from the supposed penal consequences of his sin. We simply deny, now, that Calvinism ascribes this salvation to the

influence of faith on the heart.' The physiological account of the doctrine of election is ludicrously in opposition to the accounts of Calvinists, to their experience, and to all the phenomena from which only a spectator ought to form a theory. The attribution to Owen, of inward feeling and conviction as the source of faith, is from a misapprehension, unworthy of the Teutonic school, of Owen's meaning in his invaluable but much neglected pamphlet on 'The Divine Original, etc., of the Scriptures.' Owen does not mean to assert that he has first a feeling or conviction of the Divine Original of the Scriptures, and thereupon believes the scriptures to be the word of God;' but that this feeling or conviction is his faith; a faith of the Divine Original;' a faith founded not on his seeing but on what he sees; a faith which may be called a believing apprehension; a faith which is the mind's perceiving; a faith, in matters of intellection, that corresponds to the 'seeing which is believing' of the many in regard to the grosser matters of sight. We do not wish to attribute any consequent evil reasoning to this misapprehension of our author's. We refer to it merely as indicating his inacquaintance, after all his 'endeavours,' with the habitudes of such a mind as Owen's. We may add, by the way, that Owen's views of Divine faith appear to us the germ of truth, for which, disfigured as it seems by them in the various integuments in which they have severally involved it, all the German metaphysical schools, and Cousin's too, and Hamilton's, are still contending. We anticipate with confidence a day of glory, not so much for the mighty and majestic 'leader of the Independents,' whose followers, pleading a paltry sarcasm, because enfeebled in the indolence of 'toleration,' shrink from the fellowship of one so awful in his penetration and profundity; but rather for those views of God, and truth, and the 'prima scientia,' which, favoured, as it seems to us he was, with sympathetic intercourse with God, closer perhaps than any mortal's since apostolic times, it was his lofty blessedness to take, and, we deliberately add it, it was his honour to describe with a precision and a lucidness unique, and felicitously appropriate to the 'deep things of God' that he discussed. Nor is this day of glory distant; for when men like Mr. Tayler, notwithstanding all their 'prepossessions,' can enjoy and reverence Owen to the extent apparent in this volume, the dawn is assuredly begun. But our mortification has been inexpressible while reading Mr. Tayler's volume, that he, a Unitarian and a German-taught divine, should evince, notwithstanding his misapprehensions, a more intimate acquaintance with the mind of Owen, and a juster appreciation of his personal religion, than we find in scarcely any English-taught Calvinist we meet with.