while he had asked for one thing, the Synod, as it seemed, had answered by granting another. At length after much pressing, the archpriest referred his pertinacious catechumen to the ancient difference between the Eastern and Western churches regarding the procession of the Spirit, and to the separation which took place in consequence of the insertion by the Latins of the "Filioque" into the Constantinopolitan creed. Mr. P. replied, that the use of the word Filioque does not necessarily imply a heresy, and made a statement of doctrine on the subject, which, to the arch-priest, at the time, "seemed to be orthodox.” Ultimately, however, after having studied the work of Zornikoff, our deacon recalled this statement, renounced the Latin opinion and phraseology as untenable, and concluded, that " orthodoxy is with the Eastern Church." Passing from this topic, the arch-priest unfolded the conditions on which alone Mr. P., or any one coming from the British Church, could be received into communion with the Russian. These are far too lengthy for insertion here, and it is not easy to abridge them satisfactorily. The following, we think, though a very incomplete, may be taken as a fair enough view of them:-1. that the convert must believe the orthodox Catholic Eastern Church to be truly and exclusively the Catholic or oecumenical Church in its integrity and perfection; and must be ready to pay a sincere and full obedience to the same, in all matters whether of doctrine or discipline. 2. That he must ac knowledge the XXXIX Articles to be a full and perfect confession of the faith, both of the Scottish and the Anglican Churches, a confes sion not to be interpreted, filled up, and corrected by any other document, homilies, liturgies, or writings of Divines, but to be understood and taken in the plain, literal sense and spirit; as also, he must con fess, that certain heretical propositions, amounting to LVIII in number, are either expressly contained in the XXXIX Articles, or else may be plainly and necessarily inferred from them. And 3d, that besides confessing all the said propositions to be contained in the XXXIX Articles, he must renounce and anathematize these propositions themselves, and the XXXIX Articles from which they are taken, and the British Church, which imposes these Articles as a confession of the true faith upon her members. A most perplexing situation was this, for a zealous deacon, or for any one, to be placed in. Superior in ecclesiastical learning, and greatly superior in subtlety, to the arch-priest, with whom he had now to do, that gentleman, nevertheless, had fairly overmatched him, and by nothing else than plain, direct integrity. Suppose that Mr. P. had been quite ready to comply with the first and third terms, according to our arrangement of them,-no very extravagant supposition, by the way, and so to anathematize the whole fifty and eight propositions alleged against him as heresies; yet what was he to do with the second of these terms? It had been one great object of his labours and of his life, to show, that many, at least, of these propositions never had been contained in the XXXIX Articles, while, nevertheless, his compliance now, would have obliged him to confess, that the whole of them had always been there. And to break off the negotiation abruptly, at the present stage of it, with a simple, unexplained refusal, was utterly out of the question. Such a course would have verified the worst suspi cions of those with whom he was treating, and left them in the firm belief, that after all he was no better than a pertinacious and troublesome impostor. Dulce bellum inexpertis, might have been said or sighed by our deacon over this war also. But, extricate himself he must, somehow; and the predicament is clearly such as will require the aid of all his ingenuity, and all his plausibilities. "As soon," says he, "as he" (the arch-priest)" had ended" his statement of the prescribed conditions, he demanded of me whether I were then willing to go over by the prescribed form to the Eastern, as to the oecumenical Church, and to say, anathema to the British Church, with her confession of the XXXIX Articles, and those errors which he had objected to me out of them." Alas, this demand involved much more than merely cursing Protestantism, &c. which Mr. P. had already done, well and heartily. What then, in this crisis, did our zealous deacon do? Why, he entered upon explanations; he endeavoured to engage the arch-priest in perplexing discussions :-for him, the one very best thing he could have done under the circumstances. Having distributed the LVIII. propositions into three classes, he argued, that the first class, five in number, related" only to differences of phraseology, or discipline, or ritual," respecting which no one church has a right to dictate to another. The propositions in the second class, amounting to fourteen, were such, he admitted," as noted errors, indeed, but not such errors as to overturn the saving faith itself." Besides, he maintained that these errors were not fairly deducible from the Articles of the Church of England; and though, no doubt, many "of our people in Britain" maintained them, he thought they "might, perhaps, be converted and healed by wise and charitable dealing." The third class, comprehending forty-four propositions,-for of the original LVIII., five are reckoned twice over, according to the different senses in which they may be taken, he confessed to be rank heresies; and in his own name, and in the name of his alter ego, the Bishop from whom he came, said "ana_ thema," to them all, with great readiness; but he did not admit that they could be imputed to the British Church “ without the most griev ous calumny;" on the contrary, he maintained that, "they were neither expressly to be read in the Articles, nor by any fair inference to be deduced from them. In support of this last assertion, Mr. P. put into the priest's hands a bundle of dissertations on the British Church, twelve in number, and extending to more than 100 pages, which he had, some months before drawn up at the request of M. Mouravieff, the learned historian, we suppose, of the Russian Church. Remarkable compositions are these dissertations, indeed; giving us among other things, a clear notion of what, according to the Tractarian mind, ought to have been the history of Britain about the Reformation, and subsequently, when it went all wrong; and in the confusions and quagmires of Protestant fanaticism, became as good as nothing whatever. The arch-priest, by their means, was still more hopelessly perplexed than he had yet been. But we may as well let our deacon tell the rest. "The arch-priest," says he, "took the dissertations from me and read them through; and then said, that if I pleased he would deliver them to the Synod; not as if he could himself allow the justness of my those interpretation of the Articles, (for their sense, he said, was only too clear, and needed no interpretation,) but that the Synod might see from what I had myself written, how irreconcileable my interpretation was with passages which he would extract from the text of the Articles themselves, and embody in his own report; That, therefore, (so he insisted,) I ought to be ready to anathematize those XXXIX Articles, as being most manifestly heretical, and, together with them, the Bishop from whom I came, and his Church." It would have been far better No doubt the arch-priest was right. for Mr. P., with or without cursing, to renounce the articles, bishop, church, and everything, than to live in this most miserable and by no means commendable habit of word grinding, and compelling the plainest language to contradict itself. But he thought himself obliged to maintain his own interpretation of the XXXIX Articles, against that adopted by the arch-priest; and since he could not, as things presently stood, be received into the Russian Church, he engaged either to substantiate this interpretation of his by some authoritative decision of the Church, one of whose bishops he represented-or to return to St. Petersburgh and "seek to be reconciled by the prescribed form as from heresy." "I APPEALED," he says, " to the bishop from whom I had come, and to the Synod of the Scottish bishops, who consecrated him." Our deacon now becomes our appellant. In a third and last expedi tion we must follow him back to Scotland, and see how it fared with him and his appeal there. Meanwhile our readers may have just a hint of what Mr. P. then thought of his own position and prospects. "I finally took leave," says he, " of the arch-priest on Monday, June 5th, (1843,) on which occasion, in answer to something that he had said, I assured him that I had no intention of dealing deceitfully, nor of trifling with the synod in the matter, that I felt and admitted that there were things in the bishop's printed sermons which needed some explanations, which it was for him to make, and no less that there were passages in the XXXIX articles which needed explanation, and which, I trusted, the bishop and his brethren of the Scottish synod would make also; otherwise I could not pretend to gainsay the authority which accused me, and HE MIGHT EXPECT ME TO COME BACK AND OFFER MYSELF TO BE RECONCILED." 279 ECCLESIASTICAL INTELLIGENCE. Moderation of Call at Barrhead.-On Thursday, 29th January, the Paisley Presbytery, met in the Quoad Sacra church at Barrhead, and moderated in a Call to the Rev. J. Ireland. Induction at Colmonell.—On Thursday, the 31st January, the Rev. Mr. Dell was inducted into the parish of Colmonell. The Rev Mr. Simpson preached and presided. The Rev. William Rorison, has been appointed Assistant to the Rev. Dr. Black, of the Barony church, Glasgow. Presentation to Lochmaben.-We understand that the Earl of Mansfield has presented the Rev. Dr. Liddell, formerly of this city, to the church and parochial charge of Loch maben, vacant by the translation of the Rev. Mr. Marjoribanks to Staunton. Presentation.-His Grace the Duke of Argyle has been pleased to present the Rev. Lachlan M'Kenzie, minister of Muckearn, Presbytery of Lorn, to the church and parish of Jura and Colonsay, vacant by the death of the Rev. Alexander Kennedy. The Rev. Mr. Gray, of St. Paul's, Perth, has received a unanimous call to Lady Yester's church, Edinburgh, vacant by the translation of the Rev. Mr. Caird to Errol. Died At the manse of Arbuthnot, on the 24th January, the Rev. James Milne, in the 81st year of his age. Recent investigations into the molecular constitution of matter have revealed to us new and surprising proofs of the wisdom of God. When we consider the heavens, the work of God's fingers, the moon and the stars which he has ordained, we have exhibited to us, on the sublimest scale, the skill of the Divine Architect, in balancing conflicting forces so as to produce perfect harmony. We have, in the solar system, a perfect representation of the equipoise of ever varying forces acting upon orbs of overwhelming vastness. So nice is the balance of the solar system, so intimately linked together are all the parts, that any disturbance in one, is felt throughout the whole of the system. When a musical chord is struck, the vibration is propagated through every atom of its mass, and in a like manner, were any of the planets struck from its place, all the other bodies would vibrate to this perturbation. And just as the stability of the solar system is due to the equipoise of opposing forces, so the equilibrium of the molcules of matter is due to a like cause. As we recognize the finger of God in the one case, we must do so also in the other. Though the normal state be stable, yet we find that through all God's works there are occasional disturbances of equilibrium. Such disturbances, by a natural extension of the word, may be designated storms. The solar system may be subject to its We can conceive a cometary collision producing a cosmical storm, and astronomers imagine that they find the wreck of such a storm in the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Again, the molten sea of fire on which the crust of the earth is generally supposed to rest, storms. is subject to its storms. The earthquake, which is a relief of tension, is caused by the internal heavings of the storm. The most familiar storm is that of the atmosphere-in which the equilibrium is disturbed chiefly by the solar heat. In addition to all these we have electric storms, in which the equilibrium of the electric fluid is disturbed. Since electricity has, in a great measure, been identified with chemical force, new and striking views of the constitution of nature have been opened up. Every form of matter presents us with a storehouse of this fluid. Electricity is best conceived of as a single energy possessed of a dualistic development; and it is upon the maintenance of unity in duplicity that the equilibrium depends. We live in the midst of forces of terrific power, which are kept in equilibrium by the hand of God, but which, if let loose, would carry destruction and desolation in their path. The elements of nature are like a magazine of gunpowder, which only requires the igniting spark to destroy the equilibrium of the pent-up forces. Every mouthful of water we swallow contains a thunder-storm. There are condensed around its atoms as much electricity as would suffice for the most terrific storm that has ever made the heart of man to quail. Faraday has established the important law, that the amount of electricity necessary to decompose a certain quantity of water is exactly equal to the amount of electricity liberated in the decomposition. The first can readily be measured, and, consequently, the second is at once ascertained. It has been found in this way, that the atomic elements of a single drop of water, viz. hydrogen and oxygen, are held together by an amount of electricity equal to a thunder peal. This mysterious power is diffused through all nature. Bodies organic and inorganic are pervaded by it. It equally envelopes an atom and a globe. Now, in this universal element there are occasional disturbances of equilibrium. Electricity may exist in different states. It may be statical, as in common electricity, or that of the thunder cloud, and a thunder-storm results when the statical equilibrium is destroyed. It may be dynamical; or exist in the form of currents -such as the galvanic currents which are supposed to produce the phenomena of magnetism. A storm in the latter case is indicated by the aurora borealis, which may be regarded as an effort to restore the equilibrium. Magnetic storms are also indicated by the movements of the magnetic needle. There is something strangely mysterious in a magnet disturbed by a storm. All of a sudden it swings about like a thing of life-now turning to the east and then to the west-now pausing a little as if taking thought, and then darting off on a new excursion. The Astronomer Royal compares the disturbance on one occasion to the effects that would be produced by iron wheels running round the observatory, and attracting the magnet. The most singular part of the matter, however, is, that at the same moment magnetic needles may be similarly affected throughout every part of the globe. Thus the storm of the 24th of September 1841, was observed simultaneously at Greenwich, Prague, the Cape of Good Hope, Van Dieman's Land, and MaThese violent oscillations thus indicated a storm which wrapped the whole globe in its influence. Thus, while men slept soundly in cao. |