THE CHRISTIAN OBSERVER. CONDUCTED BY Members of the Church of England. FOR THE YEAR 1877. LONDON: HATCHARDS, 187 PICCADILLY. 1877. PREFACE. THE friends and readers of the Christian Observer will not need to be reminded, at the close of another year, that the great principles with which the work has now for seventy-six years been identified have been consistently upheld in its pages. They will also have been gratified to observe, what is of no mean consequence in an age of eager controversy like this, that, while the ground has been firmly and strenuously maintained, burning questions have been uniformly handled with a courtesy, fairness, and temper befitting a Christian cause. Subjects of pressing anxiety have been debated during the past twelve months within the Church of England. The spirit of aggression-not of innovation merely-upon her entire position, doctrinal, constitutional, devotional, pastoral, an aggression supported by her own members, and characterised by high authority as nothing less than conspiracy, has been as energetic and uncompromising as ever. Other questions, not appealing visibly to the sensuous tastes of the people at large, but circulating in the press alone for thinking and inquisitive readers, propagate views which, if not diligently counteracted, can have but one result, that of loosening the sense of Divine authority of Holy Scripture in the minds of religious people themselves. The activity of party, a busy controversial press teeming with argument, asserting its own interpretations of law, appealing to history in its favour, require to be promptly, effectually, and persistently met by the most practised and the best informed writers, taxing the disposable room of a periodical like this to |