Should any American Episcopalian say that his church was the daughter of the church of England, and had adopted the essential principles of her form of government, he certainly would treat with silence the assertion that he thereby claimed the lordly titles, the varied powers, or exclusive principles of the English hierarchy.

As to the real point in debate, Dr. Hill has as yet done nothing. He has still to prove that Presbyterianism is not what Professor Hodge stated it to be; or that it did not prevail in the Prostestant churches of Scotland, Ireland, Holland, and France; or that our church did not adopt that form of government. Until he does one or the other of these things, we may safely leave the main point in dispute just where it is. If he wishes to prove that our church was not bigoted, illiberal, and persecuting, whom will he find to oppose him? If he wishes to prove that she was catholic, tolerant and Christian in all her principles, whom will he find to deny it? She may be all that, and yet Presbyterian.

Though it is not our object to appear as the eulogists or apologists of the church of Scotland, we think it right to make a remark on the manner in which Dr. Hill allows himself to speak on that subject. A specimen, though a very inadequate one, has just been given of the style in which he writes of the Scottish church. He constantly speaks of it as rigid, illiberal, intolerant, persecuting-as the enemy of all religious liberty. He says, it always has been and must be so, since this uncompromising, domineering spirit is an essential element of the system which that church has adopted. How different was the manner in which our fathers were accustomed to speak on this subject! In a letter written in 1710, by the original presbytery, to the synod of Glasgow, it is said, We address ourselves to you, "knowing none so proper to apply unto, and repose our confidence upon as yourselves, our reverend brethren of the church of Scotland, whom we sincerely honour and affectionately esteem as fathers." Both the synods of Philadelphia and NewYork professed to look upon that church as their parent. The latter body called themselves "the young daughter of the church of Scotland." This was the language of the Tennents, the Blairs, of Davies and of Finley. They declared that they had adopted "her standards of doctrine, worship, and discipline;" that they were "united with that church in the same faith, order, and discipline. Its approbation and countenance," they say, "we have abundant testimonies of,

They, as brethren, receive us; and their members we, as opportunity offers, receive as ours." "If I am prejudiced," said President Davies, "in favour of any church, it is of that established in Scotland; of which I am a member, in the same sense that the established church in Virginia is the church of England." The congregation in New-York, with Dr. Rodgers and Joseph Treat at its head, frequently called themselves "a dispersion of the church of Scotland." In an official document they called themselves: "The ministers of the Presbyterian church in the city of New-York, according to the Westminister Confession, Catechisms and Directory, agreeable to the established church of Scotland." The united synod of New-York and Philadelphia say: "Our judicatories, like those in the church of Scotland, from which we derive our origin, are church sessions, presbyteries, and synods." Now, whatever else may be doubtful, one thing is plain, viz: that Dr. Hill is a man of a very different spirit, and of very different views from those fathers of our church. It would be an insult to him to say that he belonged to the same class with them. They spoke of the church of Scotland as their mother. He reviles her. Christian men are not accustomed to revile their mothers; whatever may be their parents' faults. He must look elsewhere, therefore, for sympathy in his abuse of the Scottish church; and we know not where he will find it unless he looks beyond the pale of Christianity, or at least of the protestant communion. We really do not believe that his account of the reformation in Scotland can be matched by any similar passage in any Protestant writer. Professor Hodge had made the obvious remark, that the declaration contained in the first Scottish confession of faith, of the right and duty of the people to resist the tyranny of their rulers, " was the result of the reformation being carried on by the people." We little thought that this remark could give offence or excite contradiction. There is no more familiar historical fact than that the reformation in England was conducted in the name and by the authority of the government, and in Scotland in despite of the govenment. To this fact much of the difference between the churches in the two countries, and much of the difference of the history of the two nations is to be attributed. Dr. Hill, after quoting the above remark, says: "We learn from Buchanan, Knox and others, what kind of people they were, how excited and how they went to work. Would not any one infer from reading Professor Hodge's laudatory notice

of this matter, that the people, the common people, were all now leavened with the principles of the reformation? The people, the rascal multitude, as Knox calls them, at that time neither knew nor cared any thing about the reformation. It had not reached them; they had not yet emerged from gross papal darkness; but were led on by the nobles and the heads of their clans, and instigated by the inflammatory zeal of Knox and a few others, just as they would be led to any marauding or military enterprise. It was plunder that enkindled their zeal, and prompted them to their exterminating and indiscriminately destructive course. As the principles inculcated by the Reformers, and even the confession drawn up by Knox himself, taught the people that they had a right to resist their rulers, and abolish their right to govern, whenever they should judge they had exceeded the prescribed limits of their authority [it is well for Dr. Hill and all other heirs of British liberty that the people were thus taught], the Reformers, with all they could prevail upon to follow them, abrogated the powers of government lodged in the hands of the regent; took the reigns of government into their own hands, demolished popery and prelacy, seized upon the property and wealth of the church, and plunged the country into a bloody civil war of unusual violence, [the Reformers did all this]. The weakness and inefficiency of the Queen Regent's government; the death of the king of France who had married their young queen; the distraction in which their youthful widowed Mary, Queen of Scots, found the country when she came over from France and assumed the reigns of government; her flight, imprisonment and death in England; the long minority of James VI., then a young child, all conspired to give the Reformers the opportunity of intrenching and fortifying themselves with their new system of rigid, exclusive, divine-right Presbyterianism, throughout the whole realm. This was the introduction of the Scotch Reformation." p. 83. In precisely the same style the Papists are accustom

* On the opposite page, he says, The church of Scotland, "when it had obtained the victory over popery, assumed the place occupied by it, as the established religion of the country, retained all the property and advantages possessed by its predecessor, in churches, glebes, seminaries of learning, &c. It retained the same connexion with the civil authority, and contended for its rights and for the mastery, by weapons both carnal and spiritual." The Romish church, before the reformation was, in proportion to the wealth of the country, one of the richest churches in Europe. M'Crie, in his Life of Knox, says, that its clergy had full one half of the wealth of the nation in their hands. The present church of Scotland is probably the poorest established church in the world.

ed to attribute the reformation of England to the lust and cupidity of Henry VIII.; and that of Germany to the envy and ambition of Luther; and thus too, there are tories, who still devoutly believe that the American revolution was nothing but a Boston riot.

It is not our purpose to notice a tithe of the extraordinary things contained in the volume before us; but to confine ourselves to a few points more or less intimately connected with the history of our church. The first of these is the character of French Presbyterianism. Dr. Hill had stated in his sketches that the ecclesiastical system of the Huguenots was much more mild than those of Scotland and Holland. As Calvin was the father of the French churches; and as the mild Calvin is not exactly that combination of sounds with which the public ear is most familiar, we are not surprised that Professor Hodge was disposed to doubt whether French Presbyterianism was so characteristically gentle. To ascertain this point, he took the course which we presume will be allowed to be the correct one; he appealed to the standards of doctrine and discipline adopted by the French churches; and to the official acts of their national synods. It then appeared from the character of their confession of faith; from the rigour and frequency with which it was sworn to, and imposed on all ministers and teachers; from the provisions of their form of government; from the powers claimed and exercised by their national synods, and other judicatories, that the epithet mild was the very last which any reader would be disposed to apply to their system. Dr. Hill does not attempt to gainsay any of these points. But to show that the French were not so strict as the Scotch, he appeals, in the first place, to a speech of James VI., in which he boasts of belonging to the purest church on earth, to one which did not, as the church of Geneva did, keep Pasche and Yule, (Easter and Christmas.) "Why," asks Dr. Hill, "did that stupid hypocrite, James, use such language in the General Assembly of the kirk of Scotland? He spoke as he had been taught, and as he knew would please that Assembly. The Scotch kirk held other reformed churches in contempt, because they still observed pasche and yule, as Geneva and France did, with other remnants of popery. The church of French protestants, was but a young dove to the kirk of Scotland," p. 12. We must let this proof of the character of French Fresbyterianism pass for what it is worth.

Dr. Hill admits that "the protestants of France exhibited

While they

a very different character at different times. were favoured at court, patronised by the nobility, and their religion established by the Queen of Navarre, they were like Christians always have been in temporal prosperity, and at the right hand of power. They could then persecute the poor Independents, who had fled to their maritime coasts from oppression in England. But when their palladium, the famous edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685, and they were made to feel the effects of unrelenting persecution, their characters were entirely different." p. 9. The kind of history contained in this passage shall be noticed directly. It is enough now to remark that after the revocation of the edict of Nantes, the French protestants were almost exterminated or driven from their country, and could hardly be said to have had an ecclesiastical existence. That this representation is not too strong, will be admitted, for in quoting from Mosheim the expression, "While the Reformed churches in France yet subsisted," Dr. Hill subjoins the explanation, “i. e. before the revocation of the edict of Nantes." Now as the question at issue was the character of French Presbyterianism, one should think that this ought to be determined by the character of the church while it existed, and not after its destruction.

Dr. Hill moreover quotes largely from Mosheim to show that some of the French doctors, even before 1685, had departed in several points from the common rule of faith, and that notwithstanding the condemnation pronounced by their synod, and the opposition of their learned men, liberal sentiments gained ground, and were carried by the French refugees into other countries. We are ready to admit that if the subject in debate was the doctrinal opinions of the French emigrants to this country, these extracts would deserve attention. We admit further, that so far as they are an offset to a remark made by Prof. Hodge, viz. "As there was at an early period a strong infusion of French Presbyterianism in the churches of this country, it is well to know something of its character," they should have whatever weight properly belongs to them. How much that is, we will consider in a moment. But what have they to do with the question started by Dr. Hill in his Sketches, viz. the character of Presbyterianism as it prevailed in France? It may be admitted that false doctrine had made its appearance among the French protestants, before their great overthrow, and that their descendants departed still further from the faith, and yet every