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3. I was next to speak of the unclean spirit from the mouth of the False Prophet, or Clergy of the Romish apostacy. Now I have under the last head anticipated much of what might perhaps have been stated under this. For if Rome and its Popes have sent forth in their bulls and ordinances, their vicars apostolic and bishops, and the missions and money of the Propaganda, their voice of Popery, the Romish Clergy have, as a body, taken it up and themselves, even as if with personal interest and ambition in the matter, adopted the cry, and urged the cause forward. The distinctness, however, of this Apocalyptic symbol,-the distinctness I mean of its voice in the trio-seems rather to require (as I have before said) that we should seek its fulfilment in the voice of the priesthood of the Apostacy, in so far as, while mainly supporting the Popery of Rome, it may yet have had a certain political independency, if not religious peculiarity. And such independency does in fact now attach, more or less, to the Spanish, Portuguese, and French clergy-to the latter more especially, as members of the Gallican Church; a Church proud of its liberties, and not ultramontane in principle, but rather regarding General Councils as the seat of the infallibility of the Church, not individual Popes. Yet do they all so hold, like as at Constance, to the superstitions and false dogmas of the Apostacy, as to speak but one of

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1 It appears from Apoc. xix. 20, that the False Prophet, even to the last, is associated with, and supports the Beast.

2 See Note p. 314, Vol. iii, on the possible distinction of the cismontane and ultramontane divisions in the Romish Church, in an earlier passage of the Apocalypse. On the constitution of the Gallican Church under Napoleon, see ib. p. 364 Note 2.

In the Catholic Directory for 1843, p. 2. there is given a Formula to be subscribed by all clergymen of the Gallican Church, before permission being given them by the London Vicar Apostolic to officiate in the Papal churches in England. It is a Formula of recognition of the Pope as the alone Head of the Church. "Ego profiteor et declaro me summo Pontifici Gregorio XVI, utpote Ecclesiæ capiti, subesse; et communicare illis omnibus, tanquam Ecclesiæ membris, qui jam cùm Pio VII, quem quamdiu post suam ad Pontificatum assumptionem vixit fuisse Ecclesiæ caput confiteor, communionen usque ad ipsius mortem servârunt, et nunc Gregorio Papæ XVI communione conjunguntur."-Thus it seems that the French clergy are viewed by the Pope, as in a certain sense distinct, i. e. since the great Revolution of 1789, from the other Roman Catholic clergy. And so too, I conceive, the Spanish and Portuguese.

the tones of the Western False Prophet ;-the voice of a modified Papacy.

But we are forced, ere we quit this head, to look nearer home; and to ask whether, since independency to a certain degree, and distinctness of voice, is thus apparently required, in order precisely to satisfy the emblematic intimations respecting this spirit in the text, we may not among ourselves too have seen that which has answered to it. The warning cry of a watchman of our Israel, as well known for his spirit of love and benevolence as even for his zeal in the Christian cause, has been lately heard to denounce the modern Orford Tractarianism as, in part, the very voice of the False Prophet in the text. Can this be the case? Is it really the voice of the unclean spirit, apocalyptically prefigured as issuing like a frog out of the mouth of the False Prophet, that has been resounding these last eight or ten years from the banks of the Isis? This is a grave question.

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Certainly, if at the first there was much in it that to a discerning ear and eye seemed suspicious, there were indications also apparently of an opposite character. When the infidel revolutionary spirit swept like a flood across our land, and the Popish spirit, combining and fraternizing therewith, swelled the torrent, the Oxford primary movement was against, not for it. And hence in fact much of its early strength. It was looked on by the friends of order, religion, and the church, in times of fearful peril and agitation, as an ally of conservatism. And doubtless of its early supporters there were not a few that at the time so intended it, and foresaw not whither it would lead them.3 When a spirit of delusion goes abroad, its plans are not at once

'Viz. Mr. Bickersteth, in his late Sermon before the Protestant Association, on the Text we are now discussing.

2 I do not except from this charge even Keble's Christian Year, beautiful as is much of its sentiment, as well as poetry: and which was about the first as well as most influential pioneer to the Oxford movement.

3 See especially Mr. Perceval's account of the first origin and originators of the Oxford movement, in his Letter to the Editor of the Irish Ecclesiastical Journal.

fully developed; and thus its agents and instruments are often at the first led blindfold. Satan may come in, we know from Scripture, even as an Angel of light. But the development has now at length been sufficiently clear and unequivocal. And painful as it is to me to write on the subject, especially considering how much there is of what is eminent and estimable in many who have more or less appeared to favour the doctrine, -I dare not shrink from avowing my conviction that Mr. Bickersteth is warranted in the warning-cry he has sent forth; and that the Oxford Tractarianism bears with it evidence of being in very truth one form of the voice of the False Prophet, prefigured to St. John under the sixth Vial in the Apocalypse.

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It does not need that I should here at length set forth or illustrate the doctrines or spirit of the Tractarianism referred to. The following brief summary may suffice, sketched by one who has drawn the picture from the writings of its chief heads and authors. It appears, he says, that it is their avowed desire and object, "to reappropriate from Popery the doctrines which our Reformers rejected,-to set up a Popish rule of faith, a Popish doctrine of apostolical succession, a Popish view of the Church and Sacraments, a Popish doctrine of sacrifice in the Eucharist, available for the quick and dead for remission of sins, a doctrine on Transubstantiation, Purgatory, invocation of Saints, &c, &c,-aye and even on the Papal supremacy,-which, if not Popish, is at least so near it, that it is like splitting hairs to draw a distinction between them: nay, which is admitted to be in most of these instances consistent with the Tridentine statements; and only not Popish, because it does not reach all the extravagances practised in the Romish communion." This is an awful, but I fear too palpably true statement. Sad that the moral sense should be so

1 I need hardly say that I refer to Mr. Goode. His most valuable Tract, The Case as it is, ought to be in the hands of every one who would wish rightly to estimate the real character of the new theological school at Oxford.

2 "Case as it is;" pp. 53, 54.

3 So the Rev. T. F. Dibdin, in a late Letter to the Editor of the Morning Chronicle.

perverted with individuals who hold these sentiments, and who thus advocate the very doctrines which our reformed Church was framed to protest against, as to allow notwithstanding of their retaining its professorships, and eating its bread !—Strange that while, as in the notable case of Lady Hewley's charity, the Civil Courts have adjudged1 that dissenting ministers, professing a religious creed essentially at variance with that of the founder, are by that profession ipso facto excluded from the benefit of the religious endowment,-our ecclesiastical law should have failed to define, or to enforce the acting upon the same rule, a rule which reason and common equity cannot but approve of: to the effect of excluding from within its pale of these avowed enemies of our beloved English Protestant Church!

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It is the business, however, of an Apocalyptic Expositor to confine himself to the Apocalyptic bearing of the subject. And most assuredly, if the interpretation of this prophetic book hitherto given be correct, (and I trust that the reader is well satisfied with the evidence of its correctness,) it may be shown that there is not a single token wanting, whereby to recognize the acts and spirit of the present Oxford religious school, as but an antitype and fulfilment of that which appeared in symbol to issue from the mouth of the False Prophet, so as described in the text. Let us trace the parallel, first, in respect of its theological character and doctrine; secondly, in respect of the time, manner, circumstances, and associations, that have marked its movement and promulgation.

As to its theological character and doctrine, the first thing which strikes us (and it is indeed a most striking one) is that it notoriously takes for its model, in respect of doctrine and practice, not the primitive age,2 so

1 And this by repeated and most solemn decisions.

2 The appeal to “ primitive" practice, &c, occurs perpetually, as any one at all acquainted with the Tractarian School must be well aware of although in nine cases out of ten, perhaps ninety-nine out of a hundred, where this word is used, the reference is not to the first century, and comparatively seldom to the

as is often most strangely and untruly asserted by its teachers, but that of the fourth and fifth centuries; an æra when the Church was greatly corrupted,' and which the Apocalyptic visions designate as that of the first marked development of the apostacy nor this alone, but that it has selected for the primary and fundamental doctrines of its movement, that very dogma respecting the sacraments as the only, and in the case of baptism, the necessarily effectual, means of communicating divine life to man, as well as that respecting the priesthood of their apostolic succession, as its only and its ex opere operato conveyancers,3 (to the destruction of personal spiritual religion, and supercession of the grace and Spirit of Christ, Himself directly and individually the illuminator and quickener of each dead soul,) which in the same prefigurative visions of Patmos were noted with the silent reprobation of the divine inditing Spirit, as the primary and fundamental doctrines of the then incipient apostacy. 2. It appears that one of its next advances, still in close imitation of the early false teachers, (that

second century, or even the third, but rather to the fourth, fifth, and perhaps sixth centuries.

1 So the Bishop of London in his late Charge, p. 60: "Not the primitive Church, but the Church of the fourth or fifth century; infected as it was with the remains of Gnostic superstition, and the inventions of enthusiastic or ambitious men."

2 See my first Section on the Sealing Vision, Vol. i. p. 238, 257, &c.

3 Mr. Perceval states that, at the commencement of the labours of the Tractators, the leading principle selected to be put forward by them was the doctrine of the apostolic succession, as a rule of practice :—that is, 1st, that the participation of the body and blood of Christ is essential to the maintenance of Christian life and hope in each individual; 2. that it is conveyed to individual Christians only by the hands of the successors of the apostles and their delegates; 3. that the successors of the apostles are those who are derived in a direct line from them by the imposition of hands, and that the delegates of these are the respective presbyters whom each has commissioned."-So Mr. Keble, Pref. to Hooker, p. 77, speaks of "the necessity of the apostolic commission to the derivation of sacramental grace, and to our mystical communion with Christ." Goode, 16. Dr. Pusey's well-known Tracts on Baptism show how early and prominently the doctrines of the fourth and fifth centuries concerning that sacrament were urged by the Tractarian School.

"I call all this Judaizing a direct idolatry. It is exalting the Church and the sacraments into the place of Christ; as others have exalted his mother, and others in the same spirit exalted circumcision." So Dr. Arnold in 1837. Life, Vol. ii. p. 74.-How exactly agreeable with what I have written of the germinating apostacy in the fourth century.

4 See my Vol. i. p. 250, &c. At page 259 I there previously cited the above

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