Burnet was disgraced from a good living by Charles the Second, on account of a fearless sermon which he preached after the discovery of the Popish plot. The text was "Save me from the lion's mouth, thou hast delivered me from the horns of the Unicorn," in which the King thought he saw an allusion to himself and his court, as the beast from which the church was in danger after the Popish Unicorn was vanquished. Burnet was certainly not a trimmer for plurality-sake; for after the accession of William, he managed to have a pamphlet burnt for asserting, that the King owed his crown to conquest or election, and not to dissent. Of his histories it is not in our place here to speak. We would barely refer to his account of the life and death of the Earl of Rochester, a work which, written on the plan of the ancient conversations of Plato, affords the most chaste, and the most attractive summary of the evidences of Christianity of any which we have met with in the language.

We do not place either Burnet or Tillotson as belonging to the court of Charles the Second. They had suffered under the Protectorate, and they continued to suffer on the restoration. They were cold republicans, and still steering in the same even course, became suspicious royalists. If there had been any opportunity of martyrdom by a violent disrespect to the civil authority of the commonwealth, it is certain that Sancroft and Stillingfleet would have won it. It may serve well to illustrate the character of the High Church Bishop, by touching on the history of the most eminent among those, who, though they remained within the pale of the Church and the patronage of the Monarch, refused to be confined by either the bigotry of the one, or the prerogative of the other. Among the moderate clergy of the Church of England, Dr. Isaac Barrow was the most eminent. It is the fashion of the day to neglect Barrow's writings; and indeed there is not a portable edition of them now in print. If his sermons only were thus smothered, we should not so much complain. They are very valuable from the exquisite research they display, from the power of the engine by which they were produced, and from the exhaustion which the subject underwent, before it was done with; but, from the mathematical exactness with which they cover the ground before them, they must disappoint a reader, who is anxious to have a little spot still left, where he can erect his own tabernacle. But the quality which rendered him unfit for a devotional discourse, adapted him to perfection for an argumentative discussion. His treatise on the

Pope's Supremacy may fall behind Chillingworth's great work, but his view of the internal evidences of the Christian religion, prefixed to his exposition of the Creed, contains a summary of that great doctrine, at once the most magnificent and the most complete. We may at some future period allude more fully to the free and liberal cast of the reasoning which he there adopted. The Oxford writers have placed Barrow in the same category with Laud and Sancroft, though we cannot imagine for what reason. Whatever grounds his consecration sermon, and that preached by order of the King immediately after his restoration, may give to the claim, we think that it is abundantly refuted by the tone of his argument in his treatises on the Lord's Prayer and the Creed. The latter were undoubtedly his most labored works, written at the close of his life, and graced at once by the perfection of his learning, and the maturity of his belief. He certainly was not justly appreciated in his generation. Dr. Pope, his biographer, mentions among others an instance of his having been appointed to preach at Westminster Abbey on a week day, when the monuments were thrown open to public inspection, and when it seems, for that reason, he was not received with the best attention. There happened to be a great crowd present, who had come attracted rather by the desire of seeing than hearing, but the preacher mistaking their object, and not being aware that the rules of the Cathedral were, that none should be allowed to see the tombs till after sermon, prolonged his discourse to a tether, which he was always prepared for, but seldom had occasion to use. After he had preached about three hours, he was interrupted by some strange rebellious sounds from the organ loft, which it seems some of the discontented had stormed, and had converted into their own purposes, by pouring from it a battery on the offending divine. By a singular coincidence, Mr. Baxter happened to be present, attracted and enchained, as he afterwards confessed, by the abstruse grandeur of the preacher's style, and it was only by his powerful interference, that the tumult was pacified, though the conclusion of the sermon was lost.* Indeed Barrow found that he was listened to much better in his parsonage than in the Cathedral; so after a few unsuccessful endeavors to bring his great abilities to a worthier market, he was forced by the coldness of the royal shepherd, and the stupidity of the flock, to bury himself in his

* Pope's Life of Barrow, p. 147.

perpetual curacy. But the retreat that was most distasteful to him was the means of his reaching a far higher eminence, than either the applause of a congregation or the favor of a king could have given him.

The reign of Charles the Second has often been quoted as the meridian of the genius of the English Church, and a powerful illustration has thence been drawn of the peculiar adaptation of a monarchy both to the purposes of religion and literature. To this might in part be answered, that it was the cessation from civil war, and not the restoration of the monarchy, that gave the man of talent the means to be a man of education, and gave leisure to both to cultivate their parts. But secondly, is it not clear that, however the cloud of polemic divinity may have gathered under the reign of Charles the Second, it did not burst until after the revolution. Charles seems successfully to have avoided the brooding storm; for though it spent itself on all sides, he remained untouched. He silenced Burnet, and he disfavored Barrow; he was too late for Chillingworth and Hooker, and too soon for Tillotson and Swift; and however he may be said to have given to the first leisure and retirement for their studies, he certainly had very little to do with the others. We take our views of the English republic from such poisoned sources, that it is difficult to say whether or not the reign of Charles was a millennium compared to the stormy sway of the protectorate, or whether it was the lamb or the wolf that did most towards muddying the stream. It is a hard matter for an Englishman to dispel the prejudice, that for two centuries has been growing round him in respect to the name of Cromwell. Once a year he gives thanks in his churches for Charles the Second's restoration, and he cannot but believe therefore, that it was a very praiseworthy achievement. But the track of English history, which precedes that event, belongs equally to us, and to him. It is there that the two nations began to separate in their paths. Before they were one. But when the regicides hid themselves in the woods of the valley of the Connecticut, the troopers of the Stuarts could not outroot them. The day will come when as Americans we shall own our parentage, and rescue the character of our ancestors from the reproach, which it was both the taste and the tact of the monarchists to throw around them.

ART. II.1. System der Christlichen Moral, von D. FRANZ VOLKMAR REINHARD. Wittenberg. 1814. System of Christian Morals, by Dr. FRANCIS VOLKMAR REINHARD. Fifth enlarged and improved edition. In five parts. 2. Christliche Sittenlehre, von Dr. WILHELM MARTIN LEBERECHT DE WETTE. Berlin. 1819-23. Christian Ethics, by Dr. W. M. L. DE WETTE. In three volumes. 3. Theologische Zeitschrift. Von SCHLEIERMACHER, DE WETTE, und LÜCKE, herausgegeben. Kritische Uebersicht der Ausbildung der theologischen Sittenlehre in der evangelisch Lutherischen Kirche seit Calixtus. Von Dr. W. M. L. DE WETTE. Berlin. 1819-20. Theological Journal. Edited by SCHLEIERMACHER, DE WETTE, and LÜCKE. Two articles upon the Progress of Theological Ethics in the Evangelical Lutheran Church since Calixtus. By Dr. W. M. L. DE WETTE.

MORALITY is as old as Man and Society. Its foundation is in man's nature and his relations to his Maker and his fellow creatures. To find the beginning of morality, we must go back to the origin of reason and conscience, the sense of right and the sense of duty. Moral science, on the contrary, is the creation of reflective reason, and its progress depends upon that of philosophy. The two are related to each other, like religion and theology; as a man may be deeply religious without being versed in theology, so he may be very moral in character without having any just pretension to moral science. Yet as the interests of religion, both for the maintenance of its purity and the satisfaction of reason, demand a consistent system of theological doctrines, so the interests of morality demand a system of moral science, or science of human duties and the sources of moral obligation.

In all reflective ages ethical questions have been among the most attractive subjects of human inquiry. In Greece, however, ethical science appears to have had its origin. We say this notwithstanding the recent efforts to glorify Oriental science at the expense of Greece. Not, indeed, that the human mind in the more ancient nations of Asia and Egypt had taken no thought of moral subjects. But in these Oriental nations, theology and the priesthood bore such undivided sway, as to prevent any free ethical inquiries independent of priestly dogmatism. In

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Greece, the prevalent theology, however much it acted upon the superstitions of the vulgar, and was made to minister to the taste of the refined, had little or no influence over philosophy. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, moralized just as freely and scientifically, as if the gods of Olympus had no concern at all with Ethics. The fate of Socrates showed, indeed, that he was too pure a moralist for the prevalent mythology and moral condition: yet his simple doctrine of the source of obligation in the moral sense proves the father of ethical science to have stood in no fear of thinking for himself, despite the superstitions of the people. And the ethical speculations of the Academy, the Lyceum, the Porch, and the Garden do not appear to have been much awed by the vicinity of the Temple. Grecian Ethics had little union with Grecian theołogy, or rather mythology. It is well for the interests of science, that such was the case.

Yet if theology be true, there ought to be no such divorce between it and Ethics. On the contrary, ethical science must be a rational classification of the duties, that grow out of our relations to God and to our fellow beings and to ourselves, and consequently must treat of all the duties, that are enjoined by God, whether in reason or revelation, natural religion or revealed. Now it is a remarkable fact, that comparatively little has been done towards giving a complete system of Ethics in connexion with Christian theology. There have been moralists enough and to spare. But they have been chiefly of two kinds. The one has been so busy with natural ethics, as to neglect the ethics of the gospel; the other has been so occupied with theological doctrines, as to have run into a dogmatism upon subjects of human duty, that has little claim to the name of moral science. It is a remarkable fact, that the great moralists of our mother tongue have seemed to forget their theology in their ethical speculations, as well as their ethical speculations in their theology. Butler, the greatest of them all, either did not seek to reconcile his ethics with his theology, or else he held ethical opinions, little consistent with it. The modern theologians, who have sought to give a system of ethical science, have run to the other extreme, and too often, like Wardlaw, and in some respects, our own esteemed Wayland, sunk ethics in theological dogmatism. Yet we like their purpose to unite the two, although we must look beyond them for success in achieving the union. If our theological dogmas are true, we must not