ter from Presbyterians, have or can have the essential faith; and then you must recall your denial, and say that Presbyterianism and Protestantism are one and the same thing, and that Presbyterians are the only Protestants.'

"Very well, I will not insist on the point. Say the nonessentials are matters which one may either believe or disbelieve without erring essentially."

"We now seem to be in a fair way of determining what Protestantism is. It is, you say, the essentials, and the essentials are all the truths clearly and manifestly revealed in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Tell me what these truths are, and you tell me what Protestantism is, and take the preliminary step towards answering my question, Why are you a Protestant?"

CHAPTER III.

MUCH to the relief of James, while he was considering what he should reply to John's last demand, the conversation was suspended by the entrance of Mr. Wilson, a brother Presbyterian minister, settled over the oldest Presbyterian congregation in the city. He was of Scottish descent, and upwards of seventy years of age, a man of antiquated notions, with little respect for the younger ministers of his denomination. Presbyterianism, in his view, had nearly lost its original distinctive character. Wesley and Whitefield, by their appeals to heated passion and mere animal excitement, instead of reason and voluntary affection, had well nigh ruined it. Presbyterians were now Methodists, Arminians, in all except name and outward organization and gov ernment; and the new methods and measures lately adopted for the conversion of sinners appeared to him likely to prove in the end its total destruction. He saw with pain the lecture-room and rostrum superseding the pulpit, strolling evangelists and revival preachers the regular pastors, and "inquiry" and "anxious" meetings the orderly ministrations of the word.

Between him and James there was little sympathy. James was a man of his times. He understood the tendencies of. his age and country, and held that it was the part of wis dom, if not indeed of duty, to yield to and obey them. To have power over the people, he held it to be necessary to consult them, to change with them, to take the direction they indicate, to be always just in advance of them, and never to

lag behind them. He availed himself of their passions and tendencies as the readiest way of occupying the post of leader, and, if he could only occupy that post, the direction he followed or the final goal he might reach was comparatively indifferent. He was adroit, shrewd, unscrupulous, but he did not know that he who leads the mob only by yielding to them leads them only by being their slave. The true leader is he who makes the multitude follow him, not he who follows them. He who has principles and will stand by them. though he stand alone, or be hewn down by the maddened multitude for his fidelity to them, is by many degrees superior to him who sacrifices his principles, if he have any, to popularity, or who has no principles but to ascertain and yield to the passions and tendencies of the age or country. But of all this James knew, at least, cared, nothing. He lived in an age and country of demagogues, and he did not aspire to be thought superior to his age and compatriots. The greatest modern achievement in the state, he was accustomed to hear it boasted, had been to establish the rule of demagogues; and why should it not be as glorious to establish this rule in the church as in the state?

Little as James sympathized ordinarily with Mr. Wilson, he welcomed him in the present instance with great cordiality, and introduced him to his brother. After some commonplace remarks, he told him he had just learned that his brother, who had been absent for many years, had become a Catholic. He recapitulated the conversation they had just had, stated the point at which it had arrived, and begged Mr. Wilson to answer the question they were debating. Mr. Wilson was not pleased with the course adopted by James, and replied:

"If I had had the management of this discussion from the beginning, I should have given it another direction. Your brother has, doubtless, been under the training of the Jesuits, is versed in all their scholastic refinements and subtilties, and a perfect master of all the sophistical arts by which they entrap and bewilder the simple and unwary. When you dispute with such a man, mind and keep the management of the argument in your own hands. Consent to ply the laboring oar yourself, and you are gone. The great secret of dialectics is in knowing how to put your questions. You gentlemen of the modern school are far abler demagogues than logicians, and much better skilled in exciting the passions of the mob than in managing a dis

cussion. I have often told you the folly and madness of neglecting severer studies. You have studied only to conform to the multitude; you have made the mob supreme, and taught them to lord it over their pastors, loosened them from their old moorings, set them adrift upon a stormy and tempestuous sea, without helm or helmsman, or rather with the helmsman bound to obey the helm. Their passions are a favorable gale for you to-day; but what certainty have you that they may not make the port of Rome, or be stranded on the rocky beach of popery, to-morrow? Attempt to guide or control them, cross in any thing their prejudices or their wishes, and where are they,-where are you? How often must I tell you, it is hard making the port of the Gospel with the devil for pilot? If you had had a grain of common sense, you would have insisted on your brother's answering your question, why he had become a Catholic, instead of consenting, as a great fool, to answer his question, why you are a Protestant. If you had been acquainted with the old Protestant controversialists, you would have seen that they leave Protestantism to take care of itself, while they reserve all their forces for the attack upon Rome."

"Never mind that now, Brother Wilson. I could hardly foresee the turn the conversation would take, for those Catholics I have known have generally contented themselves with replying to the charges brought against their church, without going far in their attacks upon Protestantism; and besides, it is no more than right, since Protestantism is a positive religion, that they who profess it should define what they mean by it, and give their reasons for believing it."

"If the old Protestant masters of whom Mr. Wilson speaks," interposed John, "had thought of that, and, before attacking Catholicity, had defined and established a religion of their own, my brother would have had an easy task now, if indeed any task at all."

"The true polemical policy is always to keep yourself and party on the offensive; but if you imagine that Protestantism, as a positive religion, is indefinable and indefensible, you are very much mistaken."

"The readiest way to convict me of that will be to define it, and give me good and valid reasons for believing it."

"In becoming a Catholic you abjured Protestantism. Am I to infer that you abjured you knew not what?"

"Mr. Wilson pays me but a sorry compliment, if he supposes I shall voluntarily surrender what he terms the true polemical policy. The question is not what I may or may not know of Protestantism, what I may or may not have abjured, on becoming a Catholic, but what Protestantism is, as understood by those who profess it?"

"But, if you were not fully informed as to what Protestantism really was, how could you know that in abjuring it you were not abjuring the truth?"

"He who has the truth has no need of knowing the systems opposed to it, in order to know that they must be false. But suppose you proceed with your definition. You profess to be a Protestant, and so able, experienced, and learned a man cannot be supposed to profess to believe he knows not what. If you know what it is, you can easily tell me."

"I will give you Dr. Owen's definition. I dare say your brother James has never read Owen's works, nor Boston's, nor those of any other man who was in breeches fifty years ago. It is a shame to think how the old worthies are neglected. Nobody reads them now-a-days. The study of school divinity is wholly neglected. Our theologians are frightened at a folio, tremble at a quarto, can hardly endure even an octavo. The demand is for works, short, pithy, and pungent.' It is the age of petty Tracts, Penny Magazines, Peter Parleys, Robert Merrys, trash, nonsense, and humbug."

6

"And yet it is the glorious age on which the glorious sun of the glorious reformation beams in all its effulgence. If the reformers were here, they would exclaim, Et tu, Brute!"

"I hope Mr. Wilson will not heed my brother's sneer,' interposed James; "but proceed with his definition."

"Brother Milwood, have you Owen's works? No? No, I dare say not. But I presume you have Dowling, D'Au

bigné, and the last new novel."

"I do not read novels."

"The best thing you have said for yourself yet. Well, I see I must quote from memory. Protestantism,—remember I quote the great Dr. Owen, one of those sound old English divines who cared as little for prelacy as for papacy, and would no more submit to king than to pope. They were the men. It will be long before we shall look upon their like again. They were God's freemen. The pomps and vanities of the world could not dazzle or blind them. They cared not for crown or mitre, and the blood of a king

was to them as the blood of a common man. They went straight to their object. England was not worthy of them. The Lord directed them here. Here they laid the foundations of a noble empire. This is their work; this land is their land, and their children's after them, and a crying shame is it, that a miserable, idolatrous Papist should be suffered to pollute it with his accursed foot."

"But you are thinking of the Independents, rather than of the Presbyterians. The Presbyterians were for king and covenant, and pretend to have disapproved of the execution of Charles Stuart."

"No matter. The Independents only completed what the Presbyterians began, and soon sunk into insignificance when left to struggle alone. In the glorious war against prelacy and papacy they were united as brothers, as I trust will always be their children."

"But the definition."

"Remember, I quote the words of the great Dr. Owen, great and good, notwithstanding he left the Presbyterians and became a Congregationalist;-excepting in matters of church government, rigidly orthodox, and as much superior to the degenerate race of ministers in our day, as a huge old folio is to a modern penny tract, and whose works I recommend to both of you to read. Protestantism is,- 1. What was revealed unto the church by our Lord and his apostles, and is the whole of that religion which the Lord doth and will accept. 2. So far as needed unto faith, obedience, and salvation of the church, what they taught, revealed, and commanded is contained in the Scriptures of the New Testament, witnessed unto and confirmed by the Old. 3. All that is required, that we may please God, and be accepted with him, and come to the eternal enjoyment of him, is that we truly and sincerely believe what is so revealed and taught, yielding sincere obedience unto what is commanded in the Scriptures. 4. If in any thing they [Protestants] be found to deviate from them, if it [what they teach] exceed in any instance what is so taught and commanded, if it be defective in the faith or the practice of any thing so revealed or commanded, they are ready to renounce it.' What do you ask more clear, brief, comprehensive, and precise than that?"

"Did our Lord and his apostles reveal any religion which they did not reveal to the church, or which God doth not and will not accept?"