‹ That he had many estimable qualities; that he had a burning zeal for religion, a rare disinterestedness, unimpeached morals, incorruptible integrity, an unshaken patriotism; that he was always courageous, averse to war, and anxious to promote the temporal no less than the spiritual well-being of the people; are facts which, though many of his enemies have denied, have been acknowledged by the more candid. That his passions were impetuous, his vanity unrivalled, his fanaticism extreme, his intolerance equal to that of the worst popes, his jealousy of all rivals intense, his hatred of all opponents immitigable, his ideas often coarse, his language offensively vulgar; that he had little of the mild spirit of true religion, that religion which softens and sanctifies the heart; are facts equally indisputable.... No man ever laboured more successfully to diffuse this abominable spirit of persecution. Before his time, the Roman Catholics were, in this respect, bad enough; but he made them a hundred times worse.' Ib. pp. 146, 7 ; 153.

The calm effrontery of these statements is truly Roman. We must give one more extract, in which our Historian, assuming the polemic garb, thus flippantly disposes of the doctrine of Justification by Faith.

Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved! is the frequent and solemn injunction of Scripture: it means, Believe in the character and mission of our Saviour, in the divine authority of the religion which he inculcates, in the efficacy of his merits, sufferings, and intercession; in other words, believe the doctrines which he taught, and practise the duties which he enjoined. The peculiar propriety of this command at a time when Judaism and idolatry divided the whole earth, a command which simply implied, Forsake your present religion and embrace Christianity!-must be apparent to every one. That, in such circumstances, it should be earnestly and incessantly enforced, was inevitable. But this meaning of the word faith, though so actual, obvious, and so universally received from the origin of Christianity, did not satisfy the professor of Wittemberg. As we have seen, be assigned to it one equally novel, inexplicable, and incomprehensible; thereby transforming religion into a system which excluded not only philosophy, but common sense.' Ib. p. 21.

The whole account of Luther's doctrinal sentiments is a tissue of the vilest misrepresentation. Of Calvin's intellectual character and attainments, Dr. Dunham speaks with higher respect, than of the Saxon Reformer; but, with similar disregard of historic verity, he represents him as having prevailed on the magistrates of 'Geneva to consign Servetus to the flames': and his description of Calvinism reminds us of the dress in which the Holy Office arrayed the victims of an auto-da-fe. We must not omit to notice his attempt to fix the doctrine of Transubstantiation, or at least of Consubstantiation, on the Anglican formularies.

Whether some such disingenuous artifice may not have been employed in regard to a similar passage of our own Catechism; whether

the words, "the body and blood of Christ, which are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in the Lord's Supper," have not been explained so as to mean nothing; we leave to the reader's reflection. Ib. p. 181.

The insidiousness of the language corresponds to the sinister aim of the Writer, who, we must repeat, has committed as gross an offence as a literary man can well be guilty of, in thus abusing the confidence of the subscribers to this Cyclopædia, by making it the vehicle of his Popish theology and his malign bigotry.

It is not a little remarkable, that while Dr. Lardner's arrangement has given us a history of the Protestant Reformation, one of the most important sections of Church history, under the title of a history of the Germanic empire; the History of the Christian Church, by the Rev. Henry Stebbing,' which forms another portion of this Historical Cabinet, (Nos. 41 and 52,) comes down only to the martyrdom of Huss and Jerome of Prague, at the beginning of the fifteenth century. It would seem that Mr. Stebbing had been restricted to two volumes; (another instance of a somewhat Hibernian arrangement;) and he concludes his history with the following apology for breaking off in the middle.

We have now brought our history down to that period when the preparations for a great and remarkable change became evident throughout Europe. The detail and examination of the events which tended to this approaching revolution may be most profitably given with the narrative of the revolution itself. The state and revival of learning; the conflicts between the monastic orders and the clergy; the condition of the people, struggling at the same time for civil liberty, for information on the subjects which intimately concern them in all their various degrees and ranks, and for the clear and definite sanctions to immortal hope, which a pure faith alone can give ;-these are the subjects which intimately belong to the period immediately preceding the Reformation; and they are subjects sacred to careful investigation, and to full, as well as deliberate statement. They involve principles dear to every friend of humanity, to whatever church or party he belongs; and the Writer may fairly be charged with folly and presumption, who could venture to approach near the limits of such a theme, without having sufficient space to give to every circumstance of importance its due place and expansion."

Mr. Stebbing is an elegant writer, an accomplished scholar, and an ornament, by his enlightened liberality and piety, to the Established Church, at whose altars he ministers. The manner in which he has executed his task, warrants the belief that a history of the Reformation from his pen would have been a trustworthy, impartial, and competent review of that interesting period. As it is, his Church History' is an incomplete fragment, such as the subscribers to the Cyclopædia cannot, for this reason, be satisfied with. We have seen, however, that he comes

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down far enough to clash with his Popish continuator, the historian of the Germanic empire; and in their several accounts of John Huss, we have a curious and instructive specimen of the different colouring which may be given to the same characters and events, such as we should not have expected to find in the same series of histories. The following is Dr. Dunham's estimate of this great Confessor.

In the system of the Hussites, or of their descendants the Methodists, an illiterate artisan would dogmatize with confidence where the Christian Philosopher would be humbly silent: and the mischief was increased by the admixture with religious rashness of the same dangerous doctrines regarding temporal government and property, whether temporal or ecclesiastical, that had so unfortunately distinguished Wycliffe *. The bitterness with which Huss assailed the possessions of the Church, nay, even of laymen; for, like Wycliffe, he taught that all property was forfeited by sin; his absurd notion, that there required no peculiar vocation for the sacerdotal office; that any man, or even woman, might preach; that even the sacraments might be administered by any one in a state of grace; that the church consisted only of those predestined to everlasting life; with many others which we shall soon have occasion to mention, could not fail to produce alarm. The same year (1414) John XXIII. wrote an urgent letter to Wenceslas, whom he besought to extirpate a heresy which threatened such consequences to the stability of civil no less than of ecclesiastical institutions; but Wenceslas took no notice of the letter. Amidst these transactions, the council of Constance was convoked. Here Huss was cited to appear; nor did he shew any hesitation to obey. With the majority of Christian Europe, he looked to a general council with intense interest, as an assembly that would beyond doubt reform the discipline, if not the doctrines of the Church; which would not only end the shameful schism, but produce a salutary effect on the constitution and character of the ecclesiastical body. To secure himself against the malice of his enemies, and no man had ever more, he procured a safe conduct from the emperor Sigismund, and repaired to Constance.' Dunham, Vol. II. pp. 231; 237.

Dr. Dunham does not attempt to justify altogether the treacherous imprisonment of Huss; it was impolitic and unjust'; but he palliates the atrocity of the act as far as he dares, by alleging that its original object was only to prevent him from disseminating his doctrines during his stay at Constance,' and that his confinement was for some days lenient.' And when the

* For a refutation of this infamous Popish calumny on our great Proto-reformer, see Vaughan's Life of Wycliffe, Vol. II., pp. 268274. Also Le Bas's Life of Wiclif, pp. 350-361. What must we think of the integrity of the Writer who, regardless of such refutation, revives the base slander?

effect of this lenient' confinement brought on severe illness, 'the Pope is said to have sent him his own Physician'!! We restrain the indignation which these bold falsifications of history excite. The charges brought against Huss, we are afterwards told, all appear to have been fairly derived from his writings'; and most of them, however agreeable they might be to certain classes of dissenters at the present day, have little in common 'with Christianity. The first eight, which regarded the predestination of the elect, would not have been disapproved by a Calvin or a Knox'; but by a Dunham, they are stigmatized as heretical and absurd. Huss, we are further told, was willing to regard all dignitaries as eternally reprobate,'-an assertion for which there is not the shadow of a pretext. In short, that his doctrines were generally mischievous, must be conceded,' says Dr. D., by every rational Protestant.' Then, repeated and urgent were the efforts made by emperor and noble, by pope and cardinal, by doctor and monk, to procure his recantation; and in the proceedings of this infamous council, up to the point of consigning him to the secular arm, including the farce of his degradation, (all but the cap of devils,) this Writer 'cannot see there is much to condemn,' since no reasonable ' man will deny that every church has a right to expel a refrac'tory member from its bosom.' We turn with disgust from this Calumniator of the Reformers, and Apologist for their persecutors, to the account which Mr. Stebbing gives of the martyrdom of the Apostle of Bohemia.

To carry on the prosecution of Huss with proper formality, the patriarch of Constantinople and two bishops were nominated as commissioners to inquire into his heresy, and examine witnesses on the subject. It was while these persons were busily engaged in the business, that the council itself had come to the determination of deposing the rival popes; and John XXIII., who had opened it as the supreme head of the church, was in consequence obliged to flee precipitately from Constance, and take refuge in Schaffhausen. This circumstance rendered it necessary to transfer Huss to the care of a new keeper; and the bishop of Constance was charged with the office of guarding against his escape. This, it appears, he did with unnecessary severity, in the fortress of Gottleben; and it is a remarkable circumstance, that the deposed pope was himself, in a short time, brought to the same prison.

In the month of April, 1415, the cardinals of Cambray and Saint Mark, together with the bishop of Dol and the abbot of Cisteaux, were directed to complete the process against Huss, and at the same time draw up a formal condemnation of the doctrines of Wickliffe. This had already been done more than once; and certainly, if few things can exceed the wickedness of punishing men for their opinions, nothing can possibly exceed the folly of attempts to disprove doctrines by this authoritative mode of judging them. The sentiments of Wickliffe,

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however, were exhibited under a certain number of propositions, and then formally condemned. After this ceremony had been gone through, the council found itself at liberty, and perhaps thought itself in a more favourable condition, to prosecute its intentions with regard to Huss. He was, therefore, brought from Gottleben, and placed (heavily chained) in the Franciscan monastery. On the 5th of June he was called before the assembly, in order to be examined; but he had no sooner begun to read the propositions contained in his works, than the court was thrown into confusion by the clamorous exclamations of the more bigoted of its members, and the inquiry was consequently postponed till the 7th of the month.

At the renewal of the examination, which was carried on in the presence of the emperor, Huss was accused of having testified his approbation of Wickliffe's doctrine respecting the sacrament; but this he denied having done: he, however, acknowledged that he considered the archbishop of Prague had acted erroneously in condemning the reformer's works without bringing any argument from Scripture to prove that what they contained was erroneous, and that he had indeed said what he was accused of saying, that is, that he wished his soul were in the same place as Wickliffe's. The examination, which was continued for some time, ended with his being sent back to his dungeon loaded with chains as before. The next day he was again brought before his judges, and the trial was recommenced by the reading of thirty-nine propositions, said to have been drawn from his writings. On each of these he was allowed to make what observations he chose; and when pressed by the emperor and several of the prelates to recant, he requested another audience, when, if he could not prove his opinions to be founded on truth and right reason, he promised to submit himself to the judgement of the church. He was, therefore, again sent to his dungeon, and the following day, a paper containing a form of recantation was presented to him, with a request that he would sign it. But neither persuasion, nor the prospect of the dangers which threatened him, could induce him to unsay aught that he had uttered; and he constantly declared, that he would retract nothing, unless it could be proved false by the authority of Scripture.

Having at length exhausted all their arts in the vain attempt to draw Huss into a denial of his principles, the council next ordered his books to be publicly burnt, and soon after sent another deputation to discover if this had had any effect on his resolution, and once more to urge upon him the policy of recanting. But this effort was as fruitless as those before made: he answered the questions put to him by presenting a paper containing a declaration of his opinions in almost the same terms as those he had formerly used; and when, five days after, the emperor sent four bishops and two noblemen, to enquire if any change had taken place in his resolution, he replied, that he adhered to the declaration he had already delivered.

This was the last attempt made on the firmness of Huss. The next day he was led before the tribunal of the council, and the proceedings were commenced by a sermon from the bishop of Lodi, who chose for his text Romans vi. verse 6.-" That the body of sin might be destroyed," which words, he, either with wilful absurdity or gross