by an actual exhibition of that which he was representing as destitute of reality, a mere illusion of the imagination. The foregoing quotations must be considered in a similar light by every intelligent and impartial reader. They furnish an actual exhibition of that which Dr. T. denies to exist. The conformity of sentiment between our English Fathers and Reformers, and the Reformer of Geneva, is so general, unequivocal and striking, that it is difficult to conceive the possibility of a doubt of it arising in the mind of any reader, who is capable of understanding the passages which have been quoted, and is not interested in misrepresenting the matter of fact. Any man who denies or doubts it may as well doubt or deny that Calvinistic opinions are to be found in the writings of Calvin himself. To doubt or deny even the reality of motion would but little heighten the climax of absurdity.

The more any one examines and reflects upon his Lordship's Book, the more marvellous and unaccountable it appears. Let us only suppose, that some waggish, and not very scrupulous, enemy of the Church had formed the design of giving it a secret wound, and at the same time playing off, what in the dialect of the town would be called, a hoax upon the public. Is it easy to conceive of any method. more adapted to the attainment of such an object than the composition and publication of a book, caricaturing and vilifying the genuine doctrines of the Liturgy Articles and Homilies, asserting some of the most opposite and heterogeneous principles

to be really those of the Ecclesiastical Establishment and of its venerable Fathers and Reformers, and exhibiting the most dutiful sons and best friends of the Church in the present day as advocates of heretical tenets and encouragers of licentious conduct? Yet such is the true character of this volume of his Lordship, whom nevertheless we cannot suspect of being otherwise than "serious in a serious cause,' or of entertaining the most distant design of hostility to the Church, to which he lies under the strongest obligations to cherish and manifest the warmest attachment.

If the doctrine of the Church and of its first founders and their immediate successors had been Anticalvinistic, how could we account for the fact having been so totally misrepresented by writers of all parties? Bayle quotes the testimonies of two Catholics-Scultingius said, "In England Calvin's "Institutions is almost preferred to the Bible itself. "The pretended English Bishops enjoin all the "Clergy to get the book almost by heart, never to "have it out of their hands, to lay it by them in a conspicuous part of their pulpits; in a word, to "prize and keep it as carefully, as the old Romans

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are said to have preserved the Sibylline oracles." Stapleton gives the following account: "The In"stitutions of Calvin are so greatly esteemed in "England, that the book has been most accurately "translated into English, and is even fixed in the "parish churches for the people to read. More

over in each of the two Universities, after the stu

"dents have finished their circuit in philosophy, as many of them as are designed for the ministry are "lectured first of all in that book."

Even Heylin, the friend of Laud, and the avowed adversary of Calvinism, gives a similar testimony. Referring to the reign of Elizabeth,-" Predestina❝tion, and the points depending thereupon were re"ceived as the established doctrines of the Church "of England.-The books of CALVIN were the "rule, by which all men were to square their writings: his only word, like the ipse dixit of Pytha goras, was admitted for the sole canon to which they were to frame and conform their judgements. It was safer for any man in those times to "have been looked upon as an Heathen or Publican, than an Anticalvinist*"

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In the year 1624 a Latin oration was addressed to King James the First at Woodstock by Dr. John Prideaux, then Vice Chancellor of Oxford and afterwards Bishop of Worcester,-in which he declared to His Majesty, that "within the nine years "then last past the University of Oxford had sent "forth seventy-three Doctors in Divinity, and more "than one hundred and eighty Bachelors in Di

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vinity, that in his official capacity he had been "concerned in conferring those degrees, and could "confidently affirm respecting those theologians, "that they were not favourers of Arminianism."

One of Dr. Tomline's worthy predecessors, the Author of the Preface to the Liturgy which has

*Life of Laud.

been so greatly admired, Dr. Saunderson, who adorned the see of Lincoln in the reign of Charles the Second, appears to have held Calvin's theology in high estimation. "When I began (says he) to "set myself to the study of divinity as my proper "business, Calvin's Institutions were recommended "to me, as they were generally to all young scho"lars in those times, as the best and perfectest sy"stem of divinity, and the fittest to be laid as a "groundwork in the study of this profession. And "indeed my expectation was not at all deceived in "the reading of those Institutions." This Prelate, in a treatise entitled Pax Ecclesiæ, speaks of some polemical artifices practised by the Anticalvinists of those days. Two of these instances of what he calls "the manifold unjust and uncharitable cunning of "the Arminians to advance their own party," it will not be amiss to state in his own words. Bragging out some of their private tenets, as if

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they were the received established doctrine of the "Church of England; by forcing the words of "Articles, or Common Prayer Book, to a sense which "appeareth not to have been intended therein.""Seeking to derive envy on the opposite opinions;

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by delivering them in terms odious, and of ill "and suspicious sound."-If Dr. Saunderson had been endued with a spirit of prophecy, and intended to describe a work of one of his Anticalvinistic successors, what language could he have used more truly characteristic of the polemical lucubrations of Dr. Tomline?

Where could the doctrines of the English Re formed Church be reasonably expected to appear in their most genuine form, during the lives of its first founders and their immediate successors, if not in the two Universities? But the doctrines now denominated Calvinistic were most distinctly and decidedly maintained both at Oxford and at Cambridge. Of the truth of this assertion there exists proof sufficient to convince any person who is not obstinately determined to resist the strongest evidence. I shall content myself with citing a few of the Theses maintained at Oxford by those who took the degree of Doctors in Divinity, in the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First.

"Act-Theses and Questions are always (before they are either admitted, printed, published, or disputed on) propounded to a general Convocation "of the whole University, and by them particularly "allowed, voted, and then recorded in the Univer

sity Register, for a testimony to posterity, as "orthodox, and consonant to the established doc“trine, faith, and articles, of the Church of England. "So that the whole University's judgement is com"prised in them, as well as theirs that give them*."

Electorum certa est salus, ut perire non possint. The salvation of the elect is certain, so that they cannot perish.

Doctrind prædestinationis olim tradita ab Au

* Prynne Anti-Arm.