avowal for a public reader of our Church Liturgy:  but in the articles of original sin, the necessity of regeneration, the necessity of redemption in order to the possibility of regeneration, of justification by faith, and of prevenient and auxiliary grace,—­all I can say with sincerity is, that our orthodoxy seems so far in an improving state, that I can hope for the time when Churchmen will use the term Arminianism to express a habit of belief opposed not to Calvinism, or the works of Calvin, but to the Articles of our own Church, and to the doctrine in which all the first Reformers agreed.

Note—­that by Latitudinarianism, I do not mean the particular tenets of the divines so called, such as Dr. H. More, Cudworth and their compeers, relative to toleration, comprehension, and the general belief that in the greater number of points then most controverted, the pious of all parties were far more nearly of the same mind than their own imperfections, and the imperfection of language allowed them to see:  I mean the disposition to explain away the articles of the Church on the pretext of their inconsistency with right reason;—­when in fact it was only an incongruity with a wrong understanding, the faculty which St. Paul calls [Greek:  phronaema sarkos], the rules of which having been all abstracted from objects of sense, (finite in time and space,) are logically applicable to objects of the sense alone.  This I have elsewhere called the spirit of Socinianism, which may work in many whose tenets are anti-Socinian.

Law is—­’conclusio per regulam generis singulorum in genere isto inclusorum’.  Now the extremes ‘et inclusa’ are contradictory terms.  Therefore extreme cases are not capable subjects of law ‘a priori’, but must proceed on knowledge of the past, and anticipation of the future, and the fulfilment of the anticipation is the proof, because the only possible determination, of the accuracy of the knowledge.  In other words the agents may be condemned or honored according to their intentions, and the apparent source of their motives; so we honor Brutus, but the extreme case itself is tried by the event.

[Footnote 1:  ‘Relliquiae Baxterianae’:  or Mr. Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times.  Published from his manuscript, by Matthew Sylvester.—­London, ‘folio’. 1699.]

[Footnote 2:  See Hooker E. P. V. xviii. 3.  Vol.  II. p. 80.  Keble.  Ed.]

[Footnote 3:  See Table Talk, p. 162. 2nd edit.  Ed.]

[Footnote 4:  See the Church and State, p. 73, 3rd edit.—­Ed.]

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NOTES ON LEIGHTON. [1]

Surely if ever work not in the sacred Canon might suggest a belief of inspiration,—­of something more than human,—­this it is.  When Mr. Elwyn made this assertion, I took it as the hyperbole of affection:  but now I subscribe to it seriously, and bless the hour that introduced me to the knowledge of the evangelical, apostolical Archbishop Leighton.