rds fasting as a positive
duty, he should consider that these might be transferred also to the
perfect church, and that they have no necessary connexion with the
peculiar tenets of Mr. Newman. We know that the Puritans were taunted by
their adversaries for their frequent fasts, and the severity of their
lives; and they certainly were far enough from agreeing with Mr. Newman.
Whatever there is of good, or self-denying, or ennobling, in his system,
is altogether independent of his doctrine concerning the priesthood. It
is that doctrine which is the peculiarity of his system and of Romanism;
it is that doctrine which constitutes the evil of both, which
over-weighs all the good accidentally united with it, and makes the
systems, as such, false and anti-christian. Nor can any human being find
in this doctrine anything of a beneficial tendency either to his
intellectual, his moral, or his spiritual nature. If mere reverence be a
virtue, without reference to its object, let us, by all means, do
honour to the virtue of those who fell down to the stock of a tree; and
let us lament the harsh censure which charged them with "having a lie in
their right hand[10]."

[Footnote 10: The language which Mr. Newman and his friends have allowed
themselves to hold, in admiration of what they call reverential and
submissive faith, might certainly be used in defence of the lowest
idolatry; what they have dared to call rationalistic can plead such high
and sacred authority in its favour, that if I were to quote some of the
language of the "Tracts for the Times," and place by the side of it
certain passages from the New Testament, Mr. Newman and his friends
would appear to have been writing blasphemy. It seems scarcely possible
that they could have remembered what is said in St. Matthew xv. 9-20,
and who said it, when they have called it rationalism to deny a
spiritual virtue in things that are applied to the body.]

What does the true and perfect church want, that she should borrow from
the broken cisterns of idolatry? Holding all those truths in which the
clear voice of God's word is joined by the accordant confession of God's
people in all ages; holding all the means of grace of which she was
designed to be the steward--her common prayers, her pure preaching, her
uncorrupted sacraments, her free and living society, her wise and
searching discipline, her commemorations and memorials of God's mercy
and grace, whether shown in her Lord himself