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NUMBER III.

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THE

PROSPECTIVE REVIEW.

No. I.

ART. I.-HISTORICAL CHRISTIANITY.

1. The Parker Society, for the publication of the Works of the Fathers and early Writers of the Reformed English Church. Cambridge. 1841-1844.

2. A Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. Parker, Oxford. 1841-1844.

3. The Wycliffe Society, for reprinting Tracts and Treatises of the Earlier Reformers, Puritans, and Nonconformists of Great Britain.

1844.

THESE undertakings are among the significant signs of the times. Amidst the dearth of original learning and inquiry at least in the moral and theological, sciencesthey manifest an exuberance of re-productive activity. Distrusting the present, the world seems to be throwing itself back on the past. As we look over the announcements of the press, we are half tempted to believe that the age of prophecy-of free, spontaneous utterance-is gone, and that a new Alexandrine period of critics and commentators is taking its place. The editor supersedes the author, and philosophy is abandoned for the simplest form of history-the mere chronicling of remote events. The press itself is seized by the vast co-operative agencies of the day it becomes the organ, not of individual thought, but of social tendencies and predilections; and is employed in rescuing from obscurity, and presenting in a more attractive and accessible form, those monuments of CHRISTIAN TEACHER.-No. 27.

B

an earlier faith and wisdom, which different parties appeal to, as the vouchers and credentials of their present claim to the ear of the public.

The series of publications, indicated at the head of this article, all set on foot at such short intervals from each other, and issuing from parties that are so widely separated by their principles and modes of action-attest the very general diffusion of this feeling of reverence for the past, and may be taken as a decided expression of the spirit of the age. The Parker Society was instituted for the purpose of bringing before the public, the writings of the first race of Reformers, who gave to the English Church its present form and constitution, and who flourished between the accession of Edward VI. and the death of Elizabeth. It is avowedly its object to extend the knowledge and influence of what are peculiarly called the principles of the Reformation, as contained in the writings of Cranmer, Ridley, Parker, Grindal and Whitgift; and this circumstance, and the names most conspicuous on the Councilthose of the Revs. J. W. Cunningham, E. Bickersteth, Thomas Dale, B. W. Noel, J. Scholefield, and Daniel Wilson-render it sufficiently evident, that it is designed as a silent counteraction to publications of a different tendency, put forth by another party. Eleven or twelve handsome octavo volumes have already been issued by the Society, containing, among other things, the works of Ridley and Cranmer, liturgies and other documents set forth in the reign of Edward VI.,—and an interesting collection of letters, written by English Reformers, in the early part of Elizabeth's reign, to Peter Martyr, Bullinger, and other learned Protestants in Germany and Switzerland, who had hospitably entertained them during their exile in Mary's days-and now first published from authenticated copies of the autographs preserved in the archives of Zurich. Another volume of this correspondence is promised among future publications. To the ecclesiastical historian the labours of the Parker Society will be of service in completing, and exhibiting more accurately, the materials relative to this important period of our history, already collected by Burnet and Strype. As far as we have had an opportunity of examining these volumes, they appear to have been carefully edited. For the convenience

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