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Correspondance inédite, de Mabillon et de Montfaucon, avec L'Italie. Par M. VALERY. Paris: 1846.

MIDDLETON and Gibbon rendered a real, however undesigned, a service to Christianity by attempting to prove that the rapid extension of the Primitive Church was merely the natural result of natural causes. For what better proof could be given of the divine origin of any religion than by showing that it had at once overspread the civilized world, by the expansive power of an inherent aptitude to the nature and to the wants of mankind? By entering on a still wider range of inquiry, those great but disingenuous writers might have added much to the evidence of the fact they alleged, although at a still greater prejudice to the conclusion at which they aimed.

It is not predicted in the Old Testament that the progress of the Gospel should, to any great extent, be the result of any agency preternatural and opposed to ordinary experience; nor is any such fact alleged in any of the apostolical writings as having actually occurred. There is, indeed, no good reason to suppose that such miraculous though transient disturbances of the laws of the

VOL XVI. NO. IV.

28

material or the moral world, would have long or powerfully controlled either the belief or the affections of mankind. The heavenly husbandman selected the kindliest soil and the most propitious season for sowing the grain of mustard seed; and so, as time rolled on, the adaptation of our faith to the character and the exigencies of our race was continually made manifest, though under new and ever varying forms.

Thus the Church was at first Congregational, that by the agitation of the lowest strata of society the superincumbent mass of corruption, idolatry, and mental servitude might be broken up-then Synodal or Presbyterian, that the tendency of separate societies to heresy and schism might be counteracted-then Episcopal, that in ages of extreme difficulty and peril, the whole body might act in concert and with decisionthen Papal, that it might oppose a visible unity to the armies of the Crescent and the barbarians of the North-then Monastic, that learning, art, and piety might be preserved in impregnable retreats amidst the

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