Priesthood, in the Light of the New Testament. The Congregational
Union Lecture for 187G. By G. Miller, D.D. (Hodder and Stoughton.) —The Church of England owes a debt of gratitude to Dr. Miller for showing, as he does in this volume, that the sacerdotal pretensions ad- vanced by an extreme party in that Church are disallowed by so many of her most distinguished names. The modern authorities chiefly appealed to in this very able discourse on " Priesthood " are divines of the Church of England. A great part of the volume is taken up with a discussion of the doctrine of Transubstantiation and kindred theories of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. We do not remember reading any argument against such doctrines more lucid or more forcible than the one now before us. We think, however, that Dr. Miller ought to. have suggested some reason for the fact that a theory liable to. such a crushing refutation still bears sway over the minds of so many good men,—men, too, of the highest intelligence. Not the least interesting portion of the book is that in which the writer exhibits the immoral tendency of much of the teaching of the chief Roman casuists. Some of his citations, as the following, are amusing:— " Gary informs ns that if a thief, intending to steal cloth, enters a shop by night, and lights a candle, taking all care to avoid the danger of conflagration, but by some unexpected accident the candle falls into the straw, and the whole shop is burned, and the thief with difficulty just manages to escape, he is liable for nothing, because he did not in the
least foresee the danger and took sufficient care." Dr. Miller is sometimes, as it seems to us, a little ungenerous in not allowing to certain formularies of the Church of England a latitude of interpretation which they have very generally been supposed to bear.
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