same defined views, yet with the solemn and instinctive reverence for the known word of God, and that reluctance to tamper with its apparent meaning, which in other cases also characterized its founder. Zuingli, on the contrary, the parent of the Swiss reformation, though possessed (in the common sense of the terms) of honesty and love of truth, perhaps rather hatred of falsehood, was of a character and frame of mind decidedly rationalistic: he was comparatively little of a theologian, and but ill acquainted in detail with the character and teaching of the early Church: he had not been educated as a theologian, nor was his mind well trained. As a member of a Republic, he was less impressed with the value of authority; and that of the Church was to him that of the bishop of Rome only: his mind, clear, masculine, energetic, acute, original, but unsystematic, and unrefined, and uncapacious, saw distinctly, yet saw but a little way; embraced insulated facts, but saw not their bearing upon the whole system. His career also was one of uniform and easy success; God, who forms His different instruments for His several purposes and according to their capacities, faithfulness, and quick acquiescence in His will, did not appoint to him the same discipline, by which he exercised, and strengthened, and purified the faith of our Reformers and of Luther: but chiefly Zuingli does not seem to have received divine truths so deeply: with a straightforwardness, which led him to embrace what he thought truth, he yet in a common-place way laid down what he rejected, or took up the contrary, with the ease which is generally characteristic of shallowness. The belief, whatever it was, having no depth of root, gave way without up-tearing and laying bare the whole mind, as it does when it is more thoroughly fixed; no shock was communicated to the rest of his moral system. In minds, which give way thus without a struggle, truth will be parted with, as well as, and probably in conjunction with, every error. Zuingli's, more than any other, might be called an intellectual reformation. At his new opinions on the Sacraments he arrived in the way of unbelief[1]; a way, to which God appears to have
- ↑ "We all," he says, speaking of the Romish Clergy, "we all essayed something; and if nothing more, yet each of us this, to conquer and lull
