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sibly or ingeniously expressed; and we were the more anxious to discuss Lord Stanhope's views and speculations because, being presented in a popular and pleasing manner, they cannot fail to add to the attractiveness of his work.

ART. II.-1. The Church and the Age: Essays on the Principles and present Position of the Anglican Church. Edited by Archibald Weir, D.C.L., Vicar of Forty Hill, Enfield; and William Dalrymple Maclagan, M.A., Rector of Newington, Surrey. London, 1870. 2. Principles at Stake. Essays on Church Questions of the Day. Edited by George Henry Sumner, M.A., Rector of Old Alresford, Hants, and Chaplain to the Lord Bishop of Winchester. Second Edition. London, 1868.

Ir has become the fashion of late years for parties religious, political, and social, to send forth a manifesto in the shape of a collection of Essays. Ritualists, Reformers, Economists, Educators, have all had their say in this fashion, and now we have before us two substantial volumes representing the opinions held by the two most numerous and important parties in the Church of England, the parties which we may call, if we must have names, the Moderate Evangelical and the Moderate Anglican. They bear, however, no antagonistic relation; their enemies are, for the most part, common enemies, and their doctrines, so far as they are evidenced by the volumes before us, differ on no vital point. The difference between the two volumes is in truth rather in range than in tone; Principles at Stake' is mainly the protest of the moderate party in the Church -of such men as Lord Arthur Hervey and Dean Howson-against the extravagant theories and offensive practices of the socalled Ritualists; while The Church and the Age' takes a wider range; it furnishes a tolerably complete view, from the stand'point of the moderate Anglicans, of the leading principles of the Church of England, as exhibited in its constitution and formularies, in the works of its leading divines of the seventeenth century, and in its actual status at the present day; of the various energies which it is putting forth in the evangelizing of neglected populations, in education, and in missions to the heathen; and again, of the questions which stir the age in which we live, whether those which are strictly within the Church, as relating to

the priesthood and the sacraments; or those which derive their force from certain general tendencies which agitate modern society. The two books, taken together, give us, in fact, a very complete view of the condition of thought and action in the English Church, and are distinguished by thoroughness, learning, and ability.

In The Church and the Age' the first place is occupied by a name which men of all parties have learned to respect. The Dean of Chichester, a veteran labourer in the fields both of pastoral work and of literature, than whom no one has a greater right to speak with authority on such a matter, sets forth his conception of the principles of the reformed English Church, to the following effect. The Reformation is an epoch which cannot be defined; there is no one enactment, no particular revolutionary act, to which we can point as the Reformation;' it is the especial glory of the English Church that its continuity has never been broken. By a series of changes, extending over more than a century, the ritual, the formularies, and the political status of the Church have been made what they are, and they differ widely from those of the fifteenth century; but we have never cut ourselves off from the past; we still recite the same creeds and many of the same prayers that our forefathers did from the very beginning of the English Church; bishops and deans and canons occupy the same thrones and stalls in the same cathedrals as of old; the clergy throughout the land are instituted to the old benefices; whatever cavils may be made by enemies against apostolical succession in the English Church, there can be no doubt whatever that, in the eyes of the historian and the constitutional lawyer, Archbishop Tait is the true successor of Augustine and Lanfranc, of Becket and Warham. We may almost say that, in strictness of speech, in England alone was there a true Reform' of existing institutions; the continental Evangelizers were compelled, either, as in Luther's case, by force of circumstances, or, as in Calvin's, by deliberate preference, to destroy and re-constitute; there was a break of continuity; consistories and presbyteries came in place of the time-honoured Church organization, and the societies so constituted have never gained the prestige of the old churches. It has even been, in some respects, a blessing for England that there was found among the Reformers no one man of preponderant force, no Luther or Calvin; we might have been Cranmerites or Parkerists; we are Church of England men as our fathers were.

And nothing is more characteristic of this

reformed Church of England than the defe- | ture are not worthy to be compared—Mr.

rence which it has paid to the 'old Catholic doctors;' heresy was to be tested, not by the dictum of some fashionable theologian of the day, but by the authority of the canonical Scriptures or by the first four General Councils:* Elizabeth declared to foreign princes, that no new religion was set up in England, but that which was practised by the primitive Church, and approved by the Fathers of the best antiquity; the same Convocation-that of 1571-which enjoined subscription to the 39 Articles, also decreed that nothing should be taught as an article of faith but what is supported by Scripture and Catholic tradition; some of the most earnest Reformers pressed earnestly upon their disciples to follow the old fathers and doctors, to follow the Catholic and universal consent.f Thus was the Church of England distinguished from bodies founded mainly on the dicta of individual theologians.

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The real character of the Church of England, its tone and influence as distinguished from mere organization, was determined mainly by the influence of its ablest men, especially its ablest writers on theology. Mr. Haddan, in an admirable essay in The Church and the Age,' an essay written with a fulness of knowledge and a clearness of exposition which leaves nothing to be desired, contends that the men who beyond all others gave a definite tone and character to the theology of the English Church, were the leading divines of the seventeenth century; the divines to whom of late years the term 'Anglo-Catholic' has been applied. From the ranks of these men proceeded the most learned theological treatises, the best aids to holiness and devotion, the most eloquent sermons, that the English Church has even yet to boast. This school recalled men's minds to the contemplation of the Church Universal, and to the necessity of a Rule of Faith distinct from the opinions and system of some 'great mufti' (to use South's term) of Wittenberg or Geneva. It introduced order and proportion into theological teaching, not permitting a single dogma, as justification by faith, or predestination, or Papal infallibility, to overshadow the whole of the ecclesiastical horizon. In a word, it gave strength to that vigorous constitution which has enabled the English Church to resist those feverfits of heresy and infidelity which have so often shaken the Protestant communities of the continent. These divines had their defects no doubt; in particular, their somewhat stiff and jejune commentaries on Scrip

* 1 Eliz, c. i. 8. 36.

The Church and the Age,' p. 23.

Haddan truly tells us with the almost revelation of knowledge which, on this subject, German criticism has undeniably given to us;' such works as those of Dr. Tregelles and Mr. Scrivener, Canon Westcott and Professor Lightfoot, still lay in the far distance; the great questions respecting the Being and Nature of God, the evidences of Christianity, the aspect in which miracles were to be regarded, were as yet but lightly touched; liturgical science was comparatively unknown; yet their defects belonged rather to the age than to the men, and in what they did, they set an admirable example of careful and thorough investigation and treatment. Dr. Arnold said that the seventeenth-century When divines were incapable of treating any great question, he forgot that the questions which were most prominent in his own mind had hardly dawned upon Pearson or Bull; though students of the divines of this period must often have been surprised at the anticipations of modern difficulties which they meet with.

In all that Mr. Haddan says in praise of the weighty and moderate Anglo-Catholic school we entirely concur; Englishmen will, we trust, always give due appreciation to the able and learned men who produced treatises not unworthy to be set in competition with the great works of the contemporary Gallicans. Yet, on the whole, we do not think that the influence of this school upon the general mind and tone of the English Church has been by any means so great as is sometimes supposed. The influence of the seventeenth-century Anglo-Catholics did indeed descend to us, but it flowed through the eighteenth century in a very thin stream; the greater part of it was diverted into a sidechannel by the Non-jurors, and never rejoined the main waters. The source of the theology which really pervaded the Church from the days of Charles II. almost to our own time, is to be found in a body of men whom Mr. Haddan barely mentions, the Latitude men' of the latter part of the seventeenth century. True, Cudworth and More founded no school; but the men whom Burnet describes in a well-known passage, who regarded the promotion of virtuous living as the main end of revelation, who thought more of the difference between Christian and infidel than of the controversies between Christian and Christian, who cultivated science and polite literature as well as theology-these were the men who gave the tone to English thought on religious matters from the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth. It will scarcely be denied that Barrow and Whichcote, Burnet and Tillotson, are the types of eighteenth-century dig

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nitaries rather than Andrewes or Cosin; no one surely can venture to assert that Berkeley, and Butler, and Warburton, are less characteristic of the English Church than Pearson or Bull; the favourite reading of the religious laity for a century was found in the often-reprinted sermons of Tillotson, and the polite moralizing of the Spectator;' and, even now, we suspect that if we could get an authentic account of the laymen's religion, the thoughts of the great bulk of the churchgoing barristers and merchants, physicians and savants on religious subjects, would be found to approach much more nearly to the moralist than to the Anglo-Catholic type. We do not wish to depreciate the divines of whose merits Mr. Haddan treats; they are the learned school of the English Church; but a school which for more than a century influenced only a few isolated students can hardly be said to have so mastered the Church as to have survived all changes.' A great revival of interest in the Caroline divines no doubt followed the Oxford movement; but that is already declining; nothing is more conspicuous in the writings of the new Catholic' school in the Church of England than the contempt which they express for the Caroline divines and their admirers.

At all events, whether under the influence of the learned Anglicans of the seventeenth century, or the cultivated divines of the eighteenth, we have to confess with sorrow that a considerable portion of the population has been lost to the Church. As early as Charles II.'s time we find thoughtful men complaining that the inadequacy of church accommodation in the towns, the injudicious bestowal of ecclesiastical patronage, and a certain unfitness in the beautiful services of the Church of England to attract the less cultivated classes, were alienating many from the Church. The learned divines, for the most part, did not popularise their learning, and they were slow to appreciate the importance of that great middle class which had sprung into importance since the Reformation. Among this class, Baxter's 'Saint's Rest,' and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress,' took the place which Anglican theology had failed to supply, and the respectable tradesmen began to delight in supporting the Presbyterian or Independent minister who preached to them in language which came home to their hearts. While South was delighting, but not reforming, the cavaliers of the Court by his wit and his sparkling periods, the men whom South despised were sowing the seeds of that middle-class non-conformity which has never died out. While the Church was weakened by its connexion with the unfortu

nate Stuart dynasty, non-conformity was strengthened by its alliance with the political advocates of liberty. And when the surplus population of the country flocked into the great centres of manufacturing industry, the feeble organization of the Church in the towns was unable to retain those who had, for the most part, been bred up in the Church of England. The thronging multitudes whom John Wesley brought into the fold were no sooner won than lost.

These are facts which no true Churchman can ignore, however much he may lament them. But the Church has not been wasting time in unprofitable lamentation; she has made immense efforts in these days to recover the ground which had been lost. The clergy and laity have shown, in the present generation, an earnestness and activity for good, which cannot but produce important results.

In the first place, the character of the clergy has immensely risen. Without exactly adopting Lord Macaulay's estimate of the character and status of the English clergy in the seventeenth century, we cannot denyfor it is capable of abundant proof-that the ordinary parish priest was too often poor, low-born, and despised. Parson Trul iber was not an uncommon phenomenon in the days when Secker filled the throne of Canterbury; and, within living memory, the English clergyman was too often either an easy-going gentleman, with his half-dozen benefices in different dioceses, or an ill-paid vicar or curate, who cantered from church to church on Sunday, and scrambled through his three, four, or even five services. Now, all this is changed; clergymen of the old school,' which had its excellencies as well as its failings, have become rare; almost every clergyman is animated by a sense of the importance of a parochial charge. Let any one read Mr. Walsham How's beautiful essay * on the Private Life and Ministrations of the Parish Priest,' and compare this picturenot with the uncouth priest of the novelist or dramatist of a past age, but-with the ideal set forth in episcopal charges and treatises on the pastoral care in other times, and we think that he will note a great change. Here all is purity, devotion, earnestness; the life actually led by such men as the saintly John Keble, is set before us as an example; and if we dare not say that such a life as this is attained by many, such an ideal as this is really that which many thousands of the clergy propose to themselves as the standard to be attained: the standard of spiritual life among

*The Church and the Age,' pp. 201 ff.

The Church and the Age.

the clergy has unquestionably risen much in
the last forty years.

And this elevation of the character of the
clergy has naturally brought about a mani-
fold activity in the various departments of
Church work. In nothing is this more re-
markable than in education. The formu-
laries of the Church seem hardly to con-
template the clergyman as taking charge of
primary education in his parish, except in
the capacity of a catechizer, and that mainly
with a view to Confirmation; yet, by the
mere force of circumstances, and through
the awakening of a new spirit in the Church,
the dame-schools and charity-schools of the
last generation have been swept away or
remoulded, and the country is covered with
improved schools, provided for the most
part with well-trained masters and mis-
tresses, and managed practically, in the
great majority of cases, by the clergy. This
has come to pass because, especially in the
country, no class was found but the clergy
to give the necessary time and labour and
money for the promotion of primary educa-
tion. The clergy may certainly say of the
improved education of the lower classes,
'This is our work;' there is not, we venture
to say, one of our readers who could not
point to some clergyman in his own neigh-
bourhood who has made heavy sacrifices, in
the midst of indifference, to give the poor
children of his parish the blessing of a
sound teaching.

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This great subject of education is treated of by Dr. Barry in 'The Church and the Age, and by Mr. Alexander Grant in Principles at Stake,' in two of the most weighty of the essays before us. No two men have a greater right to speak with authority on the subject; Dr. Barry, besides his varied experience as an educator, has been foremost in bringing about a more equitable tone of thought on the great educational problems of the day; Mr. Grant adds to his experience as a School Inspector that of a country rector; rector, too, of a parish in which he found at work the truly liberal educational system of the late Professor Henslow. The essays differ rather in the extent of their range than in opinion. Mr. Grant confines himself to the discussion of primary education, and mainly of the respective advantages of the rating system on the one hand, and the voluntary system, supplemented from the consolidated fund, on the other. Dr. Barry includes in his survey the whole school-education of the country, and we do not think that we could refer our readers to any other work in which the educational wants of the day are stated, and their remedies discussed, so concisely,

July,

and with so much clearness, candour, and ting the charge-generally brought by men good sense. The essayists agree in repudiawho have not touched the educational burden with one of their fingers-that the clergy have stunted the education of the country for the sake of teaching catechisms and Jewish genealogies;' so far is this from being the case, that even clergymen who have declined State aid when coupled with conditions which seemed to hamper their teaching, have almost everywhere in practice adopted the principle of a conscienceclause in their schools. They agree also that the present denominational system, great as is the work which it has performed, and remarkable as is the voluntary energy which it has called forth, is still imperfect; that it gives to the rich and not to the poor; they agree that the present schools must form the basis of any universal system of national education, for to ignore the existing machinery, and establish uniform secular schools all over the country, would be a most improvident waste of resources, to say nothing of other objections; they agree in recommending a 'Conscience-clause," a subject on which, even since Mr. Grant's essay was written, the general opinion of the clergy has undergone almost a complete revolution, mainly in consequence of the exertions of such men as Dr. Barry and Mr. Grant himself; they agree in contemplating education-grant as would enable it to reach such a change in the administration of the those poor districts which are at present unaided by 'My Lords' of the Committee; and they agree in deprecating the rating system. With regard to the modification code, in accordance with the requirements of the Procrustean system of the revised of the several localities, Dr. Barry has no definite suggestion to offer. Mr. Grant suggests, that as the great difficulty of small schools consists in securing the services of a certificated teacher, who requires nearly as high a salary in a small as in a large school, either grants should be made on an increased scale to small schools, or a fixed sum (instead of the attendance-payment) should be given to all schools in aid of the salary of a certificated teacher, or the condition of a certificate should be dispensed with. All these suggestions, however, have already been rendered to some extent obsolete by the introduction of the principle of local school-boards and local rating in the Government Bill. Dr. Barry, with a forecast of this scheme, thinks that, if rating for school purposes is to be introduced, it

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* Prínciples at Stake,' p. 125.

'would be possible, and certainly the wisest | Green?
plan, to keep the power of rating as an ul-
tima ratio, if within a given time no schools
were created and maintained without it.'*

Of the kind of work which needs doing,
and is, in fact, being done, by earnest-
minded men of all parties in the overgrown
and neglected parishes of London and the
great towns, we have a most interesting ac-
count in Mr. Maclagan's essay on The
Church and the People.' It is a sad fact,
that multitudes are to be found in our
crowded streets who never enter church or
meeting-house; no public opinion urges
them to some place of public worship; on
the
contrary, the public opinion of the work-
ing class is against it; the working-man who
is saint' enough to be seen at church
must be content to endure the jeers of his
comrades. And who can wonder-of the
Dissenting bodies we say nothing-that the
genuine working-man is rarely found within
the walls of a church? Who does not re-
cognize the truth of Mr. Maclagan's picture
of the average London church as it existed
everywhere a generation back, and it exists
still in some districts which do not consider
themselves benighted? The cushioned pews
with their exclusive occupants; the stately
beadle warning off the profanum vulgus, i. e.
the poor; the pew-opener inwardly calcu-
lating the probabilities of a sixpence; the
open benches for the use of the poor ranged
along the centre passage, or thrust into the
furthest corner of the church; the service
about as lively and reverent as the proceed-
ings in the Court of Chancery, and about as
much understanded of the people,'-it is
not by such means as these that the honest
labouring man, or the thriving intelligent
mechanic, is brought to church; these men
not unnaturally prefer the park or the sub-
urban tea-garden, or the day passed idly at
home with the help of the neighbouring
tavern. We do not mean to say that the
unattractiveness of services is the sole cause
of the absence of the working-men; there
is among them a great amount of scepti-
cism, which is not always the mere unrea-
soning materialism so tempting to those who
live from hand to mouth; but it is evident
that such churches as Mr. Maclagan describes
must have tended to alienate a class by no
means ready to accept the position of hum-
ble dependents, least of all in church.

But what is to be done? How are we to Christianize the navvies and costermongers, the mechanics and artisans? How are we to change the aspect of the squalid population of Lambeth, of Shoreditch, or Bethnal

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This is a question not for the clergy only, but for the whole body of Englishmen who 'profess and call themselves Christians.' Whatever is to be done, it cannot be done by the clergy alone. Who does not feel how touching was the desire of our excellent Archbishop, as he lay sick upon his bed, that he might be spared to do something for the organization of the laity? Mr. Maclagan points out the necessity of having some organized work in which helpers may find their place whenever they are moved to offer themselves; too often such helpers are lost for want of a receptacle; we must carefully store the drops if we are ever to fill our empty cistems. And it is an immense help to the workers to be members of a society animated by a common spirit, in which a closer bond of union is found than is possible in the general body of the Church. If a body of volunteers, banded together and disciplined, went forth against spiritual evil with the same vigour which has animated our rifle-corps, surely much might be done; and is this impossible? We hope not.

When

Mr. Maclagan's essay indicates pretty clearly the great change which has come over the minds of the most earnest of the clergy with regard to the kind of services which it is expedient to use in what is really missionary work in towns. we are surrounded by thousands who never come to church, and to whom the ordinary services would be 'Hebrew-Greek' if they did, it is useless simply to ring the churchbell and put up a notice-board; we must, in some way, go out into the highways and hedges. In parishes of 15,000 people, or more, the clergy cannot do much by personal intercourse, but they can, in most cases, do a great deal by organized agencies; and it is no longer undignified for a clergyman to preach in the streets or to hold a prayer-meeting in a school-room. Services have, in most churches, been made shorter and more lively. Missions'-occasions, that is, in which all the means of good are set in operation with unusual force and frequency - have been employed with excellent effect in many parishes, under the guidance of clergymen of all parties; and if the Act of Uniformity has been something strained in the midst of all this varied activity well, we do not think that any one very much regrets it, so long as it is only strained in the way of earnest work, not of ritual vagaries. To bring the words of truth to the ears of a neglected population is a matter of very much more importance than the observance of a rubric.

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And if the old, dull, parson-and-clerk ser

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