destined to retrieve and save it in a world which has lost it: but, be it what else it may, it must be a thing private and not public, the work and thought of private men, which nothing at present conceivable could ever make a public thing. This, independently of belief, usage, and temper, is the broad distinction between the two forms of religious organization which have recommended themselves to the genius of the English nation. The capital difference is between what is public and what is private. The one is sometimes spoken of invidiously as the State Church, the creation of Acts of Parliament and the policy of governments, an establishment in bondage to the civil power and at its mercy; and the other is often described as being distinctively the voluntary system, the organisation which belongs to churches which are free, independent of political control, untrammelled by human law, and which leaves choice and conscience at liberty in matters of religion. These popular ways of viewing the subject are inadequate and misleading. The Church is subject to legal regulation, not because it is the creation of law, but because its basis is a public one; and what is public must attract the notice of the law much more than, and in a different sense from, what is private. And it is not only a mere begging of the question, but it is going in the face of palpable facts, to claim for the Nonconformist system the distinctive attributes of voluntary and free; as if the Church were neither. It would be strange, in a race like the English, if that which had been for ages the chosen religious organisation of the nation were less voluntary and less free than the organisation of particular fractions. As no one is obliged to be a Churchman against his will, and as neither numbers nor heartiness of attachment are wanting in the Church, it is idle to allege that the absence of spontaneous adhesion and voluntary choice distinguishes its organisation from that of the Nonconformists, or that its members feel themselves less free because they are under the limitations and government of English law. In their vigour, their tenacity of conviction, their ennobling sense of liberty, in their genuine and spontaneous warmth of zeal, no one who cares for his character as an honest reporter of facts can venture to say that there is anything to choose between them. Both are free, as far as freedom is compatible with an organisation at all; both are voluntary, if voluntary means the unrestrained adhesion of the will; both are popular, if popular means what answers to and attracts the sympathies and interest of mankind. It is not in this direction that the distinction between them is to be sought. But one is public, with the advantages and the disadvantages of what is public; and the other is private, with the advantages and the disadvantages of what is private. Whether these two great roads are still to remain open for the religion of Englishmen, or whether one of them is to be closed, and closed for ever, is becoming one of the serious questions of the time. From the earliest days of English history, with one short interruption, there has been a public Church, a public religion. We do not call it national, for it has not always been such; but it has always been public, open to the public, and for the public; public in its aims, public in its management. Whatever its origin, it was not private; whatever its changes, they have been brought about by great public influences, and they have been fixed by the acts of public authority. Whether there shall be such a thing any longer, is what the present generation will have to decide for themselves and those who come after them. Churchmen, indeed, believe-and believe with at least as much ground of reason as their antagonists have against them-that no changes of political relations can change the inherent attributes and prerogatives of their great institution, Its antiquity, its remoteness of origin, its long and chequered and powerful life, alone distinguish it from sects which were founded at a known and recent date, on known and limited doctrinal bases, and by the will and energy of particular men. The Church never can sink in such points to the level of religious societies which are but of yesterday. But the Church may cease, by certain alterations in her relations with the country, to be what she is now, -a public institution. And when she ceases to be a public institution, let her retain what she may of her present character and her present doctrines and habits of thought and feeling, the whole religious condition of the country is changed, and she takes her place as one among a number of religious societies, under the control of private men, under private government, and with private interests. The general direction of Liberal thought in politics and religion is in favour of reducing all religious organization to a private matter: that is to say, to giving to the Nonconformist principle and system a complete and final triumph over the older principle and system. And this is natural; for the Nonconformists claim to have been in all periods of English history the staunch supporters of Liberal principles; and, as regards the embodiment of these principles in definite political changes and acts of one, and that it ought to be made, at the cost of great organic changes, the only one, has been undertaken by Mr. Matthew Arnold; and there are few men who, from their position, the character of their mind, and their special gifts, are better qualified to discharge it with keenness and force, and, what is more important still, with unflinching straightforwardness and honesty. legislation, the claim is well-founded. | religious organization is the true and right Whether the vaunted Nonconformist support of Liberal ideas has always been accompanied with what gives them their value breadth and accuracy of knowledge, clearness and enlightenment of view, largeness of purpose and ends, and the moral qualities of nobleness, singlemindedness, and generosity -is fairly open to question. But the Liberal party owes them much, and is with reason expected to listen to their claims. But their claims are not paramount, and must be open to re-examination and scrutiny. And this claim-made with some peremptoriness, as if they were demanding the recognition of a self-evident truth-to bring down all religious organization in England to the level of their own, and their way of demanding, in the tone of men who will not any longer be trifled with, the extinction of a system to which Englishmen have been accustomed almost ever since there were Englishmen, as if it were an oppressive privilege and a degrading monopoly, is beginning to react on Liberals who live out of the cries and clamours of their party. They, as well as the Churchmen, are beginning to ask whether English society and English religion would be the better for the abolition and wiping out of one ancient English manner of being religious; for the lopping off of one most familiar and certainly not unfruitful form of religious communion and life; for a revolution and pulling down which should make it impossible for a man to be a Christian except as a member of a private sect. The sects of Nonconformity have been of great service to English progress; it does not follow from this that it would be a great gain to England if there were nothing but sects in which its religion could take refuge and find expression. Parties, political and religious, go on, repeating more and more emphatically their assumptions and watchwords; till at last, wearied out, perhaps, or rendered suspicious by confident and unqualified assertion and by the increasing disproportion of assertion to proof, the cross-examiner appears. He asks the reason why, of things which are taken for granted without misgiving, and are glibly and easily reiterated; and the difficulty and trouble which the answer gives are the measure of the usefulness of his function even to his own side. The oscillations and development of religious and philosophical thought exemplify this law at all times, and it has not been without its remarkable and significant instances in our own. This office, with respect to the current assumption among Liberal thinkers and talkers that the Nonconformist principle of Mr. Arnold has come forward to challenge the ordinary Liberal assumption that the victory of Dissent, which to so many people seems imminent, will be the victory of religious freedom, religious right, and religious improvement. He disputes the favourite Nonconformist thesis that levelling down, the equalization in external conditions of all religious societies, is the exclusively true theory of religious organization in a free country, and its right and wholesome state. As a Liberal he has endeavoured to put before Liberals, as a religious man he has endeavoured to put before religious men, what is likely to be the effect on human progress and on religion in England, of the extinction, in the name of equality, of that ancient public characteristic form in which Englishmen have up to this time known and practised religion; and of the suppression and obliteration, it may be said on mere grounds of theory, of one of the two great spheres of religious interest and religious activity in England. Mr. Arnold's claim to be listened to with attention, as an original and independent thinker, certainly not biassed in favour of ecclesiastical theology or ecclesiastical exclusiveness, no one would affect to question. But there are two things which are likely to prejudice him with many of those whom he addresses, especially among the Nonconformists. One of them is his manner as a writer; the other is the view of doctrine which he professes. As to the first, it is one for which Mr. Arnold, ever since he began to write, has been severely dealt with. He has been accused of not being in earnest; of playing with what is serious, and amusing himself with his own ingenuity and caprices of taste and prepossession; of being too delicate and fastidious in dealing with the pressing questions of a bold and energetic age, which require ready and broad, and perhaps rough answers, rather than farfetched and refined ones. People take up his phrases, and expect on producing them to call up a smile: they except to his classi fications and terminology, Hebraizing and Hellenizing, Mialism and Millism, as unreal, impertinent, and fantastic; they resent being ticketed as Barbarians or Philistines by the preacher of culture. These are tricks of writing, and belong to a man's manner and favourite ways of expressing himself; and all of us have a right to our likes and dislikes in such matters of taste. But there never was a greater mistake than that of supposing from this that Mr. Arnold had not thought deeply and really on what he writes about, or that he is anything short of being in the most auxious and often sorrowful earnest. In truth there ought to be no difficulty in seeing, through all his banter and sarcasm, that he knows well what he is talking of, and that his purpose is as near his heart as his meaning is clear and definite. But after all our experience, though humour has so often veiled the deepest feeling and conviction, we still are slow to discern what lies hid under a disguise of light and playful handling,-to distinguish between the smile of indifference or mockery, and the smile of masked emotion and concern: 'Questo che par sorriso ed è dolore.' And yet with our literature, and all that it has shown us of the manifold and subtle devices of expression, we ought to be familiar with the reasons which have induced some of the keenest lovers of truth to seek a refuge from the consciousness of human fallibility and inadequacy in that selfrepression which the Greeks call ɛipwvɛía, and have made them reveal their most anxious convictions and say their invidious truths' in words which seemed to mock their meaning. Mr. Arnold has certainly said many things at which both Nonconformists and Churchmen may stumble; but those who least agree with him may convince themselves, if they will, that few men have taken more pains to clear up to themselves, their thoughts, and the facts with which they deal; and that few take deeper interest in the conclusions which they urge. There is something irritating to many people in the easy flexibility of mind and style which passes rapidly through alternations of lofty calm, and light but stinging touches of satire, and goodnatured carelessness and self-abandonment, putting on the appearance of being too little in earnest, for fear of pretending to be too much. Let us, if we will, say that different men have different ways of writing, and that this is not ours, nor to our liking. But this ought not to lead any one to mistake the seriousness, the solid thought, and the sincerity and warmth of intention, which are marked on every line of his recent writings. A man who responds, as Mr. Arnold does, to the piety of Bishop Wilson, is not a man to think lightly of what Bishop Wilson lived and worked for. The other point is more important. Nonconformists, whose theology Mr. Arnold criticises so severely, have certainly some reason to except to the theology of their critic. Mr. Arnold's interpretation of St. Paul, if it is the true and the adequate one, makes a clean sweep of a good deal more than Puritan divinity and tradition; and it certainly seems to us that in his anxiety to bring out in its due importance the moral basis and moral significance of religion, which he does with great beauty and truth, he overlooks two things, the inextricable connection with even the moral side of Christianity of real outward facts of history, which if they fall, must bring down Christianity with them, and which it is intelligible to deny, but idle to ignore; and next, the value of those efforts after a philosophy of religion-efforts, often, doubtless, misdirected and barren, yet also, as certainly, involving deep and true work of the human mind, close scrutiny of its ideas, and patient and skilful use of the materials of knowing, which have gone on without interruption during the most progressive ages of man, and which we call theology. Mr. Arnold, for instance, is so deeply impressed and so amply satisfied with St. Paul's moral use of the idea of resurrection, that he does not seem to want for himself or further to care to see in St. Paul, any great stress laid on the historical fact of our Lord's resurrection. But to leave out the capital and supreme significance of that actual rising from actual death in the belief and teaching of St. Paul, is surely as arbitrary and hopeless a suppres sion as any that can be laid to the charge of those Puritan interpreters who have been blind to St. Paul's morality, and have dropped it out of his doctrine. It is vain to say that St. Paul did not want it as a real fact and step in the history and development of human destiny, as well as a great figure and suggestion of moral progress. It is in vain to attempt to expound St. Paul on the supposition that though he believed the resurrection as a fact, he put it, as an historical event, in the background as secondary; it is in vain to explain the meaning of Christianity on the supposition that it may be left aside, to succumb to or to wait for the decision of science. The great alternative which the question about it offers ought never to be absent from the mind of any one who speaks of Christianity. If it cannot be, then Christianity cannot be; and then it is waste of time to write about churches and sects, and to compare their merits. We must think that St. Paul, though most undoubtedly, as Mr. Arnold urges, he policy of England with respect to the Church. Other considerations need to come in-not perhaps higher or more important ones, but wider ones. There is room for a judgment from a point of view apart, on its grounds, course, and probable issues; and it should be the point of view of one who is beyond suspicion in his love of liberty and his independence of thought, and, on the other hand, is able to sympathise with and respond to the supreme value of the Christian religion, which is the mainspring of all that is serious and noble in both the contending interests. If a man does not care for Christianity, it will matter little which way a quarrel ends which to him is little better than a fight between kites and crows; if a man does not care for liberty, his anxiety will not be awakened as to the risks which liberty may run in the turn which things may take. founded Christianity on the great and sure foundation, 'Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity,' founded it also on the facts of the Apostles' Creed; and we cannot imagine how he could have founded it on anything short of them. That the one truth has been, as Mr. Arnold justly says, so widely and so astonishingly forgotten, does not make the other less true; and with respect to his sketch of the two great doctrinal directions in which Nonconformist theology runs-that at least which is most popular and commonthough there is but too abundant reason for his remarks, yet it is probable that explanations and remonstrances could be offered, to which equitable men must pay attention. In those Calvinistic and Arminian theories of Divine justice and man's condition, of which he has given summaries-bald and repulsive ones, yet indicative, undoubtedly, of infinite coarseness of mind, and of much To these real, yet indirect aspects and mischievous and debasing teaching-little as bearings of the struggle, in relation to reliwe sympathize with them in their peremp-gion in itself, Mr. Arnold has drawn attentory hardness and with the religious leaning which makes them exclusively the Gospel message, yet we cannot say that there is no meaning; they do mean something deep, solemn, and real, though they are so unhappy in their effort to express it; there are profound and indestructible ideas of the human mind lying at the bottom, though it may be very intractable ones. But our differences with Mr. Arnold, both as to the respect due to Calvinistic and Arminian theology, and as to the tenableness of that view of St. Paul which he would put in their piace, do not affect the question, which he has handled with so much temperate wisdom and with so strong a grasp, between the Church and Nonconformity. The direct conflict between the Church and Nonconformity is commonly and naturally urged about questions of doctrine and Church order. The Church does not preach the Gospel,' the Church maintains an order and discipline which are not scriptural and primitive-these are the two great fundamental allegations on the part of Nonconformists: the invidiousness of being a 'dominant sect,' a 'State Church,' a monopoly,' a slavery,' a compromise,' being thrown in as a popular topic, and taking the place of that belonging to the older charges of oppression and persecution, now out of date. The reply of the Church, the offensive movement on its part, carrying back the war into its opponents' lines, has certainly not been wanting in power or spirit. But the character of the conflict and of the circumstances surrounding it are not such as of themselves to affect decisively the public tion in his essay. A further question underlies the ordinary debate between the Church and the great Nonconformist aggression on it. It is not whether the Sects or the Church represent what is true and right in religion. It is not whether, if absolute truth is unattainable, which of them, more truly or more probably than the other, represents the teaching, the spirit and the polity of a Christian body, or its primitive and purest character. It is not whether the Nonconformist societies, great or small, may claim whatever any body of free Englishmen may claim for the prosecution of good and honest aims, and for the protection of their consciences and liberty of action. It is whether, in the name of liberty or general advantage, they are entitled to claim that other men shall not have something which they have not, and in the nature of things cannot have. It is whether their desire for equality, which is a natural desire, and their impatience of privilege, to which the recent course of events has given a spur, is to proscribe or extinguish, as contrary to jus tice, if not to Christianity, another form of religious organization, older, wider, more public, than any of theirs can be; whether, because this other form has attracted to itself temporal advantages which belong to what is old and public, and is surrounded by public conditions and limitations which, in one shape or another, every association, much more every public organization, must have, but which of course must be open to plausible criticism, and which to many excellent men unquestionably seem grievous bonds, therefore England is to be deprived No of something which she has never yet been | State, reminded at every step of those numwithout, which all the aggregate of sects berless large and rich traditions, of those cannot give, which vast numbers, to say the numberless appeals-often silent and obscure least, of Englishmen, high and low, regard ones, but not therefore the less powerfulas the most precious religious advantage-an to our reason as well as to our hearts, which inherited, open, public Church. gather round that which has lasted for long and embraced the most varied elements and the strangest fortunes in the many ages of an eventful history; the idea of a religious organization, joined by continuity of corporate life with the past yet in full harmony with the present, old and solid yet able to grow and change, which has seen many things and been tried by them, deep enough and flexible enough in its genius to interest and attract widely, large enough for minds to have free breathing-room and range, open for all to benefit by, and for all to see. doubt there are minds which do not value this; who do not care for an outward embodiment of religion which reflects the attributes and characters which a good citizen values in the State-its comprehensiveness, its natural and necessary breadth, its dependence on what has gone before; its longdrawn history, its accumulated memories, its usages framed by time rather than by the direct purpose of man, its mixture of strict enactment with wide margins, its practical indulgence and looseness of outline, its inherited temper of moderation and forbearance and habits of making allowance. The Church, like the State, is something which a man feels to belong to him very closely, yet not as his family belongs to him, or his club, or his joint-stock company; and there may be many good and religious people who do not care for a religious fellowship, about which so many others besides themselves, and of such opposite views and tempers, have so much to say, and which has been moulded by those who have been before us in the world, even more than by the generation of to-day or yesterday. Let such men have the most ample liberty for following religion in their own way. They have something to say for themselves, and nothing but the influences of time and reason-slow influences perhaps-ought to be hoped for, to interfere with them and control them. But if there is another way of religion in England, not now proposed for the first time to be set up against them, but existing, of immemorial date, firmly rooted, bringing forth abundant fruit, filling the land with its monuments of holy beauty, and the literature of the nation with writings of consecrated genius, why should it be proscribed and put an end to? Why should the occasion be denied to those who prize it, of feeling that their religion is not one of their own selection and framing, but that it has There are things, we have said, belonging to the Church as a public organization, which the Nonconformist bodies cannot have; and these are things which impress a man like Mr. Arnold, who is not inclined to take a strong side for or against, in the theological questions between the Church and its as sailants. The Church, to begin with, has its part, which nothing else shares with it, in the history of the nation: has not only influenced this history strongly, for that may be said of other religious bodies; but has gone along with it, side by side, in all kinds of ways, inextricably woven in with it. The triumph of Nonconformity may take many things from the Church, but this it cannot take, any more than it can itself supply it: the fact that up to this time the Church, with all its changes, has lived from first to last with the life of the English nation, and that, beyond this, it holds, by real links of historical fact and spiritual kindred, to that great Christian body whose beginnings go back to the first ages and whose limits comprehended kingdoms and empires. The enthusiasm of Mr. Miall. and Mr. Jacob Bright for self-assertion and disagreement for the dissidence of Dissent and the protestantism of the Protestant religion' may finish by putting an end to this; but let it be observed what they would be doing. Nothing, by which they could be any gainers their religious organizations would be as free and unimpeded as they are now, but not a bit more so. But, for a number of their countrymen, they would have destroyed a great idea realized for ages in unbroken fact the idea of a historic, inherited Church, which was the Church of their fathers, as it was of those from whom their fathers learned the religion of Christ; the idea of a communion, not set on foot and self-constituted, like a religious order or a charitable association, by the piety or reforming zeal and on the responsibility of certain private Christians, but one which could not help existing,' which existed in virtue of certain great general influences and certain great events of universal interest, their natural, spontaneous, uninterrupted consequence; the idea of a society in which a man found himself, just as he found himself in the State, surrounded by all the associations, venerable, inspiring, subduing, elevating, even saddening, which give grandeur and ennobling force to the thought of the |