great truth and force,* which our limits will not allow us to transcribe, Mr. Arnold sets out what is the real state of the case: that what requires this change is simply the jealousy' of those who like private association best, and may have it as much as they please, with nothing to hamper or molest them; but who will not any longer let their brethren have, what Englishmen have had so long, the alternative form of religious life, that is, a great historic public Church. 'Put an end to all this jealousy and antagonism,' say the enemies of the Church, by destroying inequality, by pulling down the "dominant sect" from its position of preeminence. Then, when it stands on common ground with the rest, there will not be this bitterness and spirit of attack.' Can any one who knows, even superficially, the condition of English society believe that this will be the result? With Mr. Miall proclaiming for his motto, the dissidence of Dissent,' can any one expect that that which the Church now gives to any one who wishes for it, the peace and calm and composure of an understood position, the tranquil security of a system long settled on recognised bases, which a man has not to fight for from day to day, will any longer be anywhere within their reach? Will there be nothing for the zeal of sects to compete for: will there be nothing to irritate them and animate their hostility in what will still remain of the pretensions even of the disestablished Church? Will the temptations to religious leaders be less-temptations to self-assertion, extremes of doctrine, violence of means? Will religious leaders, when the checks and weights of a great public body are taken off, help to make religious society more peaceable? And, whatever else results, will tranquillity and mutual forbearance be promoted when that becomes universal in which the Church,-and it is a matter of complaint against her as often as it is of praise, is in notorious contrast with the Nonconformist bodies, the concentration of a man's thoughts and interest on the affairs of his particular connexion? Will English religion gain by the extension of a state of things such as Mr. Arnold presents to us, a state of things which, apart from his judgment on it, no one we suppose denies as a fact, and of which, it is worth observing, the English Roman Catholics, though they belong to an ancient and world-wide Church, are just as much an example as any other Nonconformists? 'It is hardly to be believed, how much larger a space the mere affairs of his denomination fill in the time and thoughts of a Dissenter, than *Pp. xviii-xxiv. in the time and thoughts of a Churchman. In fact, what is it that the every-day, middle-class Philistine-not the rare flower of the Dissenin Dissent? Is it not, as to discipline, that his ters but the common staple-finds so attractive self-importance is fomented by the fuss, bustle, and partisanship of a private sect, instead of being lost in the greatness of a public body? As to worship, is it not that his taste is pleased by usages and words that come down to him, instead of drawing him up to them? by services which reflect, instead of the culture of great men of religious genius, the crude culture of himself and his fellows? And as to doctrine, is it not that his mind is pleased at hearing no opinion but its own, by having all disputed points taken for granted in its own favour, by being urged to no return upon itself, no development? And what is all this but the very feeding and stimulating of our ordinary self, instead of the annulling of it? No doubt it is natural: to indulge our ordinary self is the most natural thing in the world. But Christianity is not natural; and if the flower of Christianity be the grace and peace which comes of annulling our ordinary self, then to this flower it is fatal.'—p. xxix. Mr. Arnold surely has reason with him, reason of the widest and soberest kind, when he doubts whether such a change would raise the general level of religion. The existence, the free, flourishing, vigorous life of Nonconformity, with whatever shortcomings it has, is a benefit to the religion of England. The victory of Nonconformity would be, we do not say fatal to it, but a damage from which it would be long in recovering. In the ideas which Nonconformity rests upon and makes prominent, and in the ideas which with acrimonious intolerance it proscribes and denounces; in its hatred of what is public and general, and in its contempt for unity and its sophistries to excuse disunion, it does distinct mischief to what is of supreme importance in religion. And by giving the weight which, in most of its forms, it does, to the opinions of the least taught and the most ignorant, by weakening the independence of teachers, by encouraging the belief that zeal is a substitute for light, its direct and visible tendency, in spite of some better efforts, especially among the Congregationalists, is to promote a coarse and vulgarized type of religion. Can its triumph, that is, the exclusive prevalence of the conditions of Nonconformist religion, by cutting off and annihilating these other conditions which existed with it and before it, really do anything to secure for English greater calm and repose, greater light, greater Christianity greater purity, greater beauty, largeness? Oh!' say the enthusiasts for Nonconformity, set the Church free as the Sects, give us a clear stage, appeal to our generous rivalry; and Christians will renew the wonders of the first ages.' We can see no reason for expecting the marvels of the first ages, after the history and follics of the later ones and to destroy, out of hatred and jealousy, what, to say the least, is an advantageous position for religion, because it is not ours, to exchange deliberately the quieter influences of a long-tried and settled system, which has found its place and learned many lessons, for the chances and necessities of a competitive and perpetually aggressive proselytisin, gives no one any right to anticipate either human success or Divine blessing. in consequence, in the course of history altered greatly its own attitude to systems of belief which were on this margin; and next, it has cultivated with increasing purpose and sincerity the desire of light, the sense of what is finite and imperfect in our human grasp of divine knowledge, the aim at exact and modest statement; the recognition of the surprising and enormous differences which are made by varieties of atmosphere and by altered points of view, of the possibilities of misunderstanding and correction, of the unknown magnitude of what we may have yet to learn; the duty of making even a blind allowance for much that we Why should it be given up? Why should cannot accept or understand, the willingness the public policy of England, which is much to believe good, the readiness to welcome wider than Nonconformist interests, though sympathy where agreement is hopeless. If pledged to Nonconformist rights, be called this combination of tenacity of conviction upon to alter it? The Nonconformist and a resolute spirit in asserting it, with the ground of the unscripturalness, unlawful- successful and increasing endeavour to be ness, sinfulness of it, because it is not the open-minded and temperate, has not-in polity which Nonconformists think they find spite of all instances to the contrary, and in the Bible, and because what is public they have been too many-been a marked must be in connexion with the State and the characteristic in the English Church, it law, is a reason for being a Nonconformist, would certainly make the prospect a desperbut for nothing else. Apart from the vague ate one of her retaining hef present relation and dangerously ambiguous claim for equal to the nation. If she ceases to be dogmatic, ity, the Nonconformists have really nothing she ceases to be a Church at all; if she canto say; and it is for the statesmen and not hold her belief and teach it, with a due people of England to consider whether the consciousness of the conditions which attend Nonconformist system is so manifestly and qualify all human knowledge, she will superior, in reason and working, that it is find herself too much out of harmony with for the advantage of the country that it what is public and common to fill a public should supersede and exclude the other, the place. But against all taunts of her being a public organization which has been so long Church that does not know her own mind;' in possession, and to which not the least im- against the perplexities and inconsistencies portant part of the nation is so deeply at- which are sure to gather round everything tached. But there are reasons which, that is on a great scale and very complicatthough not those of the Nonconformists, ed; against charges of compromise and point in the same direction. How a dog- time-serving, and burdensome subscriptions matic Church-a Church of fixed creed and lightly and loosely submitted to; against professed definitions of doctrine-is to be a sneers such as that attributed to Mr. Forster, public national institution in such a country and not worthy of him, that lax interpretaas England, is a question which, no doubt, tions of formularies account for the spirit of presses on many minds. It is a question mercantile dishonesty; against all this very which our generation will probably have to plausible and very glibly reiterated criticism, deal with in a different way from what it there is to be set the plain, solid fact that has ever been dealt with before; but it is the English Church is, in its working, the also a question which in practice time has largest-minded and most tolerant of all solved. Time and experience have shown active religious communions which also that a Church with a very pronounced theo- really care for the ancient belief; and that logy, and a worship founded on it, can be in thousands and tens of thousands of cenpublic, popular, reasonable, forbearing, libe- tres it brings with unassuming and unwearied ral. Dogmatic the Church must be, if it is earnestness the plain message of the Christo be a religious society or a Christian tian religion, without controversial disputsociety at all; but in two points it has ings, with a supreme regard to its spiritual shown a character of its own. Without ever and moral bearings. Theories about Church running off its own lines, and holding fast perfection, as well as theories about abstract sturdily to the central points of the universal right, of equality, take a very secondary Christian creed, it has allowed free discus-place--at least with those who consider the sion about the margins of doctrine, and has, mixed nature of all human things--when the mind has fairly grasped such facts as these. To have made the type of religion represented by George Herbert, Bishop Wilson, and the 'Christian Year' the established and recognised type of English public Church religion is a thing to be set against many failures. incompatible with a common basis, and But it is objected that all this while we are dealing with a misnomer: that we are talking of the Church as if it were one, a whole in itself; whereas its real and vital unity, the unity of spirit and conviction, is less than that of Protestant Nonconformity. It is not one,' is the allegation; its unity is nothing but a fictitious claim of unity, a legal mask over the profoundest dissensions, a hypocritical and hollow name. How can such a body fill the place of a public Church? No doubt, it is divided. There is no Church or communion in Christendom which could hold, we do not say the recognised parties of High and Low, but such extremes as the free inquirers who are protected by the Essays and Reviews' judg ments, and the Free Lances of Ritualism, gallant and devoted fighters for religion many of them, but owning no law but one which none can understand but themselves; Catholics in intention, but assuming more and more in theory and in practice the position and the likeness of the elder PuritansPuritans of the positive quantity--for vest Of course, to assume that the Church of England, in the more or less of dogma that it enforces or permits, has hit the exact middle point between too much and too little, is for those of its champions who think that whatever is, must be right; or that in questions, which as soon as we really touch them, face us with evident and undeniable difficulties, it is yet easy off-hand to lay down the certainties of error and right. For those who accept the fallibility of Churches as well as of men, yet for all that believe that men, and Churches also, have used to good purpose God's gifts of light in teaching and upholding truth, it is enough that the English Church has maintained a doctrine essentially the same as that of Christendom in general, which is the part of a Church and religious society; and has maintained it with a power of growth, with a generous and intentional forbearance for great differences within its borders, which is the part of a public and comprehensive body. How these differences are to be treated is no light matter. They are very serious ones. They threaten daily to come into collision with all boundaries and claims of authority. They tempt impatient men to exaggerated judgments, to rash demands, and rash wishes for short and rough measures to settle them.ments, instead of against them. Even in The direct remedies proposed on opposite sides are equally full of danger. It is hard to say which would be most perilous: an increased stringency in ruling points against large parties which have a real standingground of argument, challenging them to submit or depart; or a forced and precipitate comprehension, which should sacrifice and break the ties of continuity with the past, and in order to make the Church more national unmake her as a religious society. These things render the present course of her history critical. But with these risks risks such as she shares necessarily with every great living and public body comprising in it very various elements and energetic forces she is what she has been and what she is a Church discharging not ineffectively a vast public mission, which in many respects there is none else to discharge; discharging it with a very distinct understanding of the substance which she has to teach, but allowing a degree of play to individual thought and liberty of interpretation and action which would have seemed beforehand Germany, where there is boundless liberty of In is naturally and organically one, and the metaphorical unity-the result of compact or the expression of feeling, an alliance for common ends or common war, depending on our pleasure, or a mere figure of speech -in bodies founded for the very purpose of separation, and starting in order to diverge. In one case unity, though troubled, though in continual danger, is a real thing; in the other it is a forced and fanciful invention, to cover notorious and, at a particular stress of argument, inconvenient facts. While they keep together a country is a country, and a Church is a Church. Put things at the worst in the way of parallel, yet France and Spain, torn by factions, irreconcilable in their principles, irreconcilable in their aims, are yet one; are yet to disagreeing Frenchmen and Spaniards their country. Descent, history, community of experience, community of ties and interest, greater and stronger than the forces which drive them apart, an inheritance come down to men of treasures which they had no hand in gathering, all this makes a country one. And in a historic Church, those whom Articles and law do not bind together, Creeds and Sacraments do; those whose convictions even on the Creeds differ, history, common government, the sense of corporate brotherhood and life, the tradition and usages of common worship, keep together. Antagonistic parties cannot all be right; unity may be daily threatened; but it has large and real foundations; and while it exists, it is not taken away by wishing or by theorizing it away. For there it is, as much a fact, and a fact of the same order, as the political unity of a commonwealth. We do not doubt that, as Mr. Arnold says, there are many Nonconformists, and an increasing number of them, to whom Mr. Winterbotham's 'hideous confession' of the dominance in Dissenters, as a characteristic spirit, of a 'watchful jealousy' against the Church, which must see all things awry, finds little sympathy; and who, though they cannot see their way to union any more than the Church can to comprehension, yet, looking forward to happier times, see that in the Church is the most promising hope for drawing together those bodies which are now separated from her and from one another, and for realizing that unity which is a fundamental idea, if there is one, of the Christian society. If the noblest and the wisest of the Nonconformists could master the inferior but not less powerful and important elements of Nonconformity,-if the Nonconformists, instead of being flattered by liberal politicians and even by candid opponents, had more of their own friends to tell them honestly the hard truths which all bodies of men need to be told, and which, to her infinite benefit, are told so profusely by friends and enemies to the Church, the prospects of religion would be brighter. But there are other religious interests in England, and other claims to be attended to, than those of the Nonconformists, leaders or followers. By those who care for England and the religion of England, it is not in the interest of Nonconformity alone that the great questions before us will be considered. An equality of private associations, a competition of sects, cannot give what England has hitherto had and greatly prized: a public Church, not a mere philosophy or moral instrument of instruction, but a religious society, with an ancient, eventful, continuous history; with fixed conditions of worship and teaching, yet, with these conditions, in practice as liberal and forbearing as a religious society could have; with great sources in it, living and abundant, of ideas large, deep, elevated; with a spirit of liberty and tolerance, in spite of all the difficulties, which, not in religion only, but in every region of human thought, hamper liberty and tolerance; with great faculties for self-correction, for assimilation of new truths, for sympathy with the opening thoughts of men, combined with a resolute attachment and veneration for the past. The loss to England, the loss to a majority of Englishmen, of such an organization ought to be well weighed by those who are provoked because the Church is at once so stiff and so elastic; so complicated and rigorous in theory and law, and so open to individual opinion and caprice; because it is so patient in some directions and so inflexible in others; because congregations have so much to take their chance of teaching and of ways which they dislike. A price has to be paid for everything. There is no escaping the acknowledgment exacted by human inadequacy. Whether to have had and to have such a religious institution in England as the historical English Church does not outweigh many inconveniences and many anomalies, is a question the answer to which will gauge the wisdom, the longsightedness, and the power of disengaging ourselves from present impressions, in order to give reason its fair field, of those who have the future of England in their hands. ceived the very able and judicious letter of NOTE.-Since writing the above, we have reSir J. T. Coleridge* addressed to Canon Lid * Remarks on some parts of the Report of the against Purchas," and on the course proper to be Judicial Committee in the case of "Elphinstone pursued by the Clergy in regard to it.' 8vo. London, 1871. don, wherein he makes some remarks on the advantages of an Establishment, which have so close a bearing on the subject of the preceding article, that we make no apology for transferring them to our pages: Church has seemed to be overwhelmed in the waves, and again has righted; if we are to go through the same trial with the same issue, only let us make a better use of our restoration than our forefathers did of the mercy vouchsafed to them. 'For the clergy to join in a political crusade to accelerate their disestablishment would seem to me to argue such a dementation both as to the act and the object as would indeed almost cause the most confident to despair. "Hoc Ithacus velit, et magno mercentur Atridæ." The whole Letter deserves the attentive con We had intended to offer some observations in reference to the controversy raised by the Purchas Judgment, but Sir John Coleridge has anticipated us in nearly all that we intended to say, and we therefore content ourselves with referring our readers to his excellent remarks upon the subject. 'On behalf, not so much of the clergy, as of the laity- -on behalf of the worshippers in our churches, of the sick to be visited at home of the poor in their cottages, of our children in their schools-of our society in general, I entreat those of the Clergy who are now feeling the most acutely in this matter [the Purchas Judgment] not to suffer their minds to be so absorbed by the present grievance as to take no thought of the evils of disestablishment. I am not foolishly blind to faults in the clergy-sideration of Churchmen at the present time. indeed I fear I am sometimes even censorious in regard to them-and some of their faults I do think may be referable to Establishment; | the possession of house and land, and a sort of independence of their parishioners, in some cases seems to tend to secularity. I regret sometimes their partisanship at elections, their speeches at public dinners. But what good gift of God is not liable to abuse from men? Taken as a whole, we have owed, and we do owe, under Him, to our Established Clergy, more than we can ever repay, much of it rendered possible by their Establishment. I may refer, and now with especial force, to Education-their services in this respect no one denies and but for Establishment these, I think, could not have been so effectively and systematically rendered. We are now in a great crisis as to this all-important matter. Concurring, as I do heartily, in the praise which has been bestowed on Mr. Forster, and expecting that his great and arduous office will be discharged with perfect impartiality by him, and with a just sense how much is due to the clergy in this respect, still it cannot be denied that the powers conferred by the Legislature on the holder of it are alarmingly great, even THE Seven Months' War is ended: the terms if necessary; and who shall say in what a spirit they may be exercised by his successor ? of peace are signed: our dazzled eyes and For the general upholding of religious educa- stunned hearing are gradually recovering tion, in emergencies not improbable, to whom from the flash and din of the dread encouncan we look in general so confidently as to the ter. The world is returning to the domestic Parochial Clergy? I speak now specially in interests and the everyday pursuits, which regard to parishes such as I am most familiar have been suspended while we watched the with, in agricultural districts, small, not large-death-struggle of two mighty nations. If ly endowed, sometimes without resident gentry, and with the land occupied by rack-renting farmers, indifferent or hostile to education. I have but glanced at a very few of the benefits we owe to our Establishment; this is not the place for a full discussion of the whole great question-and if it were, I am not competent to the task "Nequeo monstrare, et sentio tantum." 'If the evil, be it our trial or our chastisement, is to fall on us, I should not despair-I should still believe that the Church was under God's protection, and stripped as we might seem to be of this or that help or safeguard, should still rely on His blessing our honest endeavours to perform the duties imposed on us. It will not be the first time that the Ark of the I ART. VII.-1. Recueil de Documents sur les Exactions, Vols, et Cruautés des Armées Prussiennes en France. Publié au Profit de la Société Internationale de Secours aux Blessés. Première Partie. Bordeaux, 1871. 8vo. 2. Meddelelser om Preussernes og Oesterrigernes Færd i Slesvig. Copenhagen, 1869. 8vo. 3. The Dagbladet,' 1871, No. 25. (Translated in the Standard,' February 10th, 1871.) for the first time since the dealings of Rome we may not hope for a lasting peace, where, with Carthage, terms have been imposed expressly in foresight of future war, we seem the more resolved to enjoy the respite which is ensured, if for no other reason, by the exhaustion of the combatants. And not, we trust, only to enjoy it, but to use it for the mitigation, if we cannot hope for the preven tion, of the horrors which have been a prolonged torture to the least sensitive. As we read of ancient battles, where a pause was seized by those nearest and dearest to the combatants to rush between their warring kindred and bring them to a lasting alliance, so may the great family of nations interpose, |