Christ and His Apostles have left him. Can we condemn him for this ? '1

Dr. Sanday proceeds to claim for the Church 'a more excellent way'; to contend that further developments were within the powers of the Church, and have proved their legitimacy by their results; and to guard himself against being supposed to imply that what is good once is necessarily good always.' But we cannot think that in these latter words Dr. Sanday means to qualify the excuse which he has made for Congregationalists and Presbyterians, and which would seem to us plainly to imply that in some sense or other their systems are good always. And good they certainly are in the sense of attracting many good men good as anything which conscience approves is good to the consciences which approve it. But we do not believe that they are historically good, or that the reasons we have quoted from Dr. Sanday avail for their excuse.

Imagine similar reasons given in secular politics. A country has passed through republicanism and despotism to a limited monarchy. Will you say to a portion of its inhabitants that, if they choose to set up a republic or a tyranny for themselves, they are zealous for ancient precedent, and must not be condemned? Is it not plain that, even if ancient times offered pure examples of the form of government which they prefer, the element of disunion which it possesses now that the body of the people have passed into another stage impresses upon it a character wholly different from that which the old polity, held with the consent of all, possessed? The spirit of disunion and opposition is a more important element than the imitative reproduction of an antiquated system. So it would be universally held in a matter of mundane politics, and we know not why it should be otherwise held in ecclesiastical, except upon the assumption that unity is less important in the Church than in the State.

But is it true that the Church ever passed through a congregational and a presbyterian stage? Congregationalism is the deliberate, organized, and persistent independence of congregations maintained as a doctrine against all comers. Were primitive congregations ever independent in this sense? If Christianity began in the cities, while the country was pagan and the distances great and hard to traverse, is there anything common between this congregationalism of circumstance and the congregationalism of doctrine taught in times so different from the primitive as ours are? Was there ever in primitive

1 See the Expositor for November 1888.

congregations the spirit of deliberate independence? Were they ever free from subjection to some one outside themselves? Did not the very germ, of whatever nature it was, which in so short a time made them all episcopal constitute an essential difference between them and the modern congregations which have rejected, and still reject, that which the ancient were so ready to accept?

And why does Dr. Sanday propose that, to prove his presbyterian stage, we should consent to pass over the activity of the Apostles as something exceptional? Presbyterianism recognizes no authority above that of the presbyters. But when Paul and Barnabas ordained elders in every city of Pisidia and Pamphylia, these presbyters remained subject to the authority of the Apostles who ordained them. St. Paul claims. such authority in all his Epistles. No church of his foundation was presbyterian while he lived, unless you may represent as a republic a monarchy by setting aside the royal authority as exceptional. Nor was the activity of the Apostles as exercising authority over presbyters by any means exceptional, as the examples of St. James and SS. Timothy and Titus abundantly show. We shall accompany Dr. Sanday with cordiality in making moral and practical allowance for the condition of separated Christian bodies. But among all the good and able men who adhere to these separated bodies, we are persuaded there are very few who do so from adherence to primitive precedent and the authority of the Christian past. History, whatever minor difficulties of explanation it may offer, is in its practical results all for the Church.

own.

So true is this, that the dissent which rebels against prescription depends, we are well persuaded, for existence on its own prescription; and the opinions which reject the sacredness of institutions practically ascribe a sacredness to their The prescription of a quarter of a century is not, upon grounds of pure reason, as good as the prescription of eighteen centuries; the chapel which was erected a generation ago is not so venerable a witness of permanence as the cathedral which stood where it stands before the nation was formed. But twenty-five years' prescription and the erection which gives it a home are something for the mind to rest in and revere; and to minds unaccustomed to range far back they are enough. Dissent depends at first upon the impulse of disagreement, the exaggeration of some new discovery in religion, the excitement of feelings which because they are strong are supposed never to have been felt as strongly before. And so the schism is made. Doubtless the love of disagreement

has its power even in the second generation and the third. But this motive loses its strength with its novelty. It could not furnish vigour enough to keep a separation alive if it were not that the institutions of the sect acquire by mere continuance a sacred prescription corresponding to that of the larger body which was abandoned. The chapel is in evidence as truly as the cathedral; under the shadow of its forms of worship the souls of friends now gone have sought communion with their Maker; the minister is Reverend and wears a distinctive dress as well as the parson; his ordination and his consequent distinction from the congregation seem to represent in some sort of way the variety of office as read of in the New Testament. The atmosphere of prayer and faith which surrounds the system appears to invest it with a religious sanction. And if the sanction be not of such overwhelming strength as to hinder any change which may seem desirable; if the distinction between minister and people be not in kind but in degree; if the sacraments be only just sacred enough to yield a desirable help without oppressing the mind with anything difficult to believe, or the feelings with a too close presence of Deity, this dilution of the sacredness of institutions makes them less of a burden to faith, and leaves one's sense of power free from the humbling contact with a system which it has had no hand in creating and could not change, however one might desire to do so.

We earnestly believe that many simple souls adhere to systems which are not Catholic from motives which have enough of Catholicity to clear them in God's sight from schismatical intention. They adhere because they are humble, because they trust in God's providence which has set them where they are, because they desire to give themselves to the affairs of personal religion without meddling in the distractions of controversy and change. But the very contemplation of their merits and virtues should lead those who have opportunity, to take a larger view and accept a system which includes everything by which they claim our sympathy, but in larger degree and with more entire consistency. If it be a good thing to worship as our fathers worshipped, it must be better to worship as their fathers' fathers up to the earliest times to which memory runs have done; if it be good that ministers should be ordained by authority, it must be better that there should be no record in their succession of an authority which was self-assumed; if it be good to form a part of a community, it is better that the community to which we belong should be the universal Church; if it be good to accept the place in

which God has set us, and to make the best of it, it must be better that we should have the greatest certainty that our situation was not devised by human will; if a system claiming the institution of God be good for men to rest in, it must be better that its records should stretch back so far as directly to connect it with the system of the New Testament. It is the common boast of Christians that theirs is an historical religion. But what is the use of this unless the history has a connexion with our actual religion in the present; and if there be a connexion between the history of the present as we live it and the history of the past in which Christ and His Apostles lived, it must surely seem best to any mind of an historical turn that continuity should never have been broken, rather than that the threads of the texture should have been snapped where the New Testament closes and the pattern taken up again, not by continuity, but by imitation, at a later time.

Mr. Gore's appendix contains a careful discussion of Bishop Lightfoot's celebrated dissertation. We agree with him that the language of this essay is ambiguous and that it is liable to be interpreted as representing the episcopate to be a purely human creation. But the illustrious author has never accepted this reading of his intention. And just as in the physical world a writer who dwells upon the earthly aspect of evolution may seem to ascribe a creative power to the facts, while in reality he believes as much as anyone in a Divine Being behind them, so it may be in ecclesiastical affairs. When Bishop Lightfoot informs us that his view agrees with that of Langen, who teaches the Apostolical succession, we shall gratefully accept the assurance.

But our limits have been reached. We shall but say in conclusion that students of the origin of the Christian ministry will find in the work of Mr. Gore the whole literature of the subject, gathered with unsparing diligence and lucidly arranged. Doubtless records may still be discovered which shall throw some new light upon this ancient controversy: it would ill become the generation which has seen the publication of the Didaché to assume that no fresh materials can ever present themselves. But Mr. Gore's reasonings are based upon so wide a survey of the mass of authorities of which we are in possession, and upon so true an estimate of the principles by which the development of the Christian Church has been ruled, that they will, in our judgment, permanently recommend themselves in every essential point to the truthful inquirer.

ART. IV.-PLUMPTRE'S LIFE OF BISHOP KEN.

The Life of Thomas Ken, D.D., Bishop of Bath and Wells. By E. H. PLUMPTRE, D.D., Dean of Wells. 2 vols. (London, 1889.)

THOSE of our readers who within the last five years have visited the lovely cathedral at the foot of the Mendips, the story of which, as a typical church of the 'Old Foundation,' has been so instructively told by Mr. Freeman, will doubtless have had their attention directed to a memorial window in the north aisle of the choir, the central panel of which exhibits a bishop in cope and mitre, holding a pastoral staff. Over his head are the words, 'All glory be to God,' and below the figure is that pathetic warning which a prophet once addressed to a friend overborne by grief at thickening national calamities, and which a Christian poet has paraphrased in lines that wonderfully develop the compressed tenderness and awfulness of the original in its context-' Et tu quæris tibi grandia ? Noli quærere.'1 These words, from the Vulgate rendering of Jer. xlv. 5, were chosen by the designer of the memorial as having been written, manu propria, in two books-a Greek Testament and a copy of Grotius' De Veritate-which belonged to the saintly prelate whose praise, indeed, is ‘in all the churches,' but whose name is specially associated with the 'City of Fountains,' and in whose honour, principally through the exertions of the Dean who now comes forward as his biographer, the window was erected in the church where he once sat enthroned as bishop, and to which his six years' residence had given, in one sense, a new sanctity.

The life of Bishop Ken has been more than once written; and some of us will remember the pleasure with which, in youth, we read the volume published by 'A Layman,' who is named in the preface to the present work as Mr. John Lavicourt Anderdon. But Dean Plumptre is the biographer of him whom Dean Stanley succinctly described as 'one of the best of Englishmen.' 2 The task has been to him a labour of love, and the elaborate minuteness of research bestowed upon it will be valued as indicating an enthusiastic appreciation of

1 See Christian Year, Eleventh Sunday after Trinity. Compare Keble's Academical and Occasional Sermons, p. 306; Newman's Paroch. Serm. viii. 134.

2 Good Words for 1880, p. 135.