passes in interest Pope's narrative of a visit to the same university in the company of Lintot. The only similar occurrence, we remember, that can by any possibility be related in the same paragraph, is one recorded by Byron, and referring to his own appearance in type with Mr. Rogers, when Larry and Jacky solicited the public suffrages together. A gentleman in the Brighton coach, having been engaged in the perusal of the book, laid it down, when it was taken up by a fellow-passenger, who inquired the name of the author.

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There are two," was the mysterious reply. Ay, ay, a joint concern, I suppose, summut like Sternhold and Hopkins." The possessor of the volume was a friend of the poets.

The scene in the Double-First returned vividly to our memory, when the recent publication of Mr. Newman announced his descent into Popery. Could it be possible? Was he a Jesuit after all? Had he remained in the fortress long enough to undermine the ramparts, and poison the water-springs? Had he conciliated the garrison, only to betray it? Had he now gone over to the enemy, with all the advantages of a comrade and all the malice of a deserter? Had he made himself so familiar with the battlements of our church, only to lead the storming party of her assailants? While these questions kept thronging to our lips, the observation of a contemporary came under our eyes. He concludes some general remarks on the degrees of trust to be reposed in the author himself

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by alluding to one strange, inexplicable, moral phenomenon, which to Englishmen at least must wear an appearance so unsatisfactory, as to supersede much further examination. The present volume is a very elaborate, studied work, full of research, bearing proofs of long preparation; the result of matured thought; the conclusions of a course of reasoning which can now be traced back in Mr. Newman's writings to several years since, during which, we now know from authority, he has been meditating his recent step. It is not the questioning-the anxious, wavering questioning of an undecided mind; but the formal proof of a long-weighed conclusion.. And during all this time where has Mr.

Newman been? In what name, and in what authority, has he been teaching the children of the English church, if not by his voice in the pulpit, at least by private communication, and by his previously published works? Ilis sermons have been read as those of a minister of the Church, even those which contained the germs of the poison which he is now openly administering to the Church.

His reasonings have been listened to, have been permitted to find access to minds, from which they would have been anxiously excluded under the present title."

These comments, be it remembered, come from no semi-Dissenter, with whom St. Paul's and the Weigh House are equally sacred, and Binney and Barrow co-efficient authorities. On the contrary, they are the sentiments of one of the representatives of that large body in the Church of England, who think that her orders are apostolical, and that her Halls and Beveridges knew something of the Fathers; who, with Hooker, can revere her majestic polity; and with Horsley, refuse to be scared by the bugbear of purgatory; who, with the greatest men of the brightest times, believe nothing to be holy which is not honest; and scorn to acknowledge any devotion to be profitable or sincere which grows only in the dark, and is fed only by deception. Mr. Newman would have us to believe that his conversion rushed upon him with an irresistible impetus, while he was descending these inclined planes of developement. But no, we are wrong. It was not until type had imparted to his arguments that clear symmetry, by which they are recommended to the general reader, that the blaze of conviction burst full upon his eyes. Not by his own, but his printer's proofs, was the change to be effected. "When he had got some way in the printing, he recognised in himself a conviction of the truth of the conclusion, to which the discussion leads, so clear as to supersede further deliberation." Can this statement be received for a moment? Is it credible? Is it possible? Every understanding is undoubtedly open to new accessions of light; and one eye perceives some defects in a book, that another is unconscious of. Montaigne

was accustomed to say that he read in Livy what another could not, and that Plutarch read there what he did not. In like manner, Bolingbroke confessed of himself, that he had read at fifty what he never could find in the same book at twenty-five. This we can easily comprehend; for not only does the intellectual eye-sight reflect its own colours upon the object, but its vigour and penetration vary with conditions of the moral health. But Mr. Newman comes within neither exemption. If the theory of developement made him a Romanist, it would have made him one in its working.* No; the solution of the mystery is to be sought and found in the book itself. The author has furnished the key to the problem. At the end of the introduction the inquirer will find this sentence," It would be the work of a life to apply the theory of developements so carefully to the writings of the fathers and the history of controversies and councils, as thereby to vindicate the reasonableness of every decree of Rome; much less can such an undertaking be imagined by one who

IN THE MIDDLE OF HIS DAYS IS BEGINNING LIFE AGAIN."

We entreat our readers to mark these words. Where do they occur? Not in the preface, not in the postscript, not even at the close of the volume, where the faint ray of Roman Catholic sunrise may be supposed to have broken upon the pilgrim, then ascending, after so wearisome a journey, into the sweet garden and paradisiacal atmosphere of indulgences and image-worship. In none of those positions will this declaration be discovered. It stands in the beginning of the Essay, and that essay, which the writer commenced and finished according to his own assurance, while belonging to the Church of England. There can be no mistake here; the meaning of the passage is distinct and positive. To become a Romanist

is literally to begin life again; to begin it with a desecrated Baptism, and an inheritance of imposture. What shall we say, then, to Mr. Newman's assertion, that "his first act on his own conversion was to offer his Work for revision to the proper authorities; but the offer was declined, on the ground that it was written, and partly printed, before he was a Catholic, and that it would come before the reader in a more persuasive form, if he read it as the author wrote it?" We repeat,-what shall we say? What can we say, but that the author has been committing a fraud upon his reader, and perhaps upon himself? When he wrote the first page of this essay on developement, he was as much an alien from the English communion as he is at the present moment. He held, indeed, nothing of hers, except her Fellowship. He may not have been a Romanist, but only a sceptic. "Possibly," writes Bishop Taylor in his inscription of the Great Exemplar to Hatton, "two or three weak or interested, fantastic and easy understandings, pass from church to church upon grounds as weak as those for which formerly they did dissent; and the same arguments are good, or bad, as exterior accidents, or interior appetites, shall determine." In attributing this fantastic temperament to Mr. Newman, we are not unsupported by the highest authority in that splendid city which he has so long troubled and infected. Bishop Wilberforce was not afraid to denounce him, even in the cathedral of Christ Church, as having been borne upon the wings of an unbounded scepticism into the bosom of an unfathomable superstition. Mr. Newman does not hesitate to confess, that between Popery and infidelity is the only choice; drawn gradually to the grassy margin of the precipice, he may have felt the impulse, so common to those who gaze down

into an abyss, to plunge into it; but, scared back again by the appalling darkness beneath, he caught at Romanism. Will it hold him? We doubt it. For what Romanism is it, which this unhappy person has grasped in his plunge, and now seeks to recommend openly to the hopeful youth of England? Is it that Romanism which strikes out its roots into the early seed-land of Christendom; and whose boughs have truly sheltered some of the noblest spirits who fought, or perished, for patriotism or virtue? Is it the system of faith that sweetened the temper of Fisher, or endears to the affection of all time the beautiful piety of More? which woke the eloquence of Bossuet, and wasted the bloom from the cheek of Pascal? It is none of these. It is German infidelity communicated in the music and perfume of St. Peter's;-it is Strauss in the garment and rope of the Franciscan. It is a system which offers no insurmountable difficulty to the producer, because, in the words of Horsley, it is a system of his own making.

These complaints are uttered in no bitterness of controversy. We write them with sorrow and pain, though the vehemence of Pascal might well be pardoned, when Escobar is alive again. We know how admirably it has been said by Donne, that when God gave a flaming sword to cherubims in Paradise, they guarded the place, but the sword killed none, wounded none; and that, in like manner, God gives to his servants zeal to guard their station and integrity of religion, but not to wound or deface any man. May we never forget the allegory and its lesson! Let every available apology be tendered for one, who manifests so little disposition to apologise for himself. No eye becomes dim or confused at once. It is the result of continued derangement of the constitution. So may Mr. Newman have weakened the intellectual eyesight, not only by the disordered functions of the moral frame, but by protracted labours in the dark mines and heavy air of papal theology. Nay, we will even give him the advantage of Johnson's remark on Burnet, and think that he has not told falsehoods with intention; but that prejudice, or scepticism, de

terred him from recognising the truth when he saw it. That he will adhere to his theory for a season, now that he has launched it, is naturally to be expected. The French essayist had looked into the heart, when he said, "Toute opinion est assez forte pour se faire épouser au prix de la vie.”

It was one of the many forcible sayings of Atterbury to his most celebrated friend, that he hated to see a book gravely written, and in all the forms of argumentation, that proves nothing and says nothing,— the only object of which is to occasion a general distrust of our own faculties, to unsettle our conclusions and bewilder our vision, until the reader is driven to doubt whether it be possible, in any case, to distinguish truth from falsehood, the good from the evil, the beautiful from the coarse; whether, in fact, the Lutheran be more a Christian than the Arian, Cæsar a braver soldier than Horace, or Pope a nobler poet than Pomfret. Now, of Mr. Newman's essay, in whatever degree the other objections of Atterbury may be able to attach themselves, it cannot, with the slightest show of justice, be affirmed, that it says nothing. Throughout 450 very closely printed pages, the learning and ingenuity of the writer are kept in constant motion; and cloud after cloud of sophism is subjected to the embrace of a genius, singularly vigorous, lively, and productive. That the offspring inherit some of the unsubstantial elements of their creation, will excite surprise in none who reflect upon their composition.

And, perhaps, of all the subjects which the author endeavours to demolish, not one engages so much of his attention as that religious designation which is known as Protestant. Almost from the very first page of the book, the attack upon Protestantism begins. Whatever be historical Christianity, we are assured that it is not the religion of Protestants. Again (p. 6), the Protestant is said to be compelled to allow, that if such a system as he would introduce, "ever existed in early times, it has been clean swept away as if by a deluge, suddenly, silently, and without memorial; by a deluge coming in a night, and utterly soaking, rotting, heaving up, and hurrying off every vestige of what it

found in the Church." This is only a weak specimen of the hard things which Protestantism has to submit to in the course of 400 pages. It is quite melancholy to see how naked and defenceless the objector turns it out, to brave the hail, and wind, and snow; with not a shed to shelter its penury and starvation, amid all the sumptuous architecture of developement. Now, we wish it to be distinctly understood, that in using the word Protestant, we are not identifying ourselves with those well-meaning, but not particularly well-informed gentlemen, who deliver historical mistakes, with such vehement seriousness, to a tumult of bonnets, or drive over the May streams of Exeter Hall, before a hurricane of pocket - handkerchiefs. We understand the word in the sense in which Bishop Taylor understood it, when he affirmed of the Church of England, that "Catholic is her name, and Protestant her surname;" when, in the preface to his excellent devotions at Golden Grove, he said, "Let us secure that our young men be good Christians, it is easy to make them good Protestants." In the sense in which the late admirable Mr. Davison employed the word, when remarking of Taylor, that he had an absolute and independent grasp "of Protestant principles;" in the sense in which Bishop Hall accepted it, when he summoned believers in general to have no peace with Rome; in the sense of our Articles and our Liturgy. Catholic is our name, and Protestant our surname; we acknowledge the Homilies and the PrayerBook, not the Evangelical Alliance and Dr. Leifchild. And of the faith of this Catholic Protestant Church, the famous rule of Vincentius furnishes a concise and a just interpretation; it holds what has been held always, every where, and by all. Mr. Newman, of course, attacking the rule, because it confirms the English Church, and overthrows the Roman. He accordingly finds insurmountable difficulties in rendering it available. He formerly professed a different opinion. He could once describe it as being not of a mathematical, or demonstrative, but of a moral character; and, therefore, requiring practical judgment and good sense to apply it. He was plain and forci

ble then, he is mystical and weak now. The rule of Vincentius, like every canon in literature, in science, or in art, demands judgment in its employment. Will the most admirable telescope act upon the landscape or the planet, if the proper elevation or depression be not obtained? Could Herschell discover a star, if Hume directed the glass?

When Goldsmith presumed on one occasion to differ from Johnson, he was interrupted by this vehement objurgation," Nay, sir, why should. not you think what every body else thinks ?" Goldsmith was unconsciously silenced by the rule of Vincentius. Literary history swarms with illustrations. Virgil has been elevated to the throne of Latin poetry by the acclamation of criticism; yet Scaliger considered him inferior to Lucan. Among descriptive poets, Thomson has been regarded as the most attractive, yet he only excited the scorn of Walpole. Lycidus is the delight of every poetical heart; yet Johnson thought death in a surfeit of bad taste-a reasonable retribution for a repeated perusal. What

then? Is not the Eneid, after all, the most precious of Latin poems? and are not the Seasons delightful transcripts of nature? and is not Milton's Elegy worthy to be bound up with Paradise Lost? Certainly; each and all deserve their fame. The rule of Vincentius binds them together. Always, every where, and by all, their grace, and fancy, and truthfulness, have been acknowledged; and the corrupt taste of Scaliger, the contempt of Walpole, and the prejudices of Johnson, no more weaken the universal and potential reputation of the authors, than the election of a member of parliament is affected, by the indignant opposition of those voters who expected to be bribed; or the sermon of the preacher is shorn of its eloquence by the disapproval of the beadle, who received notice in the morning to relinquish his hat.

Now, in despite of all the vehement arguments, with which the Roman besiegers seek to beat down this admirable breast-work of CatholicProtestantism, we entertain no doubt whatever of its capacity of resistance and permanence. Of those great central doctrines which our Church