guilt. His friends and followers, with more | aspirant to its advantages, both temporal and discretion, and at least equal truth, assert for eternal. The terms of membership had never him the praise of having consecrated his riper been definite or severe. Whitfield and his and declining years to the practice of pure and followers had required from those who joined undefiled religion; and to the inculcation of it their standard neither the adoption of any new with all the vigour of his natural disposition, ritual, nor the abandonment of any established tempered by a composure and adorned by an ceremonies, nor an irksome submission to elegance, the most remote from his primitive ecclesiastical authority, nor the renunciation character. of any reputable path to eminence or to wealth. The distinguishing tenets are few and easily learned; the necessary observances neither onerous nor unattended with much pleasurable emotion. In the lapse of years the discipline of the society imperceptibly declined, and errors coeval with its existence exhibited themselves in an exaggerated form. When country gentlemen and merchants, lords spiritual and temporal, and even fashionable ladies gave in their adhesion, their dignities uninvaded, their ample expenditure flowing chiefly in its accustomed channels, and their saloons as crowded if not as brilliant as before, the spirit of Whitfield was to be traced among his followers, not so much in the burning zeal and self-devotion of that extraordinary man, as in his insubordination to episcopal rule and unquenchable thirst for spiritual excitement. Although the fields and the market-places no longer echoed to the voice of the impassioned preacher and the hallelujahs of enraptured myriads; yet spacious theatres, sacred to such uses, received a countless host to harangue or to applaud; to recount or to hear adventures of stirring interest; to propagate the Christian faith to the furthest recesses of the globe; to drop the superfluous guinea, and to retire with feelings strangely balanced between the human and the divine, the glories of heaven and the vanities of earth.

The last of the fathers of the Evangelical Church was Thomas Scott, the author of many books, and amongst these of a treatise called the "Force of Truth," which records his own mental history; and of a Commentary on the Bible, in which the truth he sought and believed himself to have found is discovered in almost every page of the inspired volume. Scott was nothing less than a prodigy of autodidactic knowledge. Bred up in humble life, with little education, regular or irregular, and immersed from youth to age in clerical cares (of which a well-filled nursery and an ill-filled purse seem inevitable parts) he had neither money to multiply books, nor much leisure or inclination to read them. But he studied his congregation, his Bible, and himself. From those investigations, conducted with admirable sagacity, good faith and perseverance, he accumulated a fund of thought indigenous if not original, accurate if not profound, which, considered as the gathering of a solitary mind, is altogether marvellous. In the later editions of his work, indeed, he interspersed such learning as he had derived from subsequent study. But, inverting the established order, he seems to have published his own books first, and to have read those of other men afterwards. Such a process, executed with such zeal and earnestness, if aided by a vivid imagination, would have rendered his speculations instinct with breath and life; if directed by vanity, it would have ascribed to the sacred oracles some wild novelties of meaning at jar with the sense and spirit of their authors; if guided by mercenary views, it would have brought them into harmony with the opinions of the orthodox dispensers of ecclesiastical emoluments and honours. But imagination in the mind of Thomas Scott was not merely wanting, it was a negative quantity; and his chariot-wheels drove heavily. The thirst of praise or of wealth was quenched by a desire as simple and as pure as ever prompted human activity to promote the Divine glory and the good of man. He would have seen the labours of his life perish, and would have perished with them, rather than distort the sense of revelation by a hair's breadth from what he believed to be its genuine meaning. He rendered to his party (if with such a man party can be fitly associated) the inestimable service of showing how their distinguishing tenets may be deduced from the sacred canon, or reconciled with it; and of placing their feet on that which Chillingworth had proclaimed as the rock of the Reformation.

The venerable cloisters of Oxford sheltered a new race of students, who listened not without indignation, to the rumours of this religious movement. Invigorated by habitual self-denial; of unsullied, perhaps of austere virtue; with intellectual powers of no vulgar cast; and deeply conversant with Christian antiquity,-they acknowledged a Divine command to recall their country to a piety more profound and masculine, more meek and contemplative. They spoke in the name and with the authority of the "Catholic Church," the supreme interpreter of the holy mysteries confided to her care. That sublime abstraction has not indeed, as of yore, a visible throne and a triple crown; nor can she now point to the successors of the fishermen of Galilee collected into a sacred college at the Vatican. Though still existing in a mysterious unity of communion, faith, and practice, she is present in every land and among all people, where due honour is paid to the episcopal office derived by an unbroken succession from the apostles. Her doctrines are those to which Rome and Constantinople have made some corrupt additions, but which the Ante-Nicene fathers professed and our Anglo-Saxon ancesGradually, however, it came to pass in the tors adopted. She requires the rigid obserEvangelical, as in other societies, that the vance of her ancient formularies, and calls on symbol was adopted by many who were stran- her children to adore rather than to investigers to the spirit of the original institution;- gate. She announces tenets which the unby many an indolent, trivial, or luxurious learned must submissively receive with a

of the blessed are disturbed by an unwonted discord; and the fiery soul of Whitfield blazes with intense desire to resume his wanderings through the earth, and to lift up his voice against the new apostasy.

It was with no unmanly dread of the probe, but from want of skill or leisure to employ it, that the self-scrutiny of Whitfield seldom or never penetrated much below the surface. Preach he must; and when no audience could be brought together, he seized a pen and exhorted himself. The uppermost feeling, be it what it may, is put down in his journal honestly, vigorously and devoutly. Satan is menaced and upbraided. Intimations from Heaven are recorded without one painful doubt of their origin. He prays and exults, anticipates the future with delight, looks back to the past with thankfulness, blames himself simply because he thinks himself to blame, despairs of nothing, fears nothing, and has not a moment's ill-will to any human being.

better shot than I had described myself. I had an impulse, too, to let it be thought I had only three shots when I really had had four. It was slight, to be sure, but I felt it."—"I have read my journal, though I can hardly identify myself with the person it describes. It seems like leaving some one under one's guardianship who was an intolerable fool, and exposed himself to my contempt every moment for the most ridiculous and trifling motives; and while I was thinking all this, I went into L.'s room to seek a pair of shoes, and on hearing him coming got away as silently as possible. Why did I do this? Did I think I was doing what L. did not like, or was it the relic of a sneaking habit? I will ask myself these questions again."-"I have a sort of vanity which aims at my own good opinion, and I look for any thing to prove to myself that I am more anxious to mind myself than other people. I was very hungry, but because I thought the charge unreasonable, I tried to shirk the Mr. Froude conducts his written soliloquies waiter; sneaking!"-"Yesterday I was much in a different spirit. His introverted gaze put out by an old fellow chewing tobacco analyzes with elaborate minuteness the va- and spitting across me; also bad thoughts of rious motives at the confluence of which his various kinds kept presenting themselves to my active powers receive their impulse, and, with mind when it was vacant."-"I talked sillily perverted sagacity, pursues the self-examina- to-day as I used to do last term, but took no tion, until, bewildered in the dark labyrinth of pleasure in it, so I am not ashamed. Although his own nature, he escapes to the cheerful I don't recollect any harm of myself, yet I light of day by locking up his journal. “A don't feel that I have made a clean breast of friend" (whose real name is as distinctly inti-it."-"I forgot to mention that I had been mated under its initial letter as if the patro- looking round my rooms and thinking that nymic were written at length) “advises burning they looked comfortable and nice, and that I confessions. I cannot make up my mind to said in my heart, Ah, ha! I am warm."-" It that," replies the penitent, "but I think I can always suggests itself to me that a wise thought see many points in which it will be likely to is wasted when it is kept to myself, against do me good to be cut off for some time from which, as it is my most bothering temptation, these records." On such a subject the author I will set down some arguments to be called of "The Christian Year" was entitled to more to mind in time of trouble."-"Now I am deference. The great ornament of the Col- proud of this, and think that the knowledge it lege de Propaganda at Oxford, he also had shows of myself implies a greatness of mind."used the mental microscope to excess. Admo-"These records are no guide to me to show nishing men to approach their Creator not as isolated beings, but as members of the Universal Church, and teaching the inmates of her hallowed courts to worship in strains so pure, so reverent, and so meek, as to answer not unworthily to the voice of hope and reconciliation in which she is addressed by her Divine Head, yet had this "sweet singer" so brooded over the evanescent processes of his own spiritual nature, as not seldom to throw round his meaning a haze which rendered it imperceptible to his readers and probably to himself. With what sound judgment he counselled Mr. Froude to burn his books may be judged from the following entries in them:

"I have been talking a great deal to B. about religion to-day. He seems to take such straightforward practical views of it that, when I am talking to him, I wonder what I have been bothering myself with all the summer, and almost doubt how far it is right to allow myself to indulge in speculations on a subject where all that is necessary is so plain and obvious."-"Yesterday when I went out shooting, I fancied I did not care whether I hit or not, but when it came to the point I found myself anxious, and, after having killed, was not unwilling to let myself be considered a

the state of my mind afterwards; they are so far from being exercises of humility, that they lessen the shame of what I record just as professions and good-will to other people reconcile us to our neglect of them."

The precept "know thyself," came down from heaven; but such self-knowledge as thishas no heavenward tendency. It is no part of the economy of our nature, or of the will of our Maker, that we should so cunningly unravel the subtle filaments of which our motives are composed. If a man should subject to such a scrutiny the feelings of others to himself, he would soon lose his faith in human virtue and affection; and the mind which should thus put to the question its own workings in the domestic or social relations of life would ere long become the victim of a still more fatal skepticism. Why dream that this reflex operation, which, if directed towards those feelings of which our fellow-creatures are the object, would infallibly eject from the heart all love and all respect for man, should strengthen either the love or the fear of God? A well-tutored conscience aims at breadth rather than minuteness of survey; and tasks itself much more to ascertain general results than to find out the solution of riddles. So

long as religious men must reveal their "expe- | unbroken. We cannot know about any seem. riences," and self-defamation revels in its pre-ingly indifferent practice of the Church of sent impunity, there is no help for it, but in Rome that is not a development of the apostowithholding the applause to which even lowli-lic 7005, and it is to no purpose to say that we ness itself aspires for the candour with which it is combined, and the acuteness by which it is embellished.

United States, and, in loathing against the tobacconized republic, becomes an absolutist. A "double first-class" theologian overhears the Evangelical psalmody, and straightway turns Catholic. But Congress will not dissolve at the bidding of the fair; nor will Exeter hall be closed to propitiate the fastidious. The martyrs of disgust and the heroes of revolutions are composed of opposite materials, and are cast in very different moulds. Nothing truly great or formidable was ever yet accomplished, in thought or action, by men whose love for truth was not strong enough to triumph over their dislike of the offensive objects with which it may be associated.

idolatrous abstractions to which the worship | There is nothing to dread from such hostility of more cultivated minds was rendered. Pene- and such enemies. A fine lady visits the trating the design, and seizing the spirit of the gospels, the reformers inculcated the faith in which the sentient and the spiritual in man's compound nature had each its appropriate office; the one directed to the Redeemer in his palpable form, the other to the Divine Paraclete in his hidden agency; while, united with these, they exhibited to a sinful but penitent race the parental character of the Omnipresent Deity. Such is not the teaching of the restored theology. The most eminent of its professors have thrown open the doors of Mr. Froude's oratory, and have invited all passers-by to notice in his prayers and meditations "the absence of any distinct mention of our Lord and Saviour." They are exhorted not to doubt that there was a real though silent * allusion to Christ" under the titles in which the Supreme Being is addressed; and are told that "this circumstance may be a comfort to those who cannot bring themselves to assume the tone of many popular writers of this day, who yet are discouraged by the peremptoriness with which it is exacted of them. The truth is, that a mind alive to its own real state often shrinks to utter what it most dwells upon; and is too full of awe and fear to do more than silently hope what it most wishes." It would indeed be presumptuous to pass a censure, or to hazard an opinion, on the private devotions of any man; but there is no such risk in rejecting the apology which the publishers of those secret exercises have advanced for Mr. Froude's departure from the habits of his fellow Christians. Feeble, indeed, and emasculate must be the system, which, in its delicate distaste for the "popular writers of the day," would bury in silence the name in which every tongue and language has been summoned to worship and to rejoice. Well may "awe and fear" become all who assume and all who invoke it. But an "awe" which "shrinks to utter" the name of Him who was born at Bethlehem, and yet does not fear to use the name which is ineffable;-a “fear" which can make mention of the Father, but may not speak of the Brother, of all-is a feeling which fairly baffles comprehension. There is a much more simple, though a less imposing theory. Mr. Froude permitted himself, and was encouraged by his correspondents, to indulge in the language of antipathy and scorn towards a large body of his fellow Christians. It tinges his letters, his journals, and is not without its influence even on his devotions. Those despised men too often celebrated the events of their Redeemer's life, and the benefits of his passion, in language of offensive familiarity, and invoked him with fond and feeble epithets. Therefore, a good Oxford Catholic must envelope in mystic terms all allusion to Him round whom as its centre the whole Christian system revolves. The line of demarcation between themselves and these coarse sentimentalists must be broad and deep, even though it should exclude those by whom it is run, from all the peculiar and distinctive ground on which the standard of the Protestant churches has been erected.

Mr. Froude was the victim of these associations. Nothing escapes his abhorrence which has been regarded with favour by his political or religious antagonists. The Bill for the Abolition of Slavery was recommended to Parliament by an administration more than suspected of liberalism. The "Witness to Catholic Views," "in whose sentiments as a whole," his editors concur, visits the West Indies, and they are not afraid to publish the following report of his feelings :-"I have felt it a kind of duty to maintain in my mind an habitual hostility to the niggers, and to chuckle over the failures of the new system, as if these poor wretches concentrated in themselves all the whiggery, dissent, cant, and abomination that have been ranged on their side.” Lest this should pass for a pleasant extravagance, the editors enjoin the reader not to "confound the author's view of the negro cause and of the abstract negro with his feelings_towards any he should exactly meet;" and Professor Tholuck is summoned from Germany to explain how the "originators of error" may lawfully be the objects of a good man's hate, and how it may innocently overflow upon all their clients, kindred, and connexions. Mr. Froude's feelings towards the "abstract negro" would have satisfied the learned professor in his most indignant mood. "I am ashamed," he says, "I cannot get over my prejudices against the niggers."-"Every one I meet seems to me like an incarnation of the whole AntiSlavery Society, and Fowell Buxton at their head."-"The thing that strikes me as most remarkable in the cut of these niggers is excessive immodesty, a forward, stupid familiarity intended for civility, which prejudices me against them worse even than Buxton's cant did. It is getting to be the fashion with every body, even the planters, to praise the emancipation and Mr. Stanley." Mr. Froude, or rather his editors, appear to have fallen into the error of supposing that his profession gave him not merely the right to admonish, but the privilege to scold. Lord Stanley and Mr. Buxton have, however, the consolation of being railed at in good company. Hampden is "hated" with much zeal, though, it is admitted, with imperfect knowledge. Louis Philippe, and his associates of the Three Days, receive the following humane benediction-“I sineerely hope the march of mind in France may yet prove a bloody one." "The election of the

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