But we do not believe that these defects in the present constitution of the Indian offices have had any very serious practical results upon the policy of this country towards India, or upon the conduct of the executive government in India; nor therefore that a change in the style and title of the government of India would necessarily bring about the important changes which are sometimes supposed to be connected with it. It is probably true that the natives of India, accustomed to regard with peculiar veneration the attributes of monarchy, would pay a more loyal allegiance to Queen Victoria than to a merchant company, which they conceive to have farmed the revenues of their country. The Crown of England and the imperial standard are emblems which have a meaning throughout the world: they have behind them an immortal history; they rally round them the freest people and the widest colonial empire on the globe. We have no doubt that the announcement of the assumption of the Government by Her Majesty, proclaimed throughout India in the most solemn form, would be hailed with enthusiasm by the great majority of the people, and would be an appropriate answer to the late attempt to wrest the sceptre from our hands. The fusion, or at least the equalisation in rank, of the faithful remnant of the Indian army and the Queen's forces, would be a proper acknowledgment of the heroic gallantry displayed in the late emergency; and it would have the advantage of effacing the past and giving a lofty promise to the future. We do not underrate these external acts of policy or favour, and we think they deserve the consideration of the Government: but we cannot forget that they are external, and that they do not necessarily solve or materially assist the problem before us. Little or nothing could be done in India by the Crown, which the Company cannot undertake; little or nothing has been omitted by the Company, which can be supplied by the Crown; for as we all know in this country, their identity for all practical political objects is complete, and the change would be greater in appearance than in reality.

To what principle can we have recourse more sound and reasonable, than that the Minister for the affairs of India-himself, a member of the British Cabinet accountable to Parliament for his acts- should be assisted by a council or body of men, selected for their experience in the civil, judicial, and military services of India, and as far as possible independent of the vicissitudes of party government? Such is, or ought to be, the present Court of Directors; and if that body be suppressed, the majority of the men who now compose it are precisely those whom the Government would find it necessary to employ under

another name. The time is altogether past when the Company can be said to have any interests of its own distinct from those of India and of England. It has no trading monopoly to defend ; it has no property of its own except a fixed charge on the territorial revenues of India, and an accumulating fund in this country; neither collectively nor individually, have its members any profit or advantage to seek except that of the State they serve; even their patronage has been greatly reduced since the civil appointments are thrown open to public competition. It would be difficult to quote another instance of men devoting their time and talents to the government of an empire with so little personal remuneration or aggrandisement.

The East India Company holds its trust from Parliament, and Parliament is the fit tribunal to review its administration and to correct its mistakes; but we apprehend that no one, who has at heart the welfare and stability of the Indian Empire, can desire to see a more direct and active control exercised by the English House of Commons in its affairs. It is no reproach to the House of Commons to say, that its deliberations on the affairs of India have commonly alternated between passion and indifference, and that both conditions are alike unfavourable to a calm judgment on a most intricate subject. These evils may be aggravated by the artifices of debate, and the opinion of a popular assembly is liable to be grossly abused, when it has to decide on matters so remote from the experience of this country, especially when they are mixed up with party interests.

But above all, the direct and constant intervention of Parliamentary authority, if it were possible, would utterly paralyse the Government of India in India itself: there, and not in England, the strength of the Empire must lie; there, and not in England, the perils, the opportunities, the risks, and the duties of the supreme power are distinctly visible. Every great and successful Governor-general of India has exercised a large uncontrolled power. He, and not the authorities at home, is the real Indian Minister, and nothing could be so fatal to the due exercise of his authority, as that he should be subjected to all the checks of Parliamentary Government. Choose the ablest man you can find; give him large powers; recall him if he fails in the use of them, but as long as he remains there, let him be the head of the Empire in the East. He is the servant of this country, but he is the sovereign of that; and while he rules, it is more important to maintain his supremacy over the people of India, than to enforce his subjection to the people of England. Whatever tends to strengthen the machinery of

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sins against justice and charity; and it is a far graver error, when a writer suffers the feeling of indifference to pass into that of hatred, and then undertakes what is practically the task of writing the history of Christianity as the avowed ally of its most determined opponents. The effects of the former error are in great measure neutralised by their silence; the latter has disfigured the magnificent yet melancholy achievement of Gibbon. We discern, scattered through that memorable work, the signs of an artificial antagonism, of differences purposely heightened, of animosity designedly embittered; but, taking the standing ground of the historian of the Decline and Fall, an impartial and philosophical mind must perceive that his method of treating the subject does not harmonise with all its phenomena, that it fails altogether to account for some of them. Admitting every instance of imposture and deception, repudiating every effort to advance the power of Christianity by violent means of whatever kind, there must have been at work influences of a higher nature to explain adequately the advance not merely of human theories, but of human practice now, when contrasted both with theory and practice two thousand years ago.

If there is something to sober, there is everything to console us in this gradual advancement of human society; and the task of tracing out this growth, and recording its several stages, is one worthy of the highest mental powers and moral qualities. Entering the world silently and unfelt, with no claim to earthly power or any supremacy but that which was yielded to it by consent of the will, Christianity, in its earliest age, baffles our attempts entirely to determine its peculiar character. Many of its features it is impossible not to discern: but whether the professors of the new faith lived as members of the commonwealth in which they were placed, or withdrew, as a distinct society, from all polluting contact with the world, at what time they were separated from the ancient system to which at first they had exhibited no open antagonism,-whether they hoped to accomplish their mission by moulding men imperceptibly to their own standard, or by an avowed warfare against every system of law and polity which was contradictory to it,— when and in what way this new influence made itself felt in the world of imperial Rome, then almost commensurate with the habitable world, all these, with many others, are questions which we can neither answer fully nor determine with confidence. Yet this society, so mysterious in its origin, so limited in its extent, has from that time to the present continued to be a manifest and sensible power influencing the destiny of man. Rising up slowly, and for a time almost unperceived, under the

colossal shadow of Roman dominion, in the midst of effete religions, of a mythology in which few cared to place any belief, of philosophical systems which most felt to be but a poor substitute for worn-out creeds-sometimes barely tolerated, sometimes (and that chiefly under the better emperors) oppressed and persecuted-it became in the space of three centuries, too powerful for the master of the Roman world to confront as an enemy, too majestic to be otherwise than courted as an ally, if not reverenced as a teacher and a friend. Coextensive from that time forth with the wide circle of Roman supremacy, it found for itself a home in the hearts and minds of Europeans, Africans, and Asiatics. Taking up their forms of thought, their systems of philosophy, their ideas of art and government, it shaped itself in some degree to their requirements, it moulded them in far greater degree to its own. It has sometimes asserted with fearless bravery its mission as the benefactor and saviour of mankind, it has fallen at others to become a machine of political intrigue and tyranny. And not unfrequently, at one and the same time, it has seemed in the acts of synods and councils to make Christian duty synonymous with the acceptance of dogmatic propositions, while by its missions it has been drawing barbarous nations and savage clans within the borders of civilisation, and conferring upon them more than the highest temporal advantages.

With all this inconsistency, perplexing only from a narrow and partial point of view, it has in its workings and its fortunes exhibited a marvellous correspondence with those of the people amongst whom it was set up. It adhered in the East to one type unchanged and unchangeable; it adopted in the West the traditions of Roman polity, or emerged with new strength amongst barbarous and ferocious hordes. It has acknowledged the influence not only of philosophical systems, but of language and of art. It was diverted by the luminous subtlety of Greek diction into speculations as fruitless as they were inexhaustible; it achieved, in unison with Latin thought and expression, the renovation and extension of the huge fabric of Roman dominion.

Yet more in the midst of endless fluctuations, perhaps in consequence of them, it has at no time and scarcely in any place failed of effecting some good and uprooting some evil; it has ever been the instrument of conveying incalculable blessings, and of checking the inroads of ignorance and barbarism. It has kept alive the very principles of justice and morality in ages when the wickedness of man seemed destined to extinguish them. Its influence has mitigated the horrors of warfare and allayed

feuds, when feuds and warfare were the great and paramount occupation of life. It has modified where it could not change: it has alleviated the bitterness of the yoke where it could not remove the burden. It has confronted dangers the most opposite, contingencies the most varied; has exhibited the image of calm majesty, of mild and serene greatness, while all beside it seemed plunging into a chaos of anarchy and violence.

From these, the phenomena of its history, it remains to draw the legitimate inferences; and he who would approach them with the determination to find support for particular systems and the evidence of unchangeable institutions, may, by dint of learning or ingenuity, find something to justify every proposition and uphold every system; but he will find much more to perplex and bewilder him. As he who enters the fabled hall of Eblis must bid farewell to hope, so he who would judge in this way of Christian history, must resign his title to a calm and tranquil impartiality. He must yield up the first qualification of a historian before he enters upon his office. For his aim is to maintain principles which admit of no exceptions, and to which the admission of any exception must in strictness of speech be fatal. Disguise it therefore from himself as he may, he will be under the influence of an irresistible temptation to warp facts or to colour them, to impute evil motives to good men and right motives to bad men. His sympathies will be unduly excited on one side, while they will be as unduly repressed on the other. He will refuse to recognise the evil in Gregory the Great, or Hildebrand, or Innocent III., the good in Henry IV., or Frederick II., or Sigismund.

But even if unbiassed by the desire to sacrifice rigid justice to any private object whatsoever, a writer may lack the warmer feelings and livelier sympathies which seem absolutely necessary to impart life and vigour to any historical narrative: and generally there is a close connexion between this unbending impartiality and a cold, perhaps almost indifferent, temperament. In its logical conclusions, as well as in its practical effects, there are few things more vitiating than what is termed Hero-worship, the idolising of an individual through all his actions as the embodiment of certain principles, instead of valuing him for those actions merely which accord with those principles. A safer guide is to be found in that ready sympathy which embraces all systems and refuses not to acknowledge the better points even of those whose lives deserve little forbearance in the balance of historical criticism.

Such, in faint outline, are the qualifications necessary for the historian of Christian times, and such the vast field which he