domantade, which must have originally, we suppose, formed part of a declamatory popular discourse, and been thence transferred to the pages of the Dublin Review. We give it at length, as a specimen of the worst style of a work which, in many parts, exhibits all the author's well-known powers of controversial debate. You have but to realise the state of mind necessary for swallowing this style of argument, in order to have before you a calotype picture of the class of whom we are now speaking:

"The wants and wretchednesses of the English Church have been too well exposed to us in modern times, for any danger to remain of her alluring us into her arms. We no longer hear men descant upon the noble simplicity of her worship, upon the severe spirituality of her devotions, upon her freedom from the slavery of outward observances, upon her purity from mere human institutions, that act on the senses and feelings, to the detriment of reason's sterner claims. No: all these former boasts have become the theme of melancholy lamentation, as losses not easily to be compensated. She presents none of the array of the king's daughter, none of the winning graces of the spouse of the Lamb; she dwells in a solitude of her own making; her ways mourn, because none come to her festivals; she is a tributary, a captive. She has no retreats in which holy contemplatives pray in silence, no safe anchorages of religious solitude into which the care-tossed mind, the penitent heart, the timid conscience, can fly for shelter. She has no peaceful cloisters, where virgins, sacred to God, walk in sisterly community, to sing His praises, like their mates in heaven, or to minister to His little ones and poor. She has no sevenfold hour of prayer, no midnight vigils, no daily awakening, at mystical intervals, of the joyful hymn and solemn psalm. The vaults of her deserted churches. would startle at the unusual peal of a multitude's voice. She retains no note of times and seasons; the days of penitential humiliation, and those of spiritual exultation, are equal in her blank calendar and ritual; no soothing strains to each peculiar; no variation of outward garb; no solemn office commemorative of each mystery of redemption, each institution of love; no lively representation of the most glorious scenes. A dull and chill monotony is in her service, suited neither to the Easter Alleluja, nor to the Lenten Miserere. Her churches, if modern, are without consecration; no holy chrism anoints their walls; no mystic rites inscribe on their area the symbol of universal communion; no majestic procession introduces into them the remains of ancient saints. Upon her altars (if they may bear that name) no oil of gladness hath been poured, no symbolical frankincense burnt, no form of ancient prayer recited. No martyr's bones repose beneath them, to break forth thence, one day, in glorious resurrection; but the shrines that once adorned them have been demolished, and their treasures (we mean not the gold that perisheth) burnt and scattered to the winds. The cross of Christ hath been plucked down, the holy images of Himself and His saints ignominiously destroyed a mean and inglorious table hath usurped the place of all. The tabernacle hath been swept away, and with it all its tributary ornaments and perennial lamps, and, still more, the all-holy gift which it contained. The eye,

the sun, the soul of the temple is extinguished, and shall not the entire body be darksome?"-(Pp. 329-331.)

Such are the chief groups into which the great army of modern ecclesiasticism naturally divides itself. Others there are more or less distinctly marked by special characteristics, particularly a vast loose multitude of mere political high-churchmen, who, during the heyday of its success, patronised the movement, but during the late years of rebuke and disaster, have been more and more holding aloof. At the first look of the matter they could not but be disposed to hail a movement which promised to strengthen the foundations of the church, and to deal a new and crushing blow to the hated dissent. It was pleasant to them to hear, from what they deemed the holiest men of the church, that their position, as churchmen, was as safe for eternity as it was undoubtedly comfortable for time; and that there was as much sanctity as there was dignity in episcopal mitres and lawn-sleeves. But by and by things began to look more serious, and the camp waxed too hot for them. The vessel in which they had promised themselves a triumphant voyage, begins to pitch and heave ominously, some of their best officers are washed overboard, and there are cries of rocks ahead; and so they are fain to make their escape to terra firma as best they may, and return to their old, safe, easy-going, high-church ways.

The remedy for all these evils might admit of large discourse, but may be indicated in a very few sentences. The whole may be summed up in a single word-the BIBLE;-the renovating, purifying, transforming energy of the living Word. We close where we began. The Bible, and the Bible alone, is the religion of Protestants. That which formed the creative principle of the Church of England must also be its sustaining principle. That which was at the beginning the source of its life, must in all after times be the spring of fresh renovation and of increasing strength. This is the very palladium of Protestant England-the pith and marrow of whatever is sound, and strong, and holy in its constitution, alike in church and state. Here are the charmed locks wherein her great strength lies, the secret of that hidden might which has made her name great over the whole world; let her be shorn of this, and she will be weak as other lands, and fall, as other noble realms have done before her, a blind and helpless captive, into the Philistine's hands. To all the forms of ecclesiasticism alike-ascetic, idealistic, æsthetic, hierarchic-this is the true and alone effectual antagonist. The free spirit of a living Bible-Christianity must supplant, and by supplanting expel, the slavish spirit of

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an ascetic and cloistral devotion; a cordial submission of mind and conscience to the testimony of God, and a firm grasp laid on its mighty, soul-filling realities, will put to flight the airy dreams of the speculative idealist; and the sober, serious, masculine tone, at once rational and fervent, which is generated within the heart of every Bible-reading and Bible-loving people, will prove the best corrective for all the follies of a feeble, sentimental pietism. Thus biblicism will exorcise and drive out ecclesiasticism, in its every form, and all the world over. This is the grand panacea for all the ills of the body ecclesiastical at this present hour. In an age when the minds of men are uneasily oscillating between two extremes, equally perilous, between the license of the individual reason or "Christian consciousness," on the one hand, and the blind submission to an authority on the other, there is no salvation for us but in cleaving faster than ever to the eternal rock of the Word. Some, we know, are disposed to look hopefully in another direction for a remedy for the evils which now afflict the Church of England. They desiderate a thorough reformation of her whole constitution, such as would remove, at once and for ever, those seeds of mischief which have grown up from age to age in so many harvests of bitterness. They would throw the Protestant Church of England once more into the crucible of organic change, and turn the spirit of this earnest and reforming age to the completion of that work which was begun, but arrested in its progress, three centuries ago. To these views we have nothing to gainsay. As the pia desideria of enlightened and patriotic Christian men, they have our most thorough concurrence and sympathy; and we would only express the hope, that when that work is done, it may be done well-done at once, with a firm, and with a cautious and reverent hand, so that it may neither have to be done again, nor so done as to produce a reaction more mischievous than the evils it was intended to remedy. But all this, we fear, is as yet in great measure matter of mere speculation, having but little to do with the practical business of the present hour. There are few, we should think, who know any thing of the circumstances of the Church of England, who entertain the hope of witnessing, at the present time, any such reform in her constitution as alone her true friends could desire to see. It is a thing, indeed, to be hoped for, prayed for, laboured after, but scarcely for immediate realization. We must look, therefore, meanwhile to other means; and it is surely matter of thankfulness that the mightiest instrument of all is also that which is most available. While little can now be done on the ecclesiastical field, much, very much, can be done on the biblical. To remove the outward excrescences and corruptions that mar the beauty, and hinder

the healthful action of the church, may be for the moment impossible, but to feed the hidden springs of its life and soundness is not so. We may not reform the Liturgy, but we may exalt the Bible. This, thank God, is precisely the sphere in which all manner of practical ameliorations may be carried out, and the efforts of all right-hearted men may have free scope, without let or hindrance on any side, and without coming into collision with any of those great interests and prejudices which stand as insuperable barriers to all reforms of a more organie 'kind. In this good work every man, according to his measure and sphere, may bear a hand. Let us indicate one or two of the ways in which this may be practically done :

1. Through the medium of the Elementary Schools. Never before was there such an opportunity as now for wielding this mighty instrument in behalf of the great principles of Bible and Protestant truth. In fact, till now, England never had a system of popular elementary education at all. That grand element of a nation's culture, which had been so nobly provided for by our Scottish Reformers, had remained an entire blank in the ecclesiastical system of our richer neighbours. It is not so now. For some years past the whole country has been astir with educational improvement; schools have been rising up in every village and rural neighbourhood; every where the school-house promises rapidly to take its rightful place, along with the church and parsonage, around the village green. In every case, at least within the pale of the Established Church, these juvenile seminaries are under the immediate inspection and superintendence of the ministers of religion. Now, this surely is the auspicious time for every friend of the Bible and the gospel putting forth all his strength in the blessed work of leavening the rising race with the life-giving principles of eternal truth. Now is an opportunity, never before enjoyed since the Bible was laid open in the vernacular tongue, of lodging the precious volume as a household book in the hearths and homes of England. Apart from the saving influence of the Word on the hearts of some, the very diffusion of a Biblical atmosphere throughout society thus effected, is a matter of immense importance, and will prove a powerful antidote to whatever is morbid and pernicious in the spirit of the age. This powerful engine doubtless will be, and is, largely abused. Puseyism here, as elsewhere, will eat as a canker into the vitals of the church; still, even amid a large admixture of error, enough of sound scriptural truth will still be taught, to prove a vast improvement over the state of utter ignorance that had previously prevailed. And surely, if the advocates of error are alive and active, this is only another reason for the friends of truth to be up and doing, scattering the precious seed broad

cast over this new and hopeful field. (2.) Through the Universities. We here particularly refer to that great and crying want of the Church of England-that of a regular and efficient system of theological training for candidates for the holy ministry. That this should still be a desideratum in the richest church in Christendom, and in the foremost kingdom of the Protestant world, might seem almost incredible, did we not consider how overwhelming for ages past has been the power of the status quo in every thing which relates to ecclesiastical affairs in England. Yet the fact is so. While the Church of Rome, since the Reformation, has exerted itself within its own borders for the removal of the then scandalous want of clerical education, things remain in the Reformed Church of England in a great measure as they were three centuries since. While students of law and medicine must pass through a certain definite curriculum of professional training, the candidate for the holy ministry is left to gather the knowledge necessary to fulfil his momentous functions very much as he may, tested only by the precarious ordeal of an episcopal examination, immediately before entering on holy orders. The calamitous consequences of this state of things, as seen in the events of the few past years, are melancholy, but surely not wonderful. It is to this cause, doubtless, that we are mainly to ascribe the phenomenon, unhappily so frequent of late among the English clergy, of men already engaged in the cure of souls, or even holding higher office in the church, yet entirely at sea on the most fundamental matters of the Christian faith, and so open to every wind of crude and wild speculation that is abroad in an age of transition and change. Surely this clamant grievance, now so generally admitted and deplored by the best friends of the Church of England, will not long be permitted to remain unredressed. Had this been done thirty years ago, can we doubt that some at least of those unhappy men who now swell the ranks of the Roman apostasy, or have sunk into the still darker abyss of Pantheistic infidelity, would either never have been numbered amongst the ministry of the Church of England, or would have been amongst her ministry still. (3.) Through the Pulpit. That the biblical element admits of great enhancement at once in fulness and in energy in this department, cannot be doubted. With all that is admirable and attractive in the spirit of English Church evangelism, we cannot help thinking that there is, generally speaking, a deficiency in that fulness and thoroughness of biblical instruction, and in that breadth of doctrinal exposition, which the exigencies of the times demand. There is often in English churches, and sometimes in the case even of the holiest pastors, a loose, superficial, perfunctory discharge of the great ordinance of preaching,