of legal duties, upon which their right to tithes depended, the chasm which has ever since, in a greater or less degree, separated the Church and the people, was opened. The dignified clergy, partly by instinct of class, partly by necessity of political support, entered into a close alliance with that party whose faith was in rotten boroughs, and the perfection of things as they are. The unbeneficed clergy (speaking generally,) were left a contemned and suspected class-to supply whatever of real Christian ministration, was imperatively demanded by the people. Church authorities were not slow to perceive that the permanence of such an arrangement could only be secured by discouraging activity, and that the safety of such a Church lay in social stagnation. Forthwith the Church ceased to be the advocate of progress. Every doctrine which could raise a social contest, every practice which might create an inconvenience, was sedulously discarded. It became almost a part of the Anglican creed that a good Churchman should do nothing. He might be honoured as a canon, reverenced as a dean, toadied as a pluralist, but for his work as a clergyman, he neither received nor expected deference. He left such questionable merits to the lecturers, curates, and Methodistical vicars, who were ready to imperil the Church by their unseasonable piety. The people, ever prone to catch the social tone of the great, soon learnt to despise the clergy, who had nothing but their work to recommend them, and to doubt the loyalty of the preachers of an active spiritual life. Even now the wealthy rector, who confines his parochial duties to taking the chair at meetings, and preaching sermons on grand occasions, betrays in his avoidance of pastoral duties the consciousness that public opinion is still leavened with that evil opinion that active pastoral work is decidedly incorrect, and altogether unworthy of a true blue Churchman.

Can we wonder that in such a society Simeon was locked out of his own church, and that his congregation stayed away, or that the leaders in a new movement who preached the necessity of a spiritual life were greeted with a roar of disapprobation. Through the alliance of political and ecclesiastical vested interests the doctrine of the Church was practically merged in the wisdom of doing nothing, the duty of keeping things quiet, and the propriety of falling in with popular fancies. The Church in its corporate existence became a gigantic parish vestry, the noblest task of the clergy was to set the camel at ease about the difficulty of passing through the needle's eye, and to keep Lazarus quiet by fair words and occasional doles from disturbing the revellers at their wine. Its claim to merit was based not on what it had done, but on what it had prevented others doing. That claim philanthropists on behalf of humanity, reformers on behalf of the nation, and Christians

on behalf of their Divine Master united to repudiate. The result may easily be anticipated. Conscious of increasing unpopularity, the Establishment drifted into an even closer alliance with political abuses. Cathedral chapters became electioneering clubs; church dignitaries the most violent of tories. No churchman doubted that the unbeneficed clergy were a standing menace to the Establishment and must be bridled, that popular feeling was set against it, and that its only trust was in the aid of political connection with all its risks. We can all of us now calculate the cost of clerical impolicy and injustice.

If the dignified clergy have paid a heavy penalty for the alliance into which a fatal error of policy forced them, if in the same long struggle pluralities fell with rotten boroughs, and cathedral chapters and municipal corporations were reformed together, the tories have had equal reason to doubt the value of, and regret the connection of their party with ecclesiastical abuses. No man fights so staunchly for anything as for his religion. Let a religious question be mingled with political agitation and a reform movement becomes a crusade. Those who would by political instinct be on the side of the government, are through their religious convictions its most determined opponents. The flame of popular discontent was fanned into a blaze when wily orators pointed to the churches from which the incumbents were absentees, and parishes into which the rector who drew his tithes from them never entered. An intense and inflexible resolution possesses a reformer when he fights not merely for his own personal interests, but as he conceives for the freedom and welfare of his religion. It was this combination of religious feeling with the political passions of reformers which gave reform so irresistible an impetus. From it inevitably resulted a reform at once political and religious, and if the tories learnt the cost of propping up an establishment which could not support the burden of its own difficulties, churchmen were taught the consequences of creating an unbeneficed clergy to work among the people and of imposing on dignitaries the ignoble task of supporting political abuses, smoothing over social evils, and preaching the wisdom of doing nothing.

Nor has the nation escaped its share of the punishment for the injustice in which, with the patrons of corruption political and ecclesiastical, it was an accomplice. The short-sighted impolicy which made the Church the rich man's tool and convenience, and tainted its doctrine with a base negation of activity, has stricken the nation with a well-nigh mortal blow.

1

1 The congregation of Cowley, Middlesex, a hundred years ago consisted of four landowners. The grandson of one of them has informed the writer that after prayers on a wet Sunday the rector would be told with much courtesy and an apologetic look at the window, that they would not trouble him for his sermon.

The Church's noblest work is the alleviation of social misery on Christian principles. But though so powerful for the regeneration of society, the scheme of Christian charity dwindled down at the beginning of this century, through the inefficiency of clerical ministry, to the distribution of a monthly dole to poor old men and women under the name of "sacrament money." The Church has vainly attempted to recover the ground which, abandoned by a helpless clergy, is now occupied by secular and sectarian agencies. Who can be satisfied with the work of the multitudinous charitable societies which with every variety of capricious rules work across each other's paths, complicate the simple work of charity with questions of church and chapel, or of this chapel against that chapel, and develope a very science of begging? Can the regeneration of society be effected by such agencies as these? As we think of the demoralized masses which defy the efforts of philanthropists armed with the latest inventions for making people good, we are sadly reminded of the vital injury which the nation sustained when the Church was forced to withdraw from the ground over which relieving officers and charitable societies exhaust their energies in vain. Our space forbids us to dwell upon the further consequences of that supreme impolicy which created in the Established Church an unbeneficed clergy. We must content ourselves with having shown how inevitably when the dignified clergy retired upon their revenues and left the work to a new class at once ill-paid and illtreated, clerical work fell into contempt from which to this hour it is not yet free, and the Established Church was forced to seek safety against popular attack in dangerous political alliances; how the preachers of the Church adopted a lower and baser tone, and the popular idea of the Christian priesthood was altogether changed. The whole question now comes before the public again at a time when the air is sultry with the thunder of impending organic changes, politicians are cautiously estimating the value of clerical support, philanthropists are criticising the influence of a Christian ministry, and radicals are preparing for a final assault. We refrain from speaking of the ominous ingenuity with which the Poor Curate grievance is manipulated in Parliament, or of the position which it is destined to occupy when Parliament shall have been reformed. Having counted the present cost of this grievance to the Church, the clergy, and the nation, we leave to another opportunity the consideration of future consequences.

507

THE LAMBETH ENCYCLICAL ON MARIOLATRY.

Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion, holden at Lambeth Palace, Sept. 24-27, 1867. I. An Address delivered at the opening of the Conference, by Charles Thomas, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. II. The Resolution of the Conference. III. Address of the Bishops to the Faithful in CHRIST JESUS. Published by Authority. Rivingtons. 1867.

ALBEIT we confessedly live now under a dispensation of faith, rather than sight, yet the history of the Church teaches us, that an immediate and sensible answer is not seldom, though exceptionally, vouchsafed to the united prayers of the Faithful, on certain special occasions. When Peter lay sleeping in his prisonhouse at Jerusalem, bound hand and foot with manacles and fetters, and closely guarded by his keepers,-" prayer was made without ceasing of the Church unto God for him." Our LORD accordingly, in fulfilment of His express promise upon agreement in special intercession, at once sent an angel and set the Apostle free. It is not undue presumption that would lead us to attribute the unwonted boldness of action and freedom of speech which have been manifested by our Apostolical Succession in their late conference at Lambeth, to special gifts of the HOLY GHOST, in answer to the Church's prayer that He would "lead into all Truth, the Bishops gathered in GoD's Name, that the true Catholic and Apostolic faith once delivered to the Saints being maintained, His Church might serve Him in all godly quietness." The Synod was planned designedly on the model of the first Council at Jerusalem; in its subject-matter, too, it had reference to the similar prevailing dissensions and perplexities of the newlyconverted missionary Churches; and the pastoral letter addressed to "the Faithful in CHRIST JESUS," which has as yet been its main outcome, is framed worthily in the spirit of the Apostolic canon, and promises, with God's blessing, to issue in the same purposed and wide-reaching effects. "When they had gathered the multitude together, they delivered the Epistle, which, when they had read, they rejoiced for the consolation." "And as they went through the cities, they delivered them the decrees for to keep that were ordained of the Apostles and elders which were at Jerusalem; and so were the Churches established in the Faith, and increased in number daily."

The Lambeth Encyclical, beyond question is, even our enemies being judges, incomparably the most remarkable and satisfactory, not to say most important, document which has ever been put forth by the Anglican Communion since its alienation from the

main body of the Western Church; remarkable and satisfactory, both in its subject-matter and in its style, on account of the gravity, dignity, and propriety of its language, its theological exactness in assertion of the Catholic faith, and a certain logical symmetry and coherence in its choice of topics, which give an ad unguem completeness to the whole composition. The very terms of its anti-Papal protest seem, mirabile dictu! to satisfy even the hypercritical tastes and ultramontane prejudices of Archbishop Manning; he is able and willing to construe them in a Catholic sense. Protestantism, erastianism, and unbelief in the supernatural, finding utterance respectively in the columns of the Record, the Times, and the Pall Mall Gazette, alone venture a feeble condemnation of acts and words on the part of the Church's rulers, so decidedly at variance with the first principles of their own opinions; while the broad, latitudinarian, and soi-disant liberal school, as represented in the small person of the Dean of Westminster, have found occasion in the movement to make patent to all the world what it means by liberality, religious toleration, and hatred of sectarianism. The one single point which Catholic-minded Churchmen were, at the first reading, disposed to question and take exception to, was the protest above mentioned. It seemed not only to mar the positive character and logical consistency of the document, regarded as a declaration of faith and an earnest proffer of Catholic reconciliation, but to be an intentional going out of the way for the purpose of catching Protestant supporters by a fling at Rome, on the principle formerly advocated by Dr. Newman in justification of his own excessive abuse of the religious community which he afterwards joined, namely, the traditionary precedent of the best Anglican divines. On further consideration, however, the allusion to the ultramontane dogma of the Papal supremacy, and to the popular system which has overlaid the cultus of the Blessed Virgin, as commonly designated among us by the term Mariolatry, must be, and is admitted on all hands to be, both relevant to the general subject, and in strict keeping with the main purpose, of the Bishops' Address to the Faithful. The Encyclical sets out with an expression of earnest desire to prayer, that GOD, "in His good time, would give back unto His whole Church the blessed gift of unity in truth." Observe, not "unity" absolutely and in the abstract, but "unity in truth." Now, what plainly, as a matter of fact, are just at present the chief and prevailing practical hindrances to the Church's recovery of unity in truth? Assuredly, on the one hand, the pestilent heresies and infidelity avowed and taught openly, both in England and on the continent, by the Rationalistic schools; and, on the other, the arrogant pretensions and excessive claims set up by the ultramontane party, as regards Papal infallibility and supremacy, and apparently under sanction of the same dominant Roman