are some amongst us who are sufficiently heretical to think that the "Saturday" Reviewer did not go quite far enough in his condemnation of excessive newspaper reading, and who trace to it no small part of that decay of patriotism, of public spirit, and of private morality, as well as of that increasing frivolity and want of serious aim in life which are so unhappily characteristic of the present day. A people who, like the Athenians of old, spend their lives "either in telling or hearing some new thing -in other words, in gossiping-are not likely to be animated by very high aims, or guided by any very intelligent standard. And to the great mass of newspaper readers their favourite literature is only another form of gossip. Perhaps one in ten may read the leading articles, and study the telegrams with intelligence, but the rest look only at those portions of the paper which contain what may be most accurately described as gossip-and sometimes as gossip of the worst kind; police reports, reports of proceedings in the law courts-and especially those of the Court in which Sir James Hannen daily puts asunder those whom God is supposed to have joined-accidents and offences, and all the little trivial scraps of news which are forgotten as soon as read, and which have not the slightest interest for, and do not in the smallest degree concern any save the actors in the events recorded.

But the matter has an even graver side than this. On all sides it is lamented, and especially in Protestant communities, that faith appears to be decaying. Nor can there be much doubt that outside the pale of the Catholic Church religion is becoming year by year a less potent influence. The outward forms remain but the soul has departed. In the Church of England fashion appears to be the prevailing power A hundred years ago the fashion was what is now called "high and dry" Churchmanship. The clergy were simply country gentlemen, who on Sundays put on a surplice, and read prayers and a sermon; whilst on weekdays they farmed, hunted, shot, fished, and took their part in county business like any other laymen. Then followed the wave of Evangelical reaction, when the great mass of the clergy did their best to inspire their people with aspirations after holiness by the light of a curiously narrow and mistaken creed. It was natural that a recoil should follow, and that the excessive individualism, which is the leading characteristic of the so-called Evangelical party, should lead the more thoughtful amongst them to endeavour to realize the essentially corporate character of the Christianity they professed. The result was the publication of "Tracts for the Times," with the inevitable sequel the submission to the Church of some of the greatest intellects in the Anglican body. As Lord Beaconsfield has said, that secession inflicted a blow upon the Church of England

beneath which she yet reels. It certainly had the effect of intensifying the differences which notoriously exist amongst the members of that very miscellaneous body. The after effects of the "Tracts" have been peculiar. Those who accept their teaching carefully refrain, save in very rare instances, from carrying it to its logical consequences, while those who reject it drift year by year farther from what it is the fashion to call "the old Evangelical standards," and now form what they are pleased to describe as the "Broad Church party"-a sect, the principal article of whose creed seems to be the absurdity of having a creed at all, and whose Christianity is of so remarkable a type as wholly to abandon the supernatural element in it. All these varying parties have their organs in the press, as have also the multitude of the sects into which Protestantism outside the Church of England is divided; and their wranglings and bitterness do not, certainly, afford the impartial looker-on a very exalted idea of the effect of such religious teaching as is supplied from the pulpits of the Establishment and of the various dissenting bodies. No one, in fact, can make a study of these so-called "religious" newspapers, without arriving at a tolerably definite opinion that the tendency towards unbelief, which is so eminently characteristic of the present day, is due in no small degree to the operations of these prints. In the following pages we propose to examine their leading characteristics with as much impartiality as is possible under the circumstances.

Excluding four organs devoted to the interests of the Catholic Church, the religious papers published in London are, it appears from Messrs. Mitchell & Co.'s valuable guide, thirty-six in number. Eleven of these represent the varying parties into which the Protestant establishment is divided; two are organs of the Baptists; one proudly describes itself as the organ of Nonconformity, and takes for its motto the words "The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant Religion;" Wesleyanism has three organs; Quakerism and Judaism each two; and Presbyterianism, Primitive Methodism, and Unitarianism each one. Besides these, eight papers describe themselves as 'Unsectarian,"-by which word we may understand excessively sectarian-and two as Protestant," one of which "endeavours to unite all on the common ground of Protestantism, and seeks to bring forward the common danger of Romanism," while the other is a "non-Sectarian Evangelical Protestant" journal, which reports sermons, lectures, and general religious intelligence.

Of the "Ecclesiastical Gazette" nothing need be said in this place. It is the official organ of the Church of England, and is not a newspaper save in the most limited sen e of the term. It is published on the Friday after the second Tuesday in every

month, and though nominally issued at the price of sixpence, its circulation is almost purely gratuitous, copies being sent free of charge to every bishop and other dignitary of the Church of England and to every beneficed clegyman of the same body. The contents are not of overwhelming interest to the general reader, consisting as they do, mainly of official documents relating to the Establishment, with occasionally an original paper of almost ostentatious colourlessness on some matter of general interest. The “Guardian” is a far more important and far more widely read organ. Established at the beginning of 1846 as the organ of that section of the Church of England which describes itself as "Anglo-Catholic," it speedily assumed a position as organ of the country clergy, much in the same way as the "Field" is accurately described as "the Country Gentleman's Newspaper." There is hardly a country-house in the kingdom where the latter organ of "Sports, Pastimes, and Natural History" is not delivered with Sunday morning's letters, and where it does not beguile the tedium of Sunday afternoon. In the same way there is hardly a country parsonage which is not enlivened on Thursday by the handsome broadsheet of the "Guardian." The first number of this journal appeared on the 21st of January 1846, in the height of the Corn-Law struggle, and at the time when the relations of Great Britain with Ireland, and with the United States on the Oregon Question, were in a painfully strained condition. It is not very easy to understand from the opening leading article what line the conductors intended to take in politics; the only point about which there was no uncertainty being that the paper was neither Whig nor Radical. Eventually it developed into a Peelite organ, but the phrases of the first number hardly point in that direction. When a Minister is described as "mysterious and intangible-alienating supporters but commanding votes-not liked, not venerated, but felt to be indispensable-ready to retire, but nobody would dare to take his place, and all would be sixes and sevens until he got back again”

when, we say, a newspaper speaks of a Minister in such terms, it can hardly be said that it uses the language of a warm supporter. By the time the "Guardian" had reached its fourteenth number, a sort of settlement had been arrived at. A new series was commenced, the size of the sheet was greatly enlarged, and the "Guardian" is found to be pronouncing the shibboleth of Free Trade with quite the orthodox accent. Its ecclesiastical tendencies speedily became very strongly marked, and more space was given to articles and correspondence on these subjects, the tone being uniformly that of the more orthodox Church of England type. Thus, in the second number of the new series, may be found an elaborate attack upon the Evangelical Alliance, written

we are bound to confess, with both force and wit, for their attempt to construct a new "creed of Christendom." On the lines thus laid down the "Guardian" has continued to flourish for five-and-thirty years. So long as Sir Robert Peel lived it supported him; so long as the Peelites continued to exist as a party it was distinctly Peelite; when that party was reduced to one member, in the person of Mr. Gladstone, it transferred its entire allegiance to him. The clients of the "Guardian " do not invariably relish the devotion of their organ to the extremely versatile statesman who for the present sways the destinies of England; and it is not a little amusing to observe the complaining tone in which some of them protest when they find an apology for an unusually flagrant piece of tergiversation or high handedness on his part forced as it were down their throats. Still, however, they accept it "reluctantly and mutinously," as Lord Macaulay said of the Tories who supported Peel; for the "Guardian" is necessary to the English clergy. It is not only a most useful organ for communication between various members of that body, but it is written in a style whicn gentlemen and men of education can readily tolerate. The political leaders are readable, intelligent and moderate in tone, and the leaders on ecclesiastical subjects are, from the point of view of the moderate "High Anglican,” irreproachable. Of course mistakes are made from time to time. Thus, when Bishop Reinkens and the new sect of "Old Catholics were guilty of making a new schism in the Church, both he and they found a warm apologist in the "Guardian," whilst the proceedings of the Vatican Council were attacked in a fashion which proved very satisfactorily the justice of the claim of the Church of England to the title of Protestant. For the rest the "Guardian - allowing for all differences of opinion-is by no means an unfavourable specimen of newspapers of this particular class. The tone of culture and urbanity by which it is characterized is precisely that which might be expected in the homes of the English clergy, and if at times there is a certain air of patronage in its references to the adherents to the ancient faith of Christendom it is redeemed by the indubitable scholarship of most of its contributors, and by the efforts which they are visibly making towards a higher life and a more complete creed than that which they now possess. That it is politically given over to Gladstonism need surprise no one who is aware of the peculiar fascination which that statesman exercises over those with whom he is brought into contact, and especially those who were trained in the schools of Oxford, and who have sat at the feet of Peel.

The "Record" is a paper of a very different character. It may fairly be described as the organ of "The Clapham Sect "—as it

was the fashion to call the "Evangelical Party" (so called) in the Church of England in the earlier years of the present century. The paper is understood to have taken its origin in certain conversations held over the dinner-table of a well-known city magnate (Mr. A. Hamilton) in the year 1825, at which the friends of William Wilberforce were wont to assist. The first number was not, however, published until the 1st of January, 1828, after being heralded by a prospectus of a length which might have been expected from a sect which lays the extremest stress on what it is pleased to style "the ordinance of preaching." This wonderful document commences with a general dissertation on "the varied and extensive influence of the newspaper," and goes on to ask whether "the parent or the master of a family can indulge a reasonable hope that the constantly repeated history of vice and crime, told with all its disgusting details, and without any serious expression of horror at its enormities, will leave no pernicious impression on the minds of those whom Providence has committed to his care?" Having answered this question entirely to their own satisfaction, the promoters of the "Record" go on to say that they consider it a duty to establish a journal which shall give the news of the day "unaffected by the disgusting and dangerous character of those baneful ingredients which circulate in intimate, though certainly not inseparable, union" with it. An editor had, we learn, been appointed for this purpose, who-happy man!was to work under the control of a committee of management. On the lines thus laid down, the "Record" has been issued twice a week, from Tuesday, the 1st of January, 1828, up to the present time, and its theological views remain exactly what they were at the beginning. The first piece of original writing which was published by this journal, was a violent attack on the Catholic Bishops and Clergy of Ireland, and an apology for those conversions "by the bribe of a bonnet or a pair of shoes," which the writer actually treats as so much a matter of course as not even to require contradiction. The same kind of thing is to be found in the "Record" of to-day; but of late years this journal has awakened to the fact that the narrow teaching of the "Clapham Sect" is meuaced quite as much from the side of intellectual activity, as from that of ecclesiastical supremacy. The Catholic Church, it is beginning to see, is not the only opponent of Calvinism, though, as becomes a paper of zealously Protestant principles, it naturally traces everything to which it takes objection to the influence of "Popery." The result is somewhat curious, since the "Record" would seem to trace the vagaries of the party who indulge in what the late Prime Minister called a "Masquerade Mass," to the direct influence of the Vatican, and at the same time to refer to the same malign power the peculiar scepticism