Court, another year becomes the accuser of Jowett, whose sin is to think as freely as Pusey thought in those years when the Duke of Wellington honoured his youth by appointing him Regius Professor of Hebrew. We call on all the parliamentary High Churchmen whom our voice can by any means reach, and beg them to compute how much the Church can be strengthened by such quarrels.

It will be observed that in the last thirty years the schism of High and Low Church, ordinarily far too bitter, has again and again suddenly been healed in their conjunction to crush a freedom distasteful to both; and although the present combination of High and Low Church is in part against a bishop who avows that his conclusions are inconsistent with the parliamentary enactments, yet, among the lower clergy at least, there was fully as much animosity, and an illegality which no one can now impute, in the first attack on Dr Hampden on his appointment to be Divinity Professor. By the joint testimony of the late Dr Arnold, Dr Hawkins of Oriel College, the late Archdeacon Julius Hare, and last, not least, the Bishop of Oxford, Dr Hampden in no respect went beyond his subscriptions, but exercised a liberty strictly within the limits of law. He has since been raised to the Episcopate. The burst of anger thereby caused was dispelled by Bishop Wilberforce, who most unexpectedly declared that after a full examination of the case he found Dr Hampden to be irreproachable. Unhappily all men have not nerves strong enough to bear the tumult of controversy concerning matters which to their hearts ought to be sheltered in deep tranquillity; and by the rending asunder of friendships, and marvellous cruelties which bigotry develops, their sensitiveness is quite overpowered. Bishop Hampden (a gentleman wholly unknown to us) appears to have been blighted and crushed by that terrible attack. He has withdrawn nothing; he has neither apologized nor recanted; he has since been promoted to the bench of bishops; no one any longer ventures to say that his Bampton Lectures are unorthodox" yet, since that learned and striking publication, he has not produced anything which, as far as we can hear, his friends commend anything which can justify the ministers of the crown who raised him to the dignity first of Professor, next of Bishop. Here is a manifest proof how active in the clergy is a spirit which tries to crush (and does crush) freedom within the legal limits equally with freedom beyond those limits. Are we hard upon them in saying, this marks a bigotry which nothing can satiate?

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One of the ecclesiastical regulations may be here pointed at, which is mischievously encouraging a sectarian spirit in the clergy—we mean their power of appearing as accusers of a brother clergyman as heterodox. Everybody must see the intensely schismatic result of an accusation that has failed. "Schism" is not a mere outward division: it is emphatically spiritual. What kind of "Unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" existed, or could have existed, in Oxford after either the first movement to degrade Dr Hampden, or the prosecution of Dr Pusey? Schism was thenceforward the normal state. Surely all the ecclesiastical prosecution for religious error (if such a thing is still necessary in extreme cases) should belong entirely to an ecclesiastical attorneygeneral in which case the power would not be used, except when some grave scandal affected the minds of the laity at large— a scandal inconsistent with the professed ends of the National Church; and the clergy would be unimplicated in the odium of mutual antagonism and the effort at mutual ejection.

The word compromise is often stigmatized as hateful and abominable in a Church, inasmuch as religion ought to maintain truth without compromise. This is only one of the points in which sectarianism, the bane of Protestants, has eaten its way into the heart of the Anglican clergy, and has proportionately sapped the very foundation of the Church. A verbal confusion perhaps deceives many. Of course, no clergyman can accept it as a compliment to be called "a compromising person;" for this will suggest that he is ready to say the thing that is not when it is convenient. Truthfulness of the individual man is essential to moral worth; but for this very reason the system of the Church must be lax, in order to allow truthfulness to individuals. The compromise does not consist in personal falsehood, but in legislative comprehensiveness; and those who resist the relaxations of legal test-articles upon an abstract notion of "upholding truth," either cause men to be untruthful or drive them into secession : in each way damaging the strength of the Church, whether spiritually or materially. The parties internal to the Church, High and Low, are both painfully aware, in the formularies, of certain passages which gall them. The Evangelicals do not like the bestowal of the right to forgive or retain sin in the ordination service; nor baptismal regeneration; nor do the High Church admire the article on predestination, and various other matters yet neither party will propose relaxation in the subscriptions, whether for the others or for themselves. And why

not? Avowedly because they dread lest, through the movement of the national mind, many beside, not less honest, less pious or less learned men, whom the formularies now exclude effectually, should simultaneously gain admission. They prefer to encourage untruthfulness rather than allow the Church to become more really national.

But what might laymen do? It may be said: give us a plan. Nothing good can be got without paying a price; and no new organization worth having is to be had without some concession. But concessions, like taxes, are disagreeable, and always afford something to object to. The first thing needful is, that statesmen should feel, and should declare the object to be desirable; as by a solemn vote of Parliament, "It is deeply to be regretted that the Church has become too narrow for the nation; and measures ought to be taken to make it as comprehensive as possible." So soon as it is certain that a solution of this problem is desired by authority, many practical methods will be suggested. But if this is much longer delayed by the friends of nationalism in religion, the thing may shortly be taken out of their hands by the advocates of sectarianism.

L

THE

TOLERATION-THE POPE'S ENCYCLICAL.

From "Fraser's Magazine," August 1865.

HE very name Toleration has in modern days been disapproved and disowned, as concealing an assumption inherently offensive, by many honest advocates of freedom and equality. We respect and approve their zeal, which we hold to have practical reason in many cases. We entreat any such readers to believe, that with them we disavow unseemly arrogance in assuming to "tolerate" others: yet we think that Toleration by the State, as distinguished from perfect Neutrality, must often be justified; toleration, not of foreigners only, but of citizens; and in defence of our title we beg at once to indicate special cases. They most easily and commonly arise when rulers and ruled belong to different races, having different religions, different philosophies, different moral development, and therefore, in certain points, different codes of morality. Polygamy is a notorious and critical test; as it involves new and difficult problems to the courts of law (if it be unknown to the code of the rulers), while it entails very grave consequences to the whole social existence. If the same British Government refuse to sanction polygamy in the United Kingdom, but recognize it in the Mohammedans of India, where it is of historic growth, no one will object to the phrase that we tolerate polygamy in India. Undoubtedly the word implies that we regard the institution as a lower and undesirable state, which mankind have elsewhere outgrown, and as a relic of barbarism which a wise Government ought to discourage. On the contrary, other practices which claim religious sanction in India,—such as the burning of living widows on a dead husband's pile,-the crushing of pilgrims under the wheels of Jaganaut's car,—are no longer tolerated by us, but are suppressed with a high hand. While a foreign practice is judged of from a moral point of view, no one can reasonably object to our feeling repugnance to it, even while it may seem unadvisable to punish it by law. On the contrary, when a difference of religion does not touch social morality, but is only decreed to be moral by ecclesiastical enact

ment, as the question whether Ali ought to have been the first khalif, or, how Easter should be computed, then there is reason in the dislike to the word Toleration. It seems to us absurd for a Turk to say that he tolerates a Persian heretic, or for Dr Arnold that he tolerates a Jew. The unbelief of the Persian in Turkey, or of the Jew in England, has in it nothing of a moral or political character with which Law can justly concern itself. Christians differ among themselves in moral questions and sentiment at least as much as the Jew differs from them; and the same may be said of Sonnee and Shiite.

So much suffices to indicate that there is a real margin-how broad, is a separate question-between those enormities of fanatical religion which the law justly punishes as inhuman or perniciously immoral, and those diversities of religious belief which the law and its executive ought to treat with absolute impartiality. The two extreme cases are clear enough. On the one side we have (perhaps) rival schools of science,-homœopathic and allopathic physicians; astronomers or geologists of an old or new sect; Athanasian and Arian Christians; Nestorians and Monophysites; Quakers and Jews. Except that the Quaker may come into collision with patriotism by his peculiar aversion to the use of force against force; in all besides we have only differences of opinion which may be called scientific;-towards which, not the law only, but the whole Executive Government, ought to bear itself with perfect equality. While the dispute is one of science, the Government must not uphold one side and discourage the other; but, like Gallio, so much reviled in Puritanical sermons, must care for none of these things." In selecting its officers,— in bestowing honour and promotion, controversies of science are quite as irrelevant as the colour of the skin. The opposite extreme case is, where pernicious immorality or injustice has been incorporated with religion. No European is so imbecile as to say that the Thugs in India should have been allowed to strangle and plunder travellers, because it was part of their religion. We need not fear that anyone will call the legal suppression of such crime religious persecution. So again, when we punish an Englishman at home for exposing indecent pictures in his shopwindow, and even for having them on sale, it is not religious persecution if we forbid similar offences against public morality in India, though they have come down under the cover of an ancient religion. When a form of worship, a cultus, assumes a character which is widely different from scientific research or opinion, it