is development up to a certain point, and then it stops. This of itself furnishes a decisive argument against any such thing now as a "Neology."

The tendency of Dr. Stanley's mind is very clearly indicated in several passages of his "Introduction," in which he treats of the "province," the "study," and the "advantages of Ecclesiastical History." Thus at p. lxxii. he writes:

"The ingenious essays in which Archbishop Whately traces 'the errors of Romanism,' to the general fallacies latent in every creed and every church, might be extended to all kinds of theological division. The celebrated treatise of Bossuet on the Variations of Protestantism,' might be overlaid by an instructive work on a larger basis, in a more generous spirit, and with a nobler object, 'the Variations of the Catholic Church', showing how wide a range of diversities even the most ancient and exclusive communities have embraced; how many opposing principles, practices, and feelings, like the creeks or valleys of some narrow territory, overlap, traverse, infold, and run parallel with each other into the very heart of the intervening country, where we should least expect to find them. Reformers, before the Reformation, Popes, in chairs not of St. Peter; 'new presbyter but old priest writ large;' old foes with new faces;' heresy under the garb of orthodoxy, orthodoxy under the garb of heresy; they who hold, according to the ancient saying, τὰ αἱρετικά καθολοκῶς,-and they also who hold, τὰ καθολικά αἱρετικῶς;-strange companions will be thus brought together from the East and from the West, from the North and from the South. Pelagius lurks under the mitre of Chrysostom, or the cowl of Jerome; Loyola will find himself by the side of Wesley; John Knox will recognize a fellow labourer in Hildebrand; the austerities of Benedict, the intolerance of Dominic, will find their counterpart at Geneva and in Massachusetts; the missionary zeal of the Arian Ulfilas, of the Jesuit Xavier, and of the Protestant Schwarz, will be seen to flow from the same source. The judgment of history will thus far be able to anticipate the judgment of Heaven, and to supersede with no doubtful hand the superficial concords and the superficial discords which belong to things temporal, by the true separation and the true union which belong to things eternal."

The intent of such a passage as this is not at all doubtful: there is no mistaking the conclusion which the learned author would have us draw from it. If there could be any doubt, it would be swept away by a very significant sentence on the next page (p. Îxxiv.) "To find Christ or Antichrist exclusively in any one community is against charity and against humility, but, above all, against the plain facts of history." We will only remark that to find Antichrist everywhere is to find him nowhere, and to find him nowhere, is widely different from finding him somewhere.

Nothing is easier than to let charity slide into indifference; for charity and indifference are separated by a very narrow boundary, like the sublime and the ridiculous, and easily run into each other. And as good archbishop Leighton remarks,

"Toleration is a herb of spontaneous growth in the soil of indifference; and the weed has none of the virtues of the medicinal plant, reared by humility in the garden of zeal." Our author is evidently anticipating the era of extinct controversies, when all dogmatic disputes will be laid at rest, and churches as well as individuals will live most delightfully in the silent harmony of indifference to all religious doctrines, resolving the whole of their religion into respect for the person of Christ, and into his moral teaching. What but this can be the meaning of such passages as the following?—

"Look at the Bible on the one hand, and History on the other; see what are the points on which the Scriptures lay most emphatic stress; think how much of the life and sap of Christendom has run to leaf and not to fruit; remember how constant is the protest of Scripture, and, we may add, of the best spirits of the universal Church, against preferring any cause of opinion or ceremony, to justice, holiness, truth, and love; observe how constantly and steadily all these same intimations point to one Divine Object, and One only, as the centre and essence of Christianity:-we cannot, with these experiences, hesitate to say, that, if the Christian Church be drawing to its end, with no other objects than those which it has hitherto sought, it will end with its acknowledged resources confessedly undeveloped, its finest hopes of usefulness almost untried and unattempted. (Introduction, p. lxxix.)

It is to the person of Christ, and not to the religion of Christ, men of the school to which Dr. Stanley beyond doubt belongs, would lead us, because in this they think they have found the true centre of unity. They would supersede all positive doctrinal belief by riveting our regards upon the character of the Saviour, as delineated in the Four Gospels, because this they imagine would obviate all differences of opinion and all disputes. Hence advice like this :

"Take any of the chapters of the Old or New Testament to which Prophets and Apostles appeal as containing, in their judgment, the sum and substance of their message; take, above all, the summary of all Evangelical and Apostolical truth in the Four Gospels." (p. lxxxi.)

This is a very incorrect representation of the fact, but it shows the animus of the writer; it proves, beyond question, that he would practically discard, and would have others discard, the doctrinal epistles of St. Paul, as having reference only to a temporary condition of things; as not applicable to the Church of our own age; as containing arguments and principles that died with the occasion; and would thus shut us up to that historical Christ, which, as we know from Christ's own statement, left imperfectly revealed that saving Christ, which He was to become, when the mysteries of His own sacrifice were made plain by the events of His death and resurrection, and the fuller revelations of the Spirit. This is the new view of things that is

being urged in every shape and form, and on all occasions, by such writers as Jowett and our author; but it is not a view which we can adopt, till we have first shut our eyes against the far greater part of our Bible, and altogether forgotten our own sinful condition. We want Redemption, and redemption cannot be given us by History.

The work before us, with which Dr. Stanley has graced his professorial chair, is one which may be read with great advantage, if read with the proper cautions, and a heart well established in the faith. It requires to be approached with a mind that is proof against plausible novelties of sentiment, and that will not be led away by unreal hopes of some wondrous future which is to throw into shade all the past. Whether it is right for a Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History to avail himself of his office to insinuate his own private religious sentiments, and to endeavour to prepare his youthful hearers to take part in a future which exists nowhere but in his own imagination, we will not stay to inquire.

It is

Professor Stanley looks at everything with the eye of a poet. His imagination invests whatever it touches in glowing lifelike colours. Nothing can be more graphic than many of his sketches, both of character and of scenes. But he has given us a series of brilliant historical pictures rather than a continuous historical narrative. There is, too, a want of philosophic depth in his observations, and of sober reflection. He catches at what is external, showy, and exciting. with persons and events, rather than with forms of thought and great principles, he deals. The history of Christianity is the history of the human mind in its struggles against the power of Heaven-defined truth, and in its endeavours to accommodate it to its own earthly condition. Civilization took its type from it; but civilization, even in its higher form, is not vital Christianity. The Christian philosopher looks at the deeper principle which underlies all these outward manifestations of the power of the religion in which he believes. He seeks to arrive at the law of what is called "human progress." Dr. Stanley is content with its delusive appearances. Whatever is most picturesque he gives us, touched with the hand of a painter. There is a striking difference between the style in which he writes history, and the style of the late Professor Stephens of Cambridge. Professor Stephens wrote always as if he felt his robes of office about him, stiff with dignity, and inlaid with silver and gold. He moves with a sort of stately grandeur, invested in a solemn pomp of words. Professor Stanley, on the contrary, writes as if he had thrown off his cap and gown, with a sort of careless ease, as though he were a traveller describing scenery, rather than a historian. There is a charm in this. You feel as if you were with a boon com

panion rather than a stiff Professor. He carries you along with him, beguiled and delighted with his chattiness. His style of writing has, no doubt, this advantage, that it will tend to make ecclesiastical history popular, as Macaulay has made our own civil history; but instead of making men think, it will help to save them from the trouble of thinking, by carrying them delightfully over the broken billows that mark the wake of the church.

Ecclesiastical History, as our author remarks in his Introduction (p.xxxi.), has come to receive a much too restricted meaning. "It has come to signify, not the religious, not the moral, not even the social or political interests of the Christian community, but often the very opposite of these-its merely acci dental, outward, ceremonial machinery." This is very true. The fact has been lost sight of that it is the laity who constitute the church; that its true definition is, "the whole congregation of faithful men dispersed throughout the world;" whereas it has been made to appear as if it consisted only of the clergy and their contentions. This separation of the clergy from the laity-this putting of a part of the church for the whole-has been the origin of many mischievous mistakes. The Christian religion is not an order of men; neither is it a sect; neither is it a set of opinions merely; but it is a mighty principle, that acts with the force and steadiness of a law upon the whole mass of society, at the same time that it acts with its saving power upon individuals. It begins with persons and ends with nations. Christianity worked its way, for a long while, underground in the Roman empire, but all the while it was permeating the elements of Humanity preparatory to its developing those forms of religious life which, ever since, have been the outward signs of what is understood by Christian society.* The remnants of ancient Liturgies which remain are the fossilized relics of early piety, with many earthy accretions, gathered by contact with human superstitions. Still, under the loaded shell is found the kernel. The Eastern church has no more escaped than the Western from the corrupt grovelling tendencies of the ever half-heathen human mind. Human ambition, hiding itself under the meek exterior of Christian humility, has there, as elsewhere, wrought out in silence, not only the pedestal of its own elevation, but also the chains of spiritual despotism which were to hold others down. No Eastern reformation has, as yet, wrenched away these rusted iron bars; nor has it swept away the cockatrice webs of superstition. It is these things that make Ecclesiastical History a perplexing thing. But the human history of the Church, like the divine, may justly be expected to exhibit all that wild order-all that variety in unity and

*Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is, in reality, the rise and

culmination of the Christian church.

unity in variety, which distinguishes Nature. It is the analogy of Nature, indeed, that is the great safeguard against a superficial scepticism, such as Ecclesiastical History might tend to

generate.

The Reformation of the sixteenth century brought back a part of the Western church from the religion of the Fathers to the religion of Christ. But that there is to be yet another Reformation, which is to evolve "the Church of the future," is an anticipation little likely to be realized, except it be by the subversion of all that is distinctively Christian. It is not by negatives, but by positives, great and extensive changes for good are effected. Ancient Christianity, we know, was succeeded by Byzantine Christianity; Byzantine Christianity by Roman Christianity; and Roman Christianity by Protestant Christianity, which, so far from being negative, is as positive as truth itself. How we can go beyond the New Testament in our Christianity, it is not easy to see; but it is easy enough to recede by taking one part of the New Testament to the rejection of all the rest. This, probably, is the sort of advance which some anticipate—an advance backwards!

In his Introduction, treating of the "Province," the "Study," and the "Advantages of Ecclesiastical History," Dr. Stanley lays down some principles to which we can hardly subscribe. To wit, he says, (p. xlviii.,) "the proper material for ecclesiastical history is, after all, not institutions or opinions, but events and persons." Philosophically considered, it is "institutions and opinions," because these, and not "events and persons,' are the permanent elements of human society. Events pass, persons die; but institutions and opinions remain. The rites of religion, the dogmas of Councils, form the osteology, so to speak, of the living system; and the controversies that have sprung out of them are the struggles-the spasmodic struggles, in some cases of the human with the divine, the perishable with the immortal. So long as the Bible has one true doctrine, so long must Christianity be unchangeable. What some men are looking after is, evidently, not a further development only of Christianity, but a transmigration of it out of one thing into another. There may be such a thing as a transmigration of souls-there can be no such thing as the transmigration of truth. If, according to our author, the use of the study of Ecclesiastical History is, to convince us that there is very little difference between one system and another, and that men may be equally good Christians under all, it would be better for us never to study it; for though bigotry is a great evil, indifference is a yet greater. The "pitched battles of Ecclesiastical History," as Dr. Stanley calls the "General Councils of the Church," have not been fought in vain.

Passing from the "Introduction" to the History itself of the