has more than a hundred in its pay. It is conducted on the same principles as the Pastoral-Aid. Indeed the arrangements of most of the religious 'societies is of an evangelical cast: and there are few in whose Exeter Hall meetings an attack on some other party of the Church is not received with the heartiness of cheering which only polemic zeal can raise. The Church Missionary Society, which has existed sixty years, which has revolutionized whole nations in the interest of civilisation and Christianity, whose converts are numbered by the hundred thousand, does service also as a party engine. Established in imitation of methodist and baptist associations for the same cause, and from the first under the guidance of Pratt, Thornton, Venn, and other Evangelicals of heroic mould, its committeerooms are still head-quarters of party agency, its officers the chief promoters of the cause, and its publications contain elaborate attacks on Tractarianism.1 "In "its choice of men," says its select preacher in 1858, "the Church Mis"sionary Society has erred rather in "excess than in defect of holy jealousy. "And thus, directly or indirectly, it has "become a rally-point and bulwark in Your Church. . . . Let the Church Missionary Society be cajoled or frightened, "and many an Eli would tremble."

There is again another means of united action which has been devised of late years for the same object,clerical meetings. It has long been customary for the clergy of many districts to meet for conversation and mutual encouragement, though the custom has been chiefly adopted by those of the Evangelical school. But within the last few years a system of monster meetings has been brought into play. There assemble, at stated periods, around some well-known chief, a large number, -sometimes two or three hundred,-of those clergymen who are known to be of sound views, with a very few favoured laymen. Addresses are delivered, sermons preached, and statements made.

*See, for example, the "Church Missionary Intelligencer," January, 1855.

Young clergymen make the acquaintance of the great leaders, some of whom are on such occasions never wanting: and from them they learn how war is waged, and battles won. In London, the time of the May Meetings in Exeter Hall is known as one of general rendezvous, and it is then that the inner circle of champions hold council on their policy and prospects. The large meetings are held at various places; one, the origin, we believe, of the rest, at Weston-superMare; one at Peterborough, one at Bristol, a large one at Islington; and others. The addresses are prepared with great care, special subjects being generally allotted beforehand to each speaker; and they show study, and, except in the case of the chief leaders, a diffident sense of the greatness of the occasion. A small book is now before us, containing the addresses delivered at one of the largest of these meetings in the year 1858. It is called "The Church," is published by Wertheim and Macintosh, and edited by the Rev. Charles Bridges. Dr. McNeile, who is of course one of the speakers, seems to have urged the importance of the meeting, composed, as he says, of the Evangelical clergy of the Church and reminds his hearers that they are the salt of the whole mass. Canon Stowell follows him in an address of which the following passages are select examples.

66

"After all, what is the real tendency "of broad church principles,' as they are called? Why the very name is "sufficient to brand them; for we know "that broad is the way,' not of truth, "but of error; and that narrow is the way' which leadeth to life eternal.”— (P. 19.)

"There is as much hostility in the "carnal mind to the distinctive doctrines "of the gospel now as there was then; yes, and among the clergy as among "the laymen, however much it may be "reserved or disguised."-(P. 22.)

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"There can be (with regard to India) "no longer uncertainty as to what we "have to apprehend, from the way in "which Lord Stanley has spoken out. "I thank God for his candour, while I

"bitterly deplore his godless senti"ments.”—(P. 38.)

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The Rev. J. C. Ryle remarks that Exeter Hall is a fifth estate of the realm. He laments that young men are not as satisfactory as could be wished. "How often, after writing to friends, "and then advertising in the Record, Evangelical clergymen are obliged to put up with curates not established in "the faith, and not up to the mark, "simply because no others are to be "met with." He laments that no effort is made to "put out of the Church" men who differ from him in their views of inspiration and future punishment. One more quotation we must give, and then dismiss the discourse with satisfaction :

46

try. Better build by ourselves, better "let the work go on slowly, than allow "Sanballat and Tobiah to come and "build by our side. I believe that all "communion of that sort, all interchange of pulpits with unsound men, "is to be deprecated, as doing nothing "but harm to the cause of God. I be"lieve that by so doing we endorse the "sentiments of persons who have no "real love of Christ's truth.

We en"able the High-church party to manu"facture ecclesiastical capital out of the "Evangelical clergy, and to make people "believe that we are all one in heart, "when, in reality, wo differ in first "principles. From such unity and co"operation we pray to be delivered."

we

Such are the chief features of the organisation of a powerful and active school in the Church of England. If ever that Church is to be again the Church of the nation, if ever it is to lead a grand attack on vice, and folly, and worldliness, it cannot be by the continuance among this large portion of her clergy of the spirit which seems to animate their collective action. In estimating it, we use no unfair tests; we

appeal to no private scandal; we repeat no anecdotes; we quote the dicta only of the leaders of the party. Of individual intolerance we do not complain; it is a fault common to all ages and all parties. We shall not quote the Record; even though some of the leaders acknowledge it as their organ, by publishing their views in its columns, we shall yet not urge against their followers the rancour of which very many of them disapprove. When a minister of a central manufacturing town, who is usually courteous, and a favourable specimen of his school, says that if he knew any clergyman to hold the extreme High Church view of the doctrine of Confession he would not allow him to enter his family-" he could not trust him," we have no wish to charge the saying upon all those whose champion he is. But, when in every step that is taken in common by clergymen of this party, in every union for purposes of philanthropy or spiritual communion there springs up at once a polemic spirit, often bitter and always uncompromising, it is a sign that the party in which such can be the case has done its work, is shorn of half its strength for other and holier purposes, and had better die.

But the Evangelical party is redeemed by the working of its parishes. It is to its credit that it is foremost in united schemes of charity: it is to its credit, to some extent, that foreign missions have so increased and spread. But that which saves it from wreck, which atones for its arbitrary social maxims, which partly conceals its obnoxious polemic. organization, is the fact that the Evangelical clergy, as a body, are indefatigable in ministerial duties, and devoted, heart and soul, to the manifold labours of Christian love. The school, the savingsbank, the refuge, all the engines of parochial usefulness, find in them, for the most part, hearty supporters and friends. There is a positive literature of parish machinery. We have now before us a small work on the subject by the minister of a large parish in the south-west of London, which gives the details of the administration of such a system. The hardest workers are not generally the

fiercest partisans; and it contains throughout not one word of religious sectarianism or hostile inuendo. Instead, there are practical suggestions and information on topics of which the following are some: -books for the sick, arrangement of pulpit, management of voice, district visitors, psalmody, almoners, Sunday and other schools, maternity fund, early communion, charity sermons, meetings, parish accounts, school books, rewards, confirmation classes, the cooking of rice, relief tickets, penny banks, soup in time of cholera, lending library, cottage lectures, open-air services, working men's seats in church, local collections, and books of memoranda. This parish, we are bound to say, is but a specimen of many; and we could quote, but that such work is not the nobler for the praise of men, similar tracts, supplying for parish circulation the annual narrative of progress in this kind of work. It is not necessary to dwell long on the subject; it is patent, and easily appreciated. But when the history of the Evangelical party is written, it will be told of them, that with narrow-mindedness and mistaken traditions, with little intellectual acquirements and ill-directed zeal against their brothers in the Church, they yet worked manfully in the pestilent and heathen by-ways of our cities, and preached the gospel to the poor.

It remains to say a few words on the intellectual attitude of the party. This is not the occasion to discuss points of doctrine, or examine questions of ecclesiastical polity. But it is impossible not to remark that the position which this body of clergymen, the appointed guides to thinking and reflecting fellow-men, have deliberately and almost unanimously adopted, is one of direct antagonism to intellectual progress and research. In this one point they have followed the tradition of the elders. Venn wrote, in 1780, "Our God never "prescribes a critical study of the "Hebrew text;" and since then it is hardly too much to say, that his followers have not led public opinion in any one point of mental advancement, or contributed one single work,—at all

events more than one,-which has been generally accepted as a signal addition to the stores of theological speculation or criticism. Their most distinguished men are not men of conspicuous learning; their most highly prized writings seem even to slight the acquirements of science and scholarship. And this is the case not only in their practice, but in their theory. The spiritual element of our nature is so highly exalted, that the intellectual is looked upon with absolute suspicion. "The cultivation of the intellectual powers," says Dr. Close (Sermons, 1842, p. 149), "can of itself "have no tendency towards moral or

spiritual good. . . . Time cannot alter "the deteriorating tendency of unas"sisted human intellect." Of all studies discordant with the Church of England, Mr. Clayton, a well-known evangelical preacher, writes (Sermons, p. 239): "Young persons should especially be "careful to turn away from all such "dangerous speculations." Mr. Ryle, even when speaking of the duty of reading and study, which he allows to be neglected, makes the singular exception, "I do not mean that we ought to read

things which do not throw light upon "the word of God" (Home Truths, vol. vi.), and in his preface to a commentary on St. Luke, shows his idea of the value of accurate criticism by the remark that "the various readings' of the New "Testament are of infinitesimally small "importance." The Rev. C. Bridges (Weston Address, p. 46), somewhat naïvely confesses, "with regard to the snares for the intellect, if we seek to "meet the great reasoner on his own ground, he is more than a match for us ;" and Canon Stowell, apparently with regard to a late edition of the New Testament, laments that "at this time

some of our learned and critical men "do us more injury than advantage."

Now it is well known that the last few years have been years of great advance in theological knowledge. Science, ethnology, the history of language, accurate scholarship, are doing much to assist the study of the Bible, and further the progress of religious thought. It is

probable that much will be done by the pursuit of these studies to modify opinions and suggest new canons of criticism. We have no wish that it should be otherwise. Religious thought was never intended to stagnate. Novelty is not, indeed, a mark of truth; but obstructiveness in matters of theory is a certain guide to error. And, therefore, towards new phases of sacred speculation the attitude of a lover of truth will be, not antagonistic virulence, but judicial impartiality. He will not be rash to adopt the guesses of a restless ambition; but he will not shut his eyes to reasonable and probable argument. He will not deem the intellect the sovereign. principle in man; but he will determine, in God's strength, to bring anything to the bar of reason. He will not read the apostolic precept as though it were "Disprove all things;" but he will no more be driven from intellectual duty by fear of consequences, than from moral. He will give all reverence to those who teach the soul: but, loyal to the ends to which man's nature points, he will render unto mind the things that are mind's. And so he will strive, without partiality or without hypocrisy, to enter the kingdom of God as a little child; and so act, if he may,

That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music.

Is it possible that Evangelical energy may ever adopt this attitude?

It was the essence of Protestantism to attack prejudice and they are the most zealous Protestants of the Church. The chief doctrine of the Reformation was the right of private judgment; and though many of the maxims of the

Reformation have been lost, this has not quite died yet. Is it yet possible that a fuller knowledge of the tendencies of the age, and some mighty resurrection from the narrowness of organised partizanship may change the current of their sympathies, and make them, even now, champions, not of change, but of inquiry, and research, and development? It cannot be, while they believe the sentiment of Dr. Close, in his Lectures on the Evidences, that Revelation was not meant to gratify a "proud investigation." Investigation of every possible subject is the bounden duty of every educated man, as far as his time and talents allow; and that investigation may well be proud which is the result of powers bestowed by the Almighty for the study of His mysteries. If they refuse to acknowledge this duty; if they cling to the crystallized system of what was once a working and living spirit, forgetting nothing, learning nothing; if they give all the energies of their collective action to attack some difference of ecclesiastical creed, and all the weight of their social influence to create artificial division in what God, by forming human society, has pronounced united; then all their labours of parish charity, and schemes of worldwide philanthropy, will hardly save them from the sentence which awaits all that is transitory, because artificial; and those who know what once the party was will see, when they look upon it now, only a fresh instance of the way in which zeal is pernicious, when its purpose is an anachronism, and good men wasted, when the mind is narrowed to tradition, and the sympathies distorted to party.

EVERY poet pleads, and every critic laments, the difficulties opposed by modern habits of thought, and the constitution of modern society, to the production of substantial works of

poetic art-such, we mean, as affect an independent concrete existence, instead of merely serving to express the feelings of the writers as individuals. If, it is said, the author resorts for his

subject to the antique or the ideal world, the degree of his success does but serve to measure the remoteness of his exile from contemporary interests and sympathies; if, on the other hand, he endeavours to reflect the life around him, he can no more escape alloying his strain with the transitory and accidental than the diver can avoid bringing up the oyster with the pearl. This is true; but it cannot be said that the unhappy divorce between the real and ideal is the especial disaster of our times. Few and brief have been the periods in human history when a vital belief in a mythology capable of supplying art with the most exalted themes has co-existed with the ability to apply it to poetic usages. The reason is evident that such a degree of ability implies a degree of culture and intelligence in presence of which the most picturesque legends disappear like

"A withered morn,

Smote by the fresh beam of the springing East."

For two generations only was it possible for the Greeks to retain, along with the civilization which permitted their tragic poets to exemplify the perfection of artistic skill no less than of native power, the simple traditional belief which gave their dramas a root in the national life as well as the national sense of beauty. Dante's contemporaries readily explained the gloom of his aspect as the effect of his Stygian experiences; but the Cardinal of Este, two hundred and fifty years later, would probably have referred the Divine Comedy to the same category as the Orlando Furioso. In fact, the difficulty of accomplishing the task on which modern criticism rather vociferously insists, of finding imaginative expression for the interests, aspirations, and social peculiarities of our own age, is so far from being any special characteristic of the age in question that it would be hard to point out any writers who have more unequivocally succumbed to it than the great Italian pair of the sixteenth century,-Ariosto and Tasso.

The contemporaries of the Constable Bourbon can hardly have cared much about Orlando; and, in Tasso's day, the Holy Sepulchre, so far from being the goal of a crusade, would not even answer as a pretext for replenishing the Papal coffers. If, then, the universal witness of the human heart justified Mrs. Browning in her "Distrust" of

"The poet who discerns

No character or glory in his times,
And trundles back his soul five hundred years,
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle court,”

The

the successive laureates of that lucky house of Este ought to have been poetically dead and buried long ago. notoriety of the contrary fact suggests that the utilitarian theory of poetry may perhaps be less sound than specious. We see (and, if further example be required, Spenser, Keats, Shelley, and Schiller are at hand) that it is quite possible for genius to disdain the ground of realities and yet exist-though, it may be but as a wild, wandering beauty, a

Strange bird of Paradise That floats through Heaven and cannot light."

The modern impatience of the indirect operation of the humanizing and harmonizing influences of art-the confusion of the poet's function with that of the philosopher, the legislator, the reformer-have only tended to make writers conceited and readers unjust.

Still, however extravagant the form in which it may sometimes find expression, the desire to see poetry brought into a more intimate relation with the practical needs of the age is in itself laudable and legitimate. In proportion to our appreciation of the elevating and refining character of its influences must be our unwillingness to contemplate these as necessarily limited in their operation to a small literary class. cannot be said that contemporary poets have, as a body, shown any indisposition "to grapple with the questions of the time." On the contrary, their mistake

It

has rather consisted in the failure to discriminate between those vitally and eternally significant and the merely trans