St. Peter was the first Bishop of Rome. As he states it, the purport of his book is to show

That St. Peter was not Bishop of the Roman see.

That no early or sufficient evidence warrants us in saying that St. Peter was ever at Rome at all.

That the Papal claims, high and lofty as claims could possibly be, are not founded in faith but in doubt,-not on settled history, but on growing fable,-and receive support from neither the word of God nor the testimony of man.

As he very fairly puts it,

“The Atlantic cable consists of many links; by it messages are sent across the ocean. It is not enough that it should be just such à length, or extend just so far, or be complete in all its parts. It may be perfect in all these ; but if it is not attached, in its first link, to Heart's Content, or · Valencia,' it carries no message! All the links, for that one want, are practically dead!

“Now, that is just what this book is designed to show respecting the Papal Claims—that in working back, they fail to touch that point which is alleged to be the Source of all! Thus, even though we should grant a long succession of Roman Bishops, Pontiffs, Popes,yet so long as they claim 'succession to St. Peter,' and yet fail to connect their cable by its first link with Peter, their claim is naught, and fails to carry

“Even though we grant all that the Church of Rome says about the 'Rock,' and about 'St. Peter' as the Rock; and about the Church,' as built upon the Rock,-still, if there is no loop on the Rock, whereby to fasten their chain, that Rock is plainly no strength to them.

“Even though we were to admit all that the Church of Rome asserts about primacy, supremacy, papacy, infallibility, as connected with St. Peter and at Rome,-yet until she connects St. Peter with Rome, she has done nothing !

“Therefore, if the purport of this book should seem to be but limited, it is because it professes to deal with that first link, and with that only. That link failing, all the rest of the chain is useless !

“That which is ‘first' is indispensable in everything. What would a building be without its first stone ? or a tree without its first planting ? or a railway without its first sod upturned ? or a river without its spring ? or a life without its first breath ? or an education without its alphabet ? So, what are the Papal Claims without-Peter? And at Rome ?”

In proving this, Mr. Maguire goes of necessity over ground familiar to theological students; he may, however, justly claim the merit of having presented his statements in a very popular and intelligible form, and of having argued them with fairness and ability. The point he seeks to maintain is one of extreme importance in controversy, although not of the consequence which Romanists would assert it to be : to them it is of course vital, for without it their whole system is utter delusion. We therefore feel grateful to Mr. Maguire for his timely production, which, far less bulky than the book of his namesake, infinitely exceeds it in sterling value. We commend it heartily to the attention of our readers.

ST. PAUL AND PROTESTANTISM. St. Paul and Protestantism; with an Essay on Puritanism and

the Church of England. By Matthew Arnold, D.C.L., LL.D., formerly Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Oriel College. Second Edition. London : Smith, Elder, & Co. 1870.

The work before us is to be regarded as a kind of theological sequel to a previous treatise by the same author, entitled, “ Culture and Anarchy: an Essay on Political and Social Cri. ticism." In his earlier work, Mr. Matthew Arnold prescribes for all our present perplexities and difficulties, whether speculative or practical, the one sovereign remedy of culture, and he describes this as “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly, which makes up for the mischief in following them mechanically.” Or, in brief, culture is “a study of perfection,” that is to say, of “a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites 'the two noblest of things, sweetness and light.'” According to our author, we have long been labouring under an undue preponderance of what he calls Hebraism, a term which, in his phraseology, means an habitual display of energy in practice, a “paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work," an "earnestness in going manfully with the best light we have.” We have too little Hellenism amongst us; that is to say, we do not sufficiently endeavour to acquaint ourselves with those ideas which are the basis of right practice, and to arrange them in a due adjustinent; we do not, in short, strive to see things as they really are, but are content to aim at right acting while we ignore the necessity for right thinking. Nor is this defect confined to one section of the community; it pervades all classes alike. It is the great blemish of the Philistines, the typical men of our middle class; Vol. 70.–No. 401.

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who, as children of the established fact, are inaccessible to ideas, and prefer to the sweetness and light of culture the dull dismal machinery and routine of business. And it is equally prevalent among the Barbarians, our aristocratic class, who have perpetuated to our own day that staunch assertion of individual liberty, that passion for field sports, and that cultivation of bodily exercises, and of the exterior graces, which were the characteristics of the nations who overthrew the effete Roman empire, and laid the foundations of modern Europe upon its ruins. The individuals of this class are prevented by the seductions of worldly splendour, of security, power, and pleasure, from striving to entertain right ideas of things; or, in other words, from admitting into their characters a due amount of Hellenism.

All of us, Mr. Matthew Arnold tells us, so far as we are Barbarians or Philistines, or belong to his third class, that of the Populace, imagine happiness to consist in doing what one's ordinary self likes. Culture leads us, on the contrary, to develope one's best self, the human instinct and right reason with which we are all more or less endowed, and which, after it has been extricated from the trammels of our class life and class prejudices, may be accepted as a paramount authority in the sphere of religion no less than in matters of literature or politics. · We have thought it desirable to lay before our readers the foregoing sketch of the leading metaphysical propositions enunciated in Culture and Anarchy ; inasmuch as they indicate the spirit in which our author approaches the study of St. Paul's teaching—a spirit, namely, of reliance upon the absolute power of the human reason to discern and approve religious truth, and of the human will to carry it into practice. We now pass on to the later treatise.

The second edition of St. Paul and Protestantism, which lies before us contains an appendix in the form of an essay, under the title of “Puritanism and the Church of England," which, as we are told, was meant to clear away some objections which had been made to the treatise, on the ground that, while it criticised a scheme of doctrine common to both Puritanism and the Church of England, it confined its attack almost exclusively to the Puritan Nonconformist bodies, and from the unsoundness of the distinctive doctrines, which they were constituted to uphold, deduced the indefensibility of their position in a state of separation from the Church of England. The light in which Mr. Matthew Arnold regards Dissent, may be gathered from the very severe, though, we think, not unmerited strictures on the present attitude of Dissenters towards the Established Church, in which he indulges both in Oulture and Anarchy

and in the volume before us. He is merciless in his condemnation of the somewhat unguarded but, it is to be feared, not inaccurate expression of one of the leading Dissenters in the House of Commons, in a speech on the Education Bill of last session, that “there was a spirit of watchful jealousy on the part of the Dissenters, which made them prone to take offence.

“ That,” says Mr. Matthew Arnold, “is positively the whole speech! 'Strife, jealousy, wrath, contentions, backbitings,'—we know the catalogue..... Where there is jealousy and strife among you, asks St. Paul, are ye not carnal ? are ye not still in bondage to your mere lower selves ? But from this bondage Christianity was meant to free us ; therefore, says he, get rid of what causes division and strife, and 'a spirit of watchful jealousy’; therefore, says he, 'I exhort you by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be not divisions among you, but that ye be all perfectly joined in the same mind and the same judgment.''

But the main question treated of in the book before us is not a comparison between the adherents and the foes of the Established Church, but the proper interpretation to be put upon the teaching of the great Apostle of the Gentiles, which our author considers to have been entirely misapprehended and misconstrued by Protestantism, or at least by Puritanism, “the strong and special representative of Protestantism.” Puritanism, says Mr. Matthew Arnold, puts forward the three doctrines of original sin, election, and justification—or, as he enumerates them elsewhere, of election, justification, and sanctification-as the cardinal points of St. Paul's theology, and he affirms that in doing so it is grievously mistaken.

“What in St. Paul is secondary and subordinate, Puritanism has made primary and essential ; what in St. Paul is figure and belongs to the sphere of feeling, Puritanism has transported into the sphere of intellect and made formula. On the other hand, what is with St. Panl primary, Puritanism has treated as subordinate ; and what is with him thesis, and belonging (so far as anything in religion can properly be said thus to belong) to the sphere of intellect, Puritanism has made image and figure.”

This is indeed a weighty charge to be brought against any system of interpretation : let us see how Mr. Matthew Arnold proceeds to substantiate it.

He very properly begins by laying down what he understands by the terms, primary and secondary, essential and subordinate. He means by them “ so far as the apostle is concerned, a greater or less approach to what really characterises him, and gives his teaching its originality and power," and, “so far as truth is concerned, a greater or less agreement with

tendent with the we think is

facts which can be verified, and a greater or less power of explaining them.” The first of these definitions is, of course, unimpeachable ; nor should we be disposed to quarrel with the second, if our author had honestly and fairly abided by it. But to accommodate it to the use which he makes of it, we must read it as if it ran,-“ so far as truth is concerned, a greater or less agreement discernible by the human mind with facts which can be verified, and a greater or less power of offering an explanation for them which is intelligible to the unaided human intellect.” Nay, we think he has even gone further, and, not content with the definition thus qualified, has manifested a tendency tacitly to substitute for it a rule of different import, and to test the primary or secondary, the essential or subordinate character of a dogmatic statement, not by the degree of its agreement with facts which can be verified, and its power of explaining them, but by the extent to which it does or does not lie within the scope of the same experience as that by which we verify facts—by the extent, in short, to which it is or is not itself within the grasp of the intellect and the senses. Now, to measure the value of a system of religious teaching by this standard, appears to us to be, not a scientific, but a very unscientific proceeding; for it arrogates to man a cosmical prominence, if not pre-eminence, to which modern investigations have more and more shown that he is not entitled.* When the Ptolemaic theory has been long since exploded, and we are ready to admit, not only that our earth is a subordinate member of the solar system, but also that the solar system is, in all probability, by no means the most important part of the universe, it does seem the height of presumption to lay down that a truth is of merely secondary importance because, forsooth, it is not within the ken of the dwellers upon the earth, or they cannot see its direct connection with the phenomena more immediately around them.

That we have not misconceived the true import which Mr. Matthew Arnold assigns to his definition of primary and secondary religious truths, is, we think, abundantly clear from the explanation he himself gives of it.

“What essentially characterizes a religious teacher, and gives him his permanent worth and vitality, is, after all, just the scientific value of his teaching, its correspondence with important facts, and the light it throws on them. Never was the truth of this so evident as now. The scientific sense in man never asserted its claims so strongly : the propensity of religion to neglect those claims, and the peril and loss to it from neglecting them, never were so manifest.