Church without a creed, and a people without belief. It is curious that none of the usual causes, such as prosperity and riches, idolatry, superstition, or even ignorance-all generally supposed to lead to forgetfulness or denial of God-appear in this retrospect, but rather those forms of persecution and suffering usually found to lead the poor and miserable the more to need and seek after Him. But the real cause lies deeper below. Livingstone, the great missionary, laid down the axiom that it was useless to attempt the direct work of evangelisation among savages until they had risen to the condition of the natural man; and by the same principle the reformation of religion must ever be in great measure powerless among a people who have not attained the condition of the free man. It is not only that the free could or can alone reason rightly, but in a land of such exceptionally searching and multiplied forms of despotism the bondsman was not allowed to reason at all. The Reformation, it is true, professed to give liberty of thought, but the rulers of Germany more than took it away. The Peace of Augsburg, 1555, virtually undid with the one hand what it professed to do with the other. It granted legal recognition of the Protestant States, but also legal authority to them to compel their subjects to be of the same religion as themselves. Cujus regio, ejus religio.' They thus inaugurated a system of greater tyranny even than that of Rome, and which has ended in greater deadness of practice and belief. It cannot be said, in Milton's words, The hungry sheep look up, and are 'not fed, for the very hunger for spiritual food is starved out. Not even superstition survives. Still we are well aware that all religion cannot be said to be extinct in Protestant Germany. On the contrary, it survives here and there in examples of pastoral faithfulness and private piety, the more beautiful from their isolation and rarity. But they shine in the midst not of a crooked and perverse generation,' for the German people are not that, but upon minds from which the very instinct of the want of something higher than their own poor selves of something which all das Grübeln of their philosophers cannot find out-appears to have died away; upon minds come to a negative state; or to Carlyle's city of Weissnichtico, -a condition like that of pagan Rome before the advent of Christ, when the people ceased to bring sacrifices, cared no more for their idols, and yet had nothing to put in their place. Were it not a well-known fact that German Catholics and Protestants are all essentially of the same Teutonic blood, one would be tempted to think the Protestants of some fundamentally dinerent race. For how comes it that the element

of persecution which has stimulated faith in the one should have wellnigh extinguished it in the other? We have no space to express more than the natural wonder that a period of utter deadness in the Protestant community should have been chosen to harass and decimate the Roman Catholic Church. Twelve dioceses, 788 cures, and about 300 vicariates have been stripped by imperial order-whether rightly or wrongly is not the question here-of their respective functionaries; but, instead of acquiescing and showing indifference, the bereaved flocks only cling the closer to the cause of what they believe to be religion, attend their churches, light their candles, and recite their prayers before a priestless altar!

It is difficult to define the precise meaning of the word Kulturkampf; but, if implying, as is supposed, the conflict of science and free thought with traditional dogmas and opinions in religion the struggle as to which shall educate the people, the State or the Church-it must be owned that the triumphs which the Prussian Government has achieved in Protestant matters are not such as to incline Christians to wish further success to their arms. Meanwhile, in contiguous parishes of Catholic and Protestant populations, one invariable distinction has long been patent to all eyes and conclusions. The path to the Catholic Church is trodden bare, that to the Protestant Church rank with grass and weeds to the very door.

So much has been said and sung, written and ranted, about Liberty-so many crimes committed, so many abuses defended, in her name-that it needs some of the courage she imparts to venture a word on a subject so sacred and so stale. There are but two supreme sources of Good for the needs of suffering and sinful man, and neither can flourish purely without the other. Both have their kindred difficulties and struggles, and their infallible signs. Both require faith and sacrifice, devoted priests and stainless altars; and each can boast a noble and always replenished army of martyrs. The flame in both is kindled by sore friction and tribulation; but once lighted in hearts, as in states, its infallible test is to permeate all things with its ineffable virtue. It is especially the characteristic of Liberty to be so adjusted and appointed for the development of the human mind, that, like the air we breathe, we know not how it surrounds us till it be vitiated or withdrawn; so that the highest proof of its perfect action consists in its failing to remind us of its existence. The birth of Liberty is slow and difficult. It has, so to say, to precede and teach itself. For men and nations must be free before

they can know how to prize or even to use their freedom. The despot's stock pretext is that his people are not fit for Liberty. The only answer is that without Liberty they never will be. Thus the first stage of its life, and the second of its development, are all-critical, for it needs what, in feudal lands, is rare, a believer in freedom to found it, and what after long subservience is as rare in turn, a people fit to wield it. Despotism is twice cursed-in the slavery it imposes, and in its far worse progeny, the slavishness it engenders. Where this debased condition of a people has obtained, Liberty is difficult to set in action; for it has as much to undo as to do.

It is this fatal effect of foregone causes that accounts for the political and social riddles presented at the present day by so great and gifted a race as the Germans ;-which explains the almost Oriental impassibility of a caste-barbarous, merciless, and powerful in old times-powerless, insignificant, but no less arrogant and obstructive even now. It is this which still maintains the deep and open divisions in the bosom of the Fatherland, the animosity between class and class, the cowardly customs, the rude manners, the low estimation of the female sex, and all that reminds the Englishman that he is not in 2 land of freedom. And it is especially this which has frustrated and nullified the true objects of the great movement of the Protestant Reformation in Germany.

May some of our readers live to hail the time, under a different reign, when this falsely so-called 'fight for culture' may be exchanged for another and far nobler War of German Liberation!

ART. VIII. The Early History of Charles James Fox. By GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN, M.P. 8vo. London: 1880.

TH HIS is a delightful book; and not the less so that it comes on us, to some extent, in the manner of a surprise. We knew, indeed, Mr. Trevelyan as a pleasant and able writer; but we had not given him credit for the excellence which he has here displayed, for the peculiar talent as an historical artist which he had not till now so fully revealed. As we read this book the recollections of the great dead rise before us. It is impossible not to remark how much Mr. Trevelyan's style resembles that of his uncle, the late Lord Macaulay. Are we to consider this as an inheritance? It is certainly not an imitation. The resemblance is not such as a counterfeit bears to its original; it is rather that of the good Sir Rowland's

son, 'most truly limned and living.' It lies not in any mere trick of words or sentences, but in the arrangement of the ideas, in the wit, the humour, the allusion-now delicate, now sufficiently outspoken-the half-veiled or wholly unclouded epigram; and it is because we find in the book all this and more, because we have read it and enjoyed it as a work of art quite as much as an historical study, that we feel justified in pronouncing it purely and simply delightful. Perhaps, indeed, the ornamentation is sometimes too elaborate; some of the descriptions-like the electric light-are too brilliant; and it must be said that, in a continual and successful protest against the stilted dignity of history,' the author has occasionally descended into license, as when he borrows expressions from the current slang of the day-in telling us that the Duke of Portland was left out in the cold,' or that Ulysses was not to be drawn'-which trespass on the proprietary rights of some of the Queens of modern fiction.

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But quite apart from the interest which attaches to the manner of this work, the matter of it is also most valuable and important. It is not that the author has had access to any new or recondite sources of information; indeed, so many volumes of memoirs, diaries, or correspondence have been published within the last forty years, that the history of this period contains few secrets for those who have time, patience, and skill. But it is not everyone who can command them; and the years which intervened between the Peace of Paris, in 1763, and the declaration of American Independence, in 1776, are to most readers marked merely by the passing of the Stamp Act, by the destruction of tea in Boston harbour, or by the battle of Bunker's Hill. It is quite true that they passed smoothly enough, so far as related to foreign affairs; but at home they were years of fierce political strife, in which parties, as we now know and understand them, took a definite form, and the great questions of personal or parliamentary government were fairly set before the country as the problems on which its future well-being depended. The history of this time Mr. Trevelyan has now written. He has chosen, indeed, to give his narrative a special and dramatic interest by grouping the figures round the younger Fox, to whom he has assigned a prominence due rather to his later merits and his great name. But the book is, in truth, a detailed history of the opening campaigns of that struggle which, after more than sixty years, resulted, in 1832, in the crowning victory of parliamentary reform, opening wide the gates to constitutional freedom, progress, and prosperity; and if even a small

proportion of those who will read it are induced to examine more closely into the origin of the contest it describes, and to trace the real bearings of those problems too often hidden in unmeaning names, Mr. Trevelyan will have won as distinguished a success in the field of politics as in the garden of literature.

It has been said by Sir Erskine May that the accession of George III. presents no natural boundary in constitutional history.' This is true as to the results; but it overlooks the great constitutional struggle which then commenced. The first twenty-two years of George III.'s reign were spent, at home in regal aggression and the furious contests which it awakened; abroad, in ignoble treaties, in colonial misgovernment, in revolt, and in unsuccessful war. When tyranny

and ineptitude had disintegrated the empire, had forcibly torn off the fair American colonies, and irritated the people of England to the verge of rebellion; when London had been sacked by the mob, when our fleets had been defeated, our armies captured, our shores insulted; when the navies of France and Spain had cruised triumphant in the Channelthen, but not till then, did the King give up the design of subverting the constitution and of establishing a purely personal government; then did he accept the judgment of his Ministers, and yield himself to the domination of a will stronger even than his own. Mr. Trevelyan has thus described the change:

'Our politics once more flowed along the constitutional channel from which thenceforward they rarely diverged. Events nearer to our time, and far more startling in their magnitude and more agreeable to our patriotic feelings, threw into the shade the Middlesex election and the American revolution; and one who, during the best years of his life, had been known as the most wilful and the least prosperous of rulers, came to be remembered as a good easy man, under whose auspices, as a reward for his virtue, Trafalgar was added to the roll of our victories. The popular impression of George the Third is derived from the period when he had Pitt for a master and Nelson for a servant, and has little in common with the impression which has stamped itself upon the minds of those who have studied him when he was as much the rival as the sovereign of Fox.'

It is, however, with the earlier part of the first period that we are now concerned; we have to examine into the motives that guided his actions, and the conduct that led to the disasters which preceded the reign of Pitt. The King's faults may be traced to a defective and misguided education. Brought up by a silly and narrow-minded mother, whose one idea of