express and admirable, in action so like an angel, in apprehension so like a God!" to quit, I say, the study of man, that one may employ oneself in studying an oyster or a shrimp. But the explanation of this is not difficult to find. The young enthusiast of human nature, fresh from the study of history and philosophy, tries to apply what he has learnt in books to the living subject, man. He starts with a generous enthusiasm of humanity; he enters upon a profession; he mixes with men. But he is brought to a sudden pause by the dead weight of practical experience. Like a young horse starting with his first load, instead of moving onward with a slow and steady pull, he attempts a rush: the dead weight checks him, the collar galls him, and he becomes for the time a jibber. To drop metaphor, there probably comes a time in the experience of most men when the study of human nature, of their fellow-man, his pursuits, his aims, his hopes -a study which they entered upon with such avidity at first- becomes distasteful to them. Practically, they find him to be a meaner being, occupying a lower place in the scale of creation than they had thought. As their knowledge of the world widens, they find that some one or two men whom they had looked up to as their guides and teachers are not perfect or infallible. They find out in them that weaker side of humanity in which all men share. And so, from being hero-worshippers, they become for a time misanthropists. The fact is, they have probed just deep enough to find the devil in man, but they have not probed deep enough to find the angel. And the worst of it is that the devil they get at in most modern men is such a poor devil after all, deteriorated, says the sneering philosopher, by much intercourse with man ; who does not seem to know how to sin upon a grand scale, but is a compound of meanness and petty shifts-not Milton's devil, but rather Göthe's; a sneering, shifty Mephistophelian fiend, and not the primeval Satan at all. Macmillan's Magazine. THE SHAM SACERDOS. (Ritualist sings) Aмo a mass; I make a lass, POETRY: Mother Country, by Miss Rossetti, 66. Tom Noddy's Lament, 66. Sleeping in Church, 84. Unter der Linden, 95. Three Meetings, by the author of John Halifax, 111. "Hear! Hear!" 128. To My Nose, 128. BROWNLOWS, by Mrs. Oliphant, has been published at this office, price 37 cents. mail, prepaid, for that price. Preparing for Publication at this Office LINDA TRESSEL. By the author of "Nina Balatka." THE BRAMLEIGHS OF BISHOP'S FOLLY. By Charles Lever. PHINEAS FINN, THE IRISH MEMBER. By Mr. Trollope. Just Published at this Office THE BROWNLOWS. By Mrs. Oliphant. 37 cents. THE TENANTS OF MALORY. By J. S. Le Fanu. 50 cents. Sent by PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & GAY, TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the Living Age will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year; nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. Second 66 The Complete Work, 20 66 50 Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. From The Contemporary Review. | man's conceptions of the moral attributes of God. CHURCH PARTIES, PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. But the characteristic feature of Chatham's epigram is, that it treated the Liturgy and the Articles as dead and obsolete, things THE saying ascribed to Lord Chatham,* that the Church of England had a Popish ing old, and ready to vanish away." They belonging to the past, "decaying and waxLiturgy, Calvinistic Articles, and an Armini- were there, remnants of a by-gone age, in an clergy, was, like most epigrammatic state- glaring contrast with whatever was living ments, the exaggeration of a truth. It is and energetic in the actual teachers and historically true that the Prayer-Book rep-representatives of the Church. The one resents, for the most part, the element which thing that did not enter into his calculations was that the two elements which seemed to bear witness of a strife which, far from being extinct, waxes fiercer and hotter every day. Prayer-Book and Articles are each represented by large and active parties, bound, of course, theoretically to acknowledge both, and to prove their agreement with each other, yet each also striving, consciously or unconsciously, to subordinate one to the other, to make the most of what ever fits into its own system, to ignore or we have inherited from mediæval Latin Christendom, that whenever any tendencies have lost their power should start up into a to move Romewards have shown themselves new vitality, prove themselves to be "not in the history of the English Church, they dead but sleeping," sweep away almost or have worked primarily through the cultus altogether the so-called Arminianism of the which the Prayer-Book sets forth, and been clergy, and divide them into two hostile defended in things external by its rubrics, camps, watching each other with suspicion and in matters of doctrine by the language and distrust, sometimes breaking out into of its formularies. It is not less true that, acrimonious bitterness, sometimes entering though the phraseology of the Articles may on the pitched battles of legal prosecutions. have more affinities with the Confession of So, however, it has been. High Church Augsburg than with any of the doctrinal and Low Church, Anglican and Evangelistatements of the French or Swiss Reform-cal, Ritualistic and Protestant - these names ers, they have upon them the stamp of that theology which found in Calvin its ablest and most logical exponent. It was true, lastly, of the clergy of Chatham's time, that they, in the antagonism of their theology to the Calvinism of Dissent, and in the hatred of Popery which they had inherited from the Revolution of 1688, might be popularly described as Arminian. Actually, indeed, the points at issue between Calvinists and Arminians, Supralapsarians and Sublapsa-pass rians, the old battle-ground of the Quinquarticular controversy, were rather laid on one side altogether, than debated with the eagerness which gives birth to party action. To the supercilious judgment of the statesman, perhaps to many of the clergy, Wesley and Whitefield, Law and Toplady, any teachers of earnest evangelical religion would have seemed equally Calvinistic. What characterized the great body of the clergy of that time was rather a popular, untheoretical Pelagianism, a non-emotional religion, a non-æsthetic cultus, the assertion of man's power to will, of the inalienable prerogatives of conscience, of the authority of the faculty which was known by various names, as right Reason," the "Moral Sense," the " Light of Nature," and the like. On this ground, chiefly, it opposed the Calvinism which, under Whitgift and Abbot, had once been dominant in the Church of England, as inconsistent with The saying has been often quoted. I confess myself unable to verify it in what I know of Lord Chatham's speeches, letters, or life. over lightly the inconvenient passages which bear testimony to that of its opponents. And to these two great parties there has been added of late years a third, which may be said roughly to represent the "Arminian clergy" of Chatham's aphorism. Theoretically, indeed, the chief leaders among those to whom some one in an evil hour gave the nickname of the Broad Church * party, are as far as possible from symbolizing with the scholastic technicalities of Arminian theolgy. They, too, leave it on one side, or fling it behind them with a contemptuous apathy. But so far as they represent the spirit of private judgment in opposition to Church authority; of critical inquiry into Scripture and its sources instead of a prac The phrase appears, recognised as already current, in an article on Church Parties, by Mr. Conybeare, in the Edinburgh Review for Oct., 1853, and beyond all question acquired through that article a wider and more lasting notoriety. Attention had, however, been drawn to the rise of a new School, likely to be a formidable competitor with the then dominant Tractarianism, by the present Bishop of London, in the Preface to his University Sermons, published in 1846. tical acceptance of its infallible authority as it meets us in the English version, and a theoretical assertion of its infallibility in the original; of a religion predominantly ethical in contrast with one chiefly emotional, or dogmatic, or liturgical, they answer to many of the thinkers and scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whom Chatham had in view. They are the heirs of Chillingworth and Hales, of Tillotson and Burnet, of Balguy and Butler, of Clarke and Paley, if we may include foreign theologians in the list, of Grotius and Le Clerc. The existence of such a party introduces a new complication into the problem. There is the risk of divergence in three directions till the body is rent asunder. There is the risk also of the combination of any two of the factions in order for a time to triumph over, and, it may be, expel the third. All such classifications, however servicea ble for purposes of rough analysis, are, of course, only approximately accurate. There are, let us thank God for it, very many who cannot be well classed with any party, and who yet (or therefore) do their work faithfully and loyally. There are affinities which draw together those who are labelled as antagonists. The influence of free and open speech, and friendly meetings, brings out latent sympathies that were hardly dreamt of. The moderate Churchman and the moderate Evangelical are often as near each other as are the Liberal-Conservative and the Conservative-Liberal. A section, at least, of the Evangelical school, has been more or less faithful to the principle of free inquiry. There have been approximations to union, in their common desire for a wider basis than the Tudor platform of the English Church, even between High and Broad. And each party, again, let us remember, is seen at its worst rather than its best, in what we have learnt to call its " organs and its "representatives." The real master-minds on either side may understand and so appreciate each other, may come into occasional collision, and yet lose no jot of mutual admiration and esteem; but the followers, the journalists, the frothy talkers, exaggerate all differences, and sharpen all animosities. Paul, Cephas, Apollos, may represent but different phases of the truth, phases conditioned by the inevitable differences of education, temperament, mental constitution. It is by the men who cry "I am of Cephas," and "I of Apollos," and "I of Paul," that Christ is divided and the unity of the Church imperilled. or to use its Shibboleths, who shrinks more and more from the organized action which characterises their movements, and who yet finds much to reverence and sympathise with in all three, may perhaps be permitted to note what it is that he admires in each, what it is that keeps him from joining any one until it becomes other than it is. A position of comparative isolation, if it bring with it many drawbacks, the loss of the sense of strength in belonging to a compact body, the loss of influence over many whom one would gladly reach, of apparent and even real opportunities for good, - brings with it also the compensation of a judgment, which, if it be erroneous, is at least not embittered, which may fail through ignorance or unconscious prepossesion, but is, at least, not swayed by personal or controversial antipathies. Such an one may hope to do justice to those who are arrayed in hostile ranks, even where they are least able to do justice to each other. He may render to each the service of helping it to see its own defects, and to recognise the merits of its opponents. The words of the great Epicurean poet * might speak but of a lofty selfishness: But one who stands apart from the battle may at least interpose the friendly offices of a neutral between the two belligerents. One who, in seeking the via vitæ, has not travelled with this crowd or that, may be able to see, though on no loftier eminence than others, that those who look upon each other as hopelessly lost, "ignorant and out of the way," are yet in it, and to direct the notice of each to the points where it has turned aside from the straightest or the easiest way, and to the snares and pitfalls that beset it. I. It has been too much the fashion with One who has never been able to attach superficial writers of the opposing schools to himself to the ranks of any of these parties, I * Lucretius, ii., 1-10. |
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