would wish to live under our Political Government, such as it was when our Church Government was established? And if the former has required, since that time, a series of improvements, can we believe that the experience and added light of three hundred years, could now add nothing to the perfect excellence of the latter?" The venerable Establishment!" We would ask, whether the venerable Cathedral Churches of that establishment have sustained injury from the cleaning, repairing, and removing of deformities, to which the taste and liberality of so many of our Deans and Chapters have been of late years so happily directed? or whether the ornaments added in the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First, were all so pure and so judicious, that it would have been brbarism and folly to meddle with them? The Church of England has no doubt had its "heroic martyrs ;" but so has the Church of Rome: and so have all Christian communions; and besides, is it not a little preposterous to invoke the names of those who died in the cause of reformation, in aid of an argument that their example of reform should never be followed again? It has had too "its pious and learned reformers," and wish that it would produce some more-equal in piety, and superior in judgment and enlightened views, to those of the sixteenth century.

A real knowledge of those times-not such a mere heap of prejudices as so many pick up from Isaac Walton, and other such sourceswould enable us to appreciate their excellences and their defects; would show us that we may admire them far more safely than imitate them; that though no period has produced a greater display of ability, yet that our additional experience of two hundred and fifty years gives us the same superiority of judgment over them, that many an ordinary schoolmaster possesses over a very clever boy; who, if he were as old as his master, would in all points surpass him. Such a knowledge, too, would enable us justly to appreciate the panegyrics which have been passed on the "mild and tolerant spirit" of the Church of England. It would tell us of the continued persecutions which disgraced the reign of Elizabeth, and of those which added an additional brand of infamy to that dark period between the Restoration and the Revolution. It would show us, above all, that in the sixteenth century a comprehensive spirit of Christian charity was unknown to all parties; and that the judgment even of the best men of that age, as to the number and nature of the points to be insisted on as terms of communion, is of very little value.

Thus, when the merits of the Church of England are reduced to their just proportions, and no longer magnified to our eyes by the mists of our own ignorance, the faults of its institutions will appear in their true colours, and we shall wonder by what strange infatuation they can

:

have been so long mistaken for excellences. Then it will be time to discuss more particularly the exact nature of the reforms best adapted to the state of the case with what limitations the two grand principles of rendering the constitution of the Church more popular and more effective, and of making its terms of communion more comprehensive, should be followed up in practice. So slowly does truth force its way, in opposition to existing prejudices and interests, that we dare not indulge the hope of seeing such a reform accomplished in our days. Yet a little impulse is sometimes sufficient to set in motion the stream of public opinion, which, gathering force year after year, from continual accessions of experience and reflection, swells at last into an irresistible current, and sweeps away the stubbornest mudbanks of corruption and error.

TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

This article comprises the INTRODUCTION to the Sermons on "Christian Life, its Course, its Hindrances, and its Helps," with three illustrative Notes from the same volume.

"As far as the principle on which Archbishop Laud and his followers acted went to reactuate the idea of the Church, as a coordinate and living power by right of Christ's institution and express promise, I go along with them; but I soon discover that by the Church, they meant the clergy, the hierarchy exclusively, and then I fly off from them in a tangent. For it is this very interpretation of the Church, that, according to my conviction, constituted the first and fundamental apostasy; and I hold it for one of the greatest mistakes of our polemic divines, in their controversies with the Romanists, that they trace all the corrup ruptions of the gospel faith to the Papacy."-COLERIDGE. Literary Remains.

Among the helps of Christian life, the highest place is due to the Christian Church and its ordinances. I hold the revival of the Church of Christ in its full perfection, to be the one great effort to which all our efforts should be directed. This belief was impressed most strongly upon me, by the remarkable state of affairs and of opinions in this country some years ago; and everything since that time has confirmed it in my mind more and more.

But the movement had begun earlier; nor should I object to call it a movement towards "something deeper and truer than satisfied the last century. It began, I suppose, in the last ten years of the last century, and has ever since been working onwards, though for a long time slowly and secretly, and with no distinctly marked direction. But still, in philosophy and general literature, there have been suffi cient proofs that the pendulum, which for nearly two hundred years had been swinging one way, was now beginning to swing back again; and as its last oscillation brought it far from the true centre, so it may

Newman's Letter to Dr. Jelf, p. 27.

be, that its present impulse may be no less in excess, and thus may bring on again, in after ages, another corresponding reaction.

Now if it be asked what, setting aside the metaphor, are the two points between which mankind has been thus moving to and fro; and what are the tendencies in us which, thus alternately predominating, give so different a character to different periods of the human history; the answer is not easy to be given summarily, for the generalization which it requires is almost beyond the compass of the human mind. Several phenomena appear in each period, and it would be easy to give any one of these as marking its tendency; as, for instance, we might describe one period as having a tendency to despotism, and another to licentiousness: but the true answer lies deepers and can be only given by discovering that common element in human nature which, in religion, in politics, in philosophy, and in literature, being modified by the subject matter of each, assumes in each a dif ferent form, so that its own proper nature is no longer to be recognised. Again, it would be an error to suppose that either of the two tendencies which so affect the course of human affairs were to be called simply bad or good. Each has its good and evil nicely intermingled; and taking the highest good of each, it would be difficult to say which was the more excellent ;-taking the last corruption of each, we could not determine which was the more hateful. For so far as we can trace back the manifold streams, flowing some from the eastern mountains, and some from the western, to the highest springs from which they rise, we find on the one side the ideas of truth and justice, on the other those of beauty and love :-things so exalted, and so inseparably united in the divine perfections, that to set either two above the other were presumptuous and profane. Yet these most divine things separated from each other, and defiled in their passage through this lower world, do each assume a form in human nature of very great evil: the exclusive and corrupted love of truth and justice becomes in man selfish atheism: the exclusive and corrupted worship of beauty and love becomes in man a bloody and a lying idolatry.

Such would be the general theory of the two great currents in which human affairs may be said to have been successively drifting. But real history, even the history of all mankind, and much more that of any particular age or country, presents a picture far more complicated. First, as to time: as the vessels in a harbour, and in the open sea without it, may be seen swinging with the tide at the same moment in opposite directions; the ebb has begun in the roadstead, while it is not yet high water in the harbour; so one or more nations may be in advance of or behind the general tendency of their age, and

from either cause may be moving in the opposite direction. Again, the tendency or movement in itself is liable to frequent interruptions, and short counter-movements: even when the tide is coming in upon the shore, every wave retires after its advance; and he who follows incautiously the retreating waters, may be caught by some stronger billow, overwhelming again for an instant the spot which had just been left dry. A child standing by the sea shore for a few minutes, and watching this, as it seems, irregular advance and retreat of the water, could not tell whether it was ebb or flood: and we, standing for a few years on the shore of time, can scarcely tell whether the particular movement which we witness is according to or against the general tendency of the whole period. Farther yet, as these great tendencies are often interrupted, so are they continually mixed: that is, not only are their own good and bad elements successively predominant, but they never have the world wholly to themselves: the opposite tendency exists, in an under-current it may be, and not lightly perceptible; but here and there it struggles to the surface, and mingles its own good and evil with the predominant good and evil of its antagonist. Wherefore he who would learn wisdom from the complex experience of history, must question closely all its phenomena, must notice that which is less obvious as well as that which is most palpable, must judge not peremptorily or sweepingly, but with reserves and exceptions; not as lightly overunning a wide region of truth, but thankful if after much pains he has advanced his land-marks on a little; if he has gained, as it were, but one or two frontier fortresses, in which he can establish himself for ever.

Now, then, when Mr. Newman describes the movement of the present moment as being directed towards "something better and deeper than satisfied the last "century," this description, although in some sense true, is yet in practice delusive; and the delusion which lurks in it is at the root of the errors of Mr. Newman and of his friends. They regard the tendencies of the last century as wholly evil, and they appear to extend this feeling to the whole period of which the last century was the close, and which began nearly with the sixteenth century. Viewing in this light the last three hundred years, they regard natural. ly with excessive favour the preceding period with which they are so strongly contrasted; and not the less because this period has been an object of scorn to the times which have followed it. They are drawn towards the enemy of their enemy, and they fancy that it must be in all points their enemy's opposite. And if the faults of its last decline are too palpable to be denied, they ascend to its middle and its earlier course, and finding that its evils are there less flagrant, they abandon them