in a curt, abrupt, and telling style, compressing much matter on two sheets of paper, could not easily be overlooked at Lambeth. Laud sent for Hales, whom he had known of old. Heylin, who happened to be at the palace that day, gives an account of their meeting, which can be trusted up to a certain point: how the archbishop and Hales, about nine o'clock in the morning, adjourned to the garden till the bell rang for prayers; how, when prayers were ended, they returned to the garden and stayed there talking till dinner-time; how, when dinner was over, they resumed the old work in the old place, and did not desist till the archbishop's presence was required by some great people, when they both came in, high-coloured and almost panting for breath-enough to show that there had been some heats between them, not yet fully cooled. But Heylin, whose great object was to varnish Laud's portrait, did not care much for accidentally bespattering that of Hales. He insinuates that Laud on this occasion secured the loyalty of Hales to the Church of England by his arguments, strengthened by a chaplaincy at the time, and riveted into conclusiveness by higher preferment afterwards. Clarendon, though singularly unlike Hales in temper, tastes, and opinions, represents him as acting in a way far more consonant with his character; as answering the inquiry, if he wanted any thing, by saying that he had enough and desired no additions; and as afterwards with great difficulty persuaded to accept a canonry of Windsor, because he knew that his means were already equal to his wants.

The canonry, we know, did not long stay with Hales; and when Laud's time of trouble came, Lord Say and Seal quoted against the archbishop the opening words of Hales' tract on schism. But the student probably parted readily with the preferment which he had been slow to accept; and the primate on his trial could hear without a blush the words of an honest man with whom he was far from agreeing in opinion, but whom, from motives which perhaps he could not analyse, he had in former days protected instead of injuring.

Two hundred years and more have passed since the men with whom we have been holding converse have passed from this earthly scene. No fanatical soldiers disturb the church or churchyard of Walton-on-Thames, preaching intolerable doctrines and extinguishing symbolical candles. The name of Dering has lately been before the world in consequence of a contested election between a Conservative-Liberal and a LiberalConservative. Our interest in the great men of the civil war has extended from their opinions to their bones. Falkland, happier than Hampden, sleeps in a tomb at Great Tew, of which no one can even conjecture the place, and is safe from literary or surgi

cal examination of his skeleton. Chillingworth still rests in the cloisters of Chichester Cathedral, unvexed by Cheynell and not startled even by the fall of the spire. A black marble monument in Eton churchyard covers the remains of Hales. Laud was interred with the rites which he loved in the church of Allhallows Barking, when his head had been severed from his body. Cheynell-well, graves and funerals are not exactly sacred to his memory, and we have not cared to inquire of the place or manner of his interment. Yet the dead still speak and live. Hales is "the ever memorable," even with those who knew nothing of his Golden Remains; Chillingworth argues as clearly as of old, if not quite so disputatiously; Falkland steps forward with a sad grace from the eloquent pages of Clarendon. As for Laud, his handiwork is visible in almost every church in England. The holy table stands altarwise in the chancel, protected by a decent rail from the hats of irreverent men, the satchels of careless boys, and the misdoings of profane dogs. A ceremonial more strongly resembling that of Rome than any thing which Laud ventured on is practised in the Church of England when the clergyman and the congregation like it, and sometimes, unhappily, when the clergyman likes it and the congregation does not. The Star-Chamber and the High Commission Court are indeed no more; but Laud has been more powerful to liberate than ever he was to enslave. His blood washed away from High Churchmen for ever the "horrible decree" of Calvinistic reprobation. Cheynell, too, exists, but far more altered; mild, gentlemanly, aristocratic, very probably even, to his own surprise, a bishop. By degrees, after the day of Black Bartholomew, the old Presbyterian element reconciled itself to the Establishment; first endured episcopacy and the liturgy, and then embraced them. And Low Churchmen, too, thanks to brave John Wesley, have rejected Calvinism. At the sacrifice, it may be, of logical consistency, but with an accession of moral and spiritual strength which more than compensates for such a sacrifice, the doctrines of free grace are now taught without any attempt to thrust a single soul by necessary consequence into the pit of unutterable darkness. And yet old tendencies still exist, old sympathies, old affinities; and the modern representatives of Laud and Chillingworth are essentially much nearer to each other than either to the most softened likeness of Cheynell.

Let us suppose three tolerably defined specimens of the three modern schools-High, Low, and Broad-to meet together with a view to forward some work into which the directly religious element enters,-to approve of a curate, it may be, or select an incumbent, or regulate the religious instruction of a

school or college. If the three men are by nature equally frank and unsuspicious, there is little doubt which of the trio would feel the earliest theological misgivings. In the heart of one of them would rise up on the first disputed point a question addressed to his companions, Are you converted? His own conversion is, of course, a postulate under the circumstances. But how would a modern Falkland, or Laud, or Chillingworth answer such a question, if it dropped, as it were unconsciously, from the lips of a modified Cheynell? Falkland might say that he was honestly bent on doing the work in hand, and might be told that honesty was not the spiritual mind. Even an appeal to a text of Scripture-" We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren"-might not be accepted as satisfactory from a common mortal. Who, Cheynell would ask, are the brethren? and what were the time and place of the supposed passage? Laud might suggest that he was a baptised Christian, and might hear in reply that the grace of baptism was only a charitable hypothesis. Chillingworth might say something about the light which lighteth every man, and would be consigned at once to the outer darkness of the heathen.

The school which thus erects religion on experiences, and ignores so many forms of high and unconscious goodness; which declines to accept results if it cannot see processes, and disbelieves the divine life of man if it cannot trace its history, often shows a partial sense of the danger of its own position. There is something terrible in staking so much on a few facts of religious consciousness. A man whose own faith is the warrant of his hope, whose present trust in God turns upon some past phase of his inner history, who is sure that he is now in the right way mainly on the ground that some time ago he certainly turned out of the wrong one, had need have a good memory, and a good deal of obstinacy too. His religion is not only personal, but individual; and his past convictions are a part of his present faith. Out of a few texts of the Bible he constructs his tests of a standing or falling church, a standing or falling soul; collates these texts with certain passages of his life, and thenwoe to him who would shake his confidence in either. If he is thoroughly in earnest, he is essentially a moody and morbid man. We know his thin rigid face, every line of which is hardened and drawn out in the endeavour to fix the soul on a few supposed truths, even at the danger of rejecting all other truth as falsehood. He is suspicious and solitary; for he knows that his shibboleth is easily caught, and is often repeated by hypocrites. He may have a few chosen companions whom he can trust; but he cannot throw himself unsuspiciously abroad among the glorious company of the saints and the noble army of martyrs.

They were sincere, no doubt, in their way; but he has great doubts about their vital Christianity.

The most narrow and exclusive Laudian, who having signed the Articles on the ground that they must be right, because such men as Andrews and Cosin and Bramhall have signed them before him, betakes himself to a medieval book with massive clasps, and fancies, as he chants Gregorians out of it, that every Christian of orthodox repute before the unhappy Council of Trent was exactly of the same opinion as himself, may be further from the truth than the modern copy of the Puritan, and yet can reach it by an easier and more open road. His world of thought is small and artificial, distorted in its facts and maimed in its proportions, a feeble copy of God's world; still it is a world, a cosmos; a thing of order and degree, of variety, of multiplicity, of law; full of spirits, angels, powers, authorities, hierarchies, not a thin line of connexion between the soul and God. If, as his knowledge enlarges and his feelings deepen, he escapes in an early stage of transition the superficial fascinations of Rome, he may grow naturally and almost insensibly into broader and deeper views of truth. He will still love the Church, though he has ceased to see an essential connexion between the Church and any one form of Church-government; he will respect, and wish others to respect, the sacraments, while not regarding them as charms; while admiring the types of holiness which were received in former days, he will not despise the peculiar shape which goodness may assume in his own day; he will feel that living and breathing men are as sacred as those whose bones are encased in shrines and reliquaries, and that righteousness and peace have not changed their nature in escaping into the world from the cloister. He will love the chant, the psalm, the solemn rite, the old seat of religion, the home of medieval learning, as truly as of old, and more wisely; without any taint of superstition, he can keep in its niche the image which the Puritan would break, and view without horror an apocryphal saint in a painted window; but still, as he pays the due tribute of respect to Jerusalem and even to Gerizim, he will not fear to trust himself to that spirit of Truth which is also the Spirit of God.

But the keen observer of events of the day will need no ⚫ precedents from the seventeenth century to prove that those who in the nineteenth century seek for enlightened tolerance in the Church of England must look for it rather High than Low; and an analysis of the process which has of late led many, and will yet lead more, from dull, dry, unsympathetic orthodoxy to the loving freedom of truth, has no necessary connexion with Falkland, or Chillingworth, or Hales. Let us return briefly to

our old subject before finally quitting it, and see the spirit of intolerance sitting by the side of the death-bed, not only torturing the victim, but also hardening the tormentor, by leading him to forget alike the extent of human ignorance and the scale of divine operations, and to strive with feeble yet obstinate hands to bring together those great events which God has put far asunder-the hour of death, and the day of judgment.

Chillingworth had, at least for a time, several scruples respecting the formularies of the Church of England; and one of these shall be stated in his own words. "The damning sentences in St. Athanasius' Creed, as we are made to subscribe it," thus he writes to his friend Sheldon,-"are most false, and also in a high degree presumptuous and schismatical. And therefore I neither can subscribe that these things are 'agreeable to the Word of God,' seeing I believe they are certainly repugnant to it; nor that the whole 'Common Prayer is lawful to be used,' seeing I believe these parts of it certainly unlawful; nor promise that I myself will use it,' seeing I never intend either to read these things, which I have now excepted against, nor to say 'Amen' to them." Unhappily the answer of the future archbishop to the remarkable letter from which this passage is an extract is not extant. It is probable, however, that he succeeded in palliating, if he could not wholly remove, Chillingworth's scruples; for the discussion between the two friends extended to other subjects connected with the Articles, on which it would not have been worth while to enter while this great issue remained unsettled; and Chillingworth, within three years of the date of his letter, did, on his admission to the chancellorship of Salisbury Cathedral, "willingly and heartily subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, and give his consent thereto."

On

His case was, to all appearance, a very common one. inquiry, he found that he could assent to the formularies of the Church of England with an explanation; and he assented accordingly, wishing all the time that their sound meaning was more obvious, and that they did not need to be explained. Their letter, he saw, was fatal; but he knew that an apostle had said as much of the letter of holy Scripture itself. He ⚫ could himself employ upon occasion (and an apostle could do so too) the damnatory language of ecclesiastical dogma; but it was foreign to the ordinary tone of his mind, and conflicted unpleasantly with his matured convictions. He was much more inclined to abstain from judging, that he might not be judged, than to condemn others in the hope that he might be saved

himself.

On this man, always of a tolerant and charitable disposition,