right remaining with the disciples still, which it will be hard to set aside. The other passage is in Acts vi., where again we find the apostles, without the slightest assumption of prerogative, committing to the whole multitude of the disciples the choice of the deacons. From these facts we take it as a certainty, that when a Christian Church first existed, it was the will of God that the power of " Church patronage," which belonged, of right, to Him, should be exercised by the separated society of His Christian people; and it lies with the defenders of the present system to show that the same Divine person has altered His will, and authorized a different arrange

ment.

Of course this argument implies that the English Establishment is utterly wrong in viewing the whole nation as within the Church, as well as in its system of presentation to benefices; but both matters must necessarily be touched upon in opening our argument. For, admitting that the right was vested in the Church, it might be alleged, on the other side, that the various patrons merely exercised the right on behalf of the Church. This allegation, however, can have no place if we have shown that the right rests with peculiar communities, preserved, by a regular discipline, from admixture with evil persons; and that without any power of alienating that right from themselves. Strictly speaking, the Church of England has no right of Church patronage, on the scriptural system, existing within her. For the right is in the separate community, and the Church of England, having no exclusive discipline, has no separate community at all.

While this is our main argument-viz., that the will of God has been revealed to the effect that the present system of Church patronage is not the one which He sanctioned,-it is not amiss to look at the system as at present in operation, and judge it apart from a scriptural standard.

It is clear that upon the present system, to a large extent, the character and teachings of the clergy are under the control of mere wealth. Any man is at liberty to present a clergyman, according to his own choice, to a benefice, if he has the money to buy the right; and there is but the slender defence of a bishop's examination to prevent him putting into the clerical office one scandalously unfit. There have been times-in the first Charles's time, and again in the last century-when the more strict sort of Churchmen have, in association, and as individuals, spent immense sums of money in buying livings, that they might be given to men whom they esteemed good, in order to counteract the influence of the many clergy of another kind. What they could do for their party views others could do for theirs; so that the National Church may be shaped and ordered in its ministrations, in a large degree, according to the notions of a non-elected and irresponsible number of How largely this has been the case is well known. The clergy of the Establishment, in the mass, instead of being leaders of the people, have commonly been only the representatives of the views, the morals,

persons.

and the vices, of the class of patronage-holders; and, instead of abiding in the truth of God, have changed and veered about, according as the wind of aristocratic opinion turned them hither and thither.

The system is sadly injurious to the people. They pay the labourer, but have no choice in his election. They may have a minister who laboriously instils his particular views into their minds. Upon his death or removal, they are often presented with one of a totally different kind, who proceeds to destroy the work his predecessor has done, by teaching doctrines of an opposite character. A third may be one of no doctrine at all, and whose daily life is one of amusement and contemptible idleness. At each change some part of the congregation are offended-often driven to other places of worship, where they can be more sure of a settled teaching, and these are pretty sure to be the persons of thought and decision of character, the loss of whom is a serious one. A much larger number learn to think of piety as consisting simply in the common forms and unchanged outward observances, and sink into an unthinking, purposeless formality.

The system is unfair to the clergy. Their promotion depends not on merit or length of service, but upon their connections, or their power of creeping into favour with the holders of patronage. Multitudes of the clergy are toiling in poverty, while others luxuriate in plenty, irrespective of their honest deserts.- A Sydney Smith starves (as he did) for years in obscurity, while the fat livings are often filled with youths of good families, whose qualifications for the ministry consist of a taste for brass candlesticks and good horseflesh.

This does and must cause intense dissatisfaction to those who believe in purity as an important element in the constitution of Christian communities. Who, in reason, can respect an ecclesiastical system which welcomes the immoral to its communion, and gives the appointment of its ministers to the chance holders of property or office, or to the highest bidder in the auction room?

Philosophy.

WAYAM.

ARE THE INTRINSIC MERITS OF TUPPER'S "PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY" WORTHY OF ITS POPU LARITY?

AFFIRMATIVE ARTICLE.-I.

THE article of E. S. J. appears to me to be singularly unsatisfactory; the style in which it is written condemns it most strongly, and had the writer studied the calm, noble language of the book he would fain depreciate, to good purpose, we should not have had the violent language which runs through his article. He tells us,

"that any detailed criticism must be dispensed with;" but surely, out of the various topics written on by M. F. Tupper, E. S. J. might have quoted for us a few, if, indeed, only one or two, instances of the very gross faults he imputes to the book.

E. S. J. proves too much for his cause, for it would be next to impossible to bring any other charges against any book, how bad soever it might be, than those of which he accuses Mr. Tupper's; for they, in fact, include every fault it would be possible for an author to commit. If E. S. J. be correct, Proverbial Philosophy" must be the greatest trash ever written or published, and any one who reads his article must be surprised that he should have perused such a vile composition (as I presume he has), after having discovered its nature, which he assures us he had done in its very first pages. E. S. J.'s opinion, is that all who do not agree with him are 66 mere fools." Surely this is not the method in which to conduct a controversy in these pages; and when an opponent condescends to this style of writing, it may be very fairly assumed that he has a very bad cause to advocate, on the well-known motto, "When you have a bad cause, abuse the counsel for the plaintiff." I must beg my opponent to recollect that every author cannot write a new philosophy; but the highest office of an author is to reiterate, in his age, the same truths which have been handed down from preceding ages. The greatest of our authors are those who feel this necessity to point unceasingly to the road of Truth, that those who list may follow it; and I aver that this office Mr. Tupper, as one of the priests of literature, does perform. I will, however, point out a few of the merits in Mr. Tupper's book;-only a few examples can, of course, be quoted. Every one of his numerous articles bears the stamp of genius. I open, by chance, his article on Authorship." How he dilates on this, which, if rightly considered, is one of the highest and holiest of privileges. Evidently he feels that "great is the dignity, rare the worthiness, high the privilege, and pure the happiness" of the "man ennobled by his pen." E. S. J. tells us that, according to Tupper, "to be simply contented is to attain our chief good.' Let us see what Tupper

says on this very subject of contentment :

"None is poor but the mean in mind, the timorous, the weak, and unbelieving, None is wealthy but the affluent in soul, who is satisfied, and floweth over."

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Can any one quarrel with this view of the subject? Surely not. Again, E. S. J. says, Ambition is construed into a madness." This is not Mr. Tupper's doctrine. What does his "Dream of Ambition" teach us? Simply that which every writer on the subject tells us, that an unquenchable ambition is a torturing fever, that leaves us but with death. To what did the Great Napoleon's ambition lead him? To the occupancy of a solitary rock in the midst of the ocean. To what the still greater ambition of Cromwell? From being the mighty man-ruler of these proud realms, to the similitude of a pampered king, and to the loss of a great part of his

manliness of character. The life of every ambitious man warns us emphatically against that disorder of the mind, which, if unrestrained, is, without doubt, a madness, and a madness of the worst and most uncurable nature.

"I left the happy fields, that smile around the village of Content,
And sought, with wayward feet, the torrid desert of Ambition.
Long time, parched and weary, I travelled that burning sand,
And the hooded basilisk and adder were strewed in my way for palms;
Black scorpions thronged me round, with sharp, uplifted stings,
Seeming to mock me as I ran."

Is it not the fact, I ask, that aspiration is frequently changed into phantasy; that hope does become a disordered, and worse than a disordered, a morbid dream; and that duty is but too frequently converted into a pliable stick? If so, the whole of E. S. J.'s objection against "Proverbial Philosophy" falls to the ground. Surely it is nothing against the book that the writer comes to the conclusion, "All is vanity." That conclusion was arrived at by the greatest proverb-writer; and he who attempts "to strike with feebler hand the harp of Sirach's son," may surely be expected to enunciate that same oft-quoted truth.

The merits of the book may, I think, be divided into three classes. I. The truth contained and enunciated.

II. Its effects and teaching.

III. The language in which its truth is enunciated.

I. The truth contained and enunciated. Truth is not new. It is the form in which Mr. Tupper dresses his truth that imparts the charm of novelty to it.

Thus does procrastination receive chastisement at his hands:

"To-morrow, whispereth weakness: and to-morrow findeth him the weaker;
To-morrow, promiseth conscience, and behold, no tc-day for a fulfilment.
O name of happy omen unto youth, O bitter word of terror to the dotard,
Goal of folly's lazy wish, and sorrow's ever-coming friend,

Fraud's loophole,-caution's hint,—and trap to catch the honest,-
Thou wealth to many poor, disgrace to many noble;

Thou hope and fear, thou weal and woe, thou remedy, thou ruin,—
How thickly swarms of thought are clustering round to-morrow."

Mr. Tupper passes over nothing in the ordinary round of life. The best of the book is that, as we read, we can mentally ejaculate, as a truth, not before thought of, is flashed upon us by the light of his genius, "That is true!" And of other truths, of the existence of which we were, perhaps, ignorant, he forcibly tells us. Nothing escapes him. The transporting, pure delights of "love," and the thrilling purity of "marriage," he sets before us in earnest, eloquent language.

Let us turn, for a moment, to the treatise "Of Life." Mr. Tupper brings before us successively a child, pursuing the frolics of infancy; youth, walking in the fair, flowered path of love; the man, on whose heart the demon of money had fixed its clutch;

the old man, stretched upon his bed of illness, retracing his life in thought. The angel of life reads his lesson, and thus (if I may use the term) he sums it up; and in it E. S. J. may read the refutation of his charges against Tupper:

"For human life is a choice wine, flavoured unto him who drinketh it. Delicate fragrance comforting the soul, as needful substance for the body: Therefore see thou art pure and guileless; so shall thy realities of life

Be sweetened, and tempered, and gladdened, by the wholesome spirit of romance." Where is that negative effect which E. S. J. imputes to it. Does it exist in the following?

"Dost thou live, man, dost thou live, or only breathe and labour?

Art thou free, or enslaved to a routine, the daily machinery of habit?

For one man is quickened into life where thousands exist as in a torpor,
Feeding, toiling, sleeping, an insensate weary round:

The plough, or the ledger, or the trade, with animal cares and indolence,
Make the mass of vital years a heavy lump unleavened."

I fancy E. S. J. cannot have read this article, or the one succeeding it, "Of Death," or he would not have laid the book down with, what he terms, the conviction that everything is all right. Action is a fair inference from the lines quoted, which certainly urge that excelsior-like ascent (of the want of which my opponent complains) from the bare material into the realms of the spiritual. Let E. S. J. study this, and he will find it conveys a philosophy the reverse of what he attributes to their author :

"A man will grow to an automaton, an appendage to the counter or the desk, If mind and spirit be not roused to raise the plodding groveller."

The wise and true philosophy of this article is, to "help to expose and undermine that solid falsehood the Material." Can words be more clear and to the point, or the meaning more evident? Here is reproof for those plodders and graspers, advocates of what they call, with a simper, the "practical," for their hatred of what they term "sentimentality " and " romance," on whom Tupper comments with eloquently earnest severity.

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I have already, I fear, trenched too much upon the indulgence of the reader in bringing forth these few examples of the book in question, but I considered it best to let it speak for itself. I refer E. S. J. (and your readers) to the articles "Of Immortality," "Of Ideas,' Of Names," and ask him to point out that string of platitudes which, he says, pervades the whole book? Let him adduce some evidence of that want of thoroughness which he imputes to it. Let him find us, for our satisfaction, the laboured doggerel, of which he says it consists, and I ask him to ascend from the atmosphere of mere criticism, through the writing, to the mind of the writer, and see the clear noble motives which actuated the task, and at least recognize the labour and diligence with which the work has been executed. The assurance with which E. S. J. tells us that Mr. Tupper is no genius, is amusing, when more