of existing controversies, so far as regards the cause of a truly catholic piety. Our sole care is to acquit ourselves in relation to it and to its enemies in the manner becoming us as its real disciples. In the history of providence there is a relation, partaking of the constancy of law, between the strong developments of error and the stronger developments of truth. Wakefulness begets wakefulness. It is while men sleep that the tares are sown. We feel, accordingly, that to fear belongs not to our vocation, but at all times to labour and wait, and especially during such times as are now passing over us.

The condition of the Church of England about a century since in relation to the kind of piety of which we have spoken was deplorable. The increase of an earnest Christian feeling within its pale since that time is the great fact in its recent history. So far as state enactment, and even state influence are concerned, it has not undergone any material change; but the effect of the natural progress of society on its intelligence, and feeling, and course of action, is everywhere conspicuous. Still the question of the state of religion in our established church a century since, and at the present time, is one on which our judgment should not be lightly formed. In speaking of its condition in regard to piety a hundred years ago as deplorable, we would not be understood as meaning to say that we account all churchmen in those times who were not to be numbered among the disciples of Hervey or Romaine as being destitute of spiritual religion. We know enough of the force of prejudice to be prevented from seeing our way at once to such a conclusion. The undue worship of forms may consist with a real worship of something greatly above them. Men may possess much evangelical feeling, and still hold defective, and even mistaken notions, in regard to parts of the evangelical system. There may be real piety, and not all the liberty and joyousness which belong to its higher influence. On this subject it behoves us to guard against substituting a formalism of our own, in the place of the formalism we condemn. All parties have their shibboleths, which, if true in the main, are not always charitably applied. Nevertheless, when charity has made her largest allowance in this view, the conclusion to which we are shut up is sufficiently humiliating. In the Church of England during the greater part of the last century, we see an establishment, eminent in its wealth, in its intellectual resources, and in its social influence-and a people sunk to the level of paganism, if not below it, as regards ignorance, sensuality, and irreligion.

But from the time we have mentioned, good men in our national church, both ministers and laymen, began to be observant of this state of things, and to lament it. Methodism was the

offspring of this feeling. It separated from the establishment, but it should not be forgotten that it originated there. Its spirit was much too buoyant and impetuous to bow to the restraints of the Anglican discipline. Yet, while many separated, others of kindred temper remained conformists, and for a long time the two parties laboured as parallel forces rather than as antagonists. It was a beneficent arrangement of Providence that the calling forth of this new religious feeling among the middle and lower classes of the people in England should precede the era of the French Revolution. Before the age of Robespierre and Paine, the body of Evangelical Christians in this country, conformist and nonconformist, had become sufficiently powerful to originate most of those religious institutions which have since grown to such maturity. In the history of those attempts to diffuse Christian intelligence, and a more religious feeling, there was no doubt much that savoured of extravagant expectation, and the eloquence wherewith such projects were commended was not always of the wisest or purest description. But the zeal thus evinced was that of warm-hearted pious men. It was allied, moreover, with much enlightened charity. Multitudes of men and women, presenting every variety of capacity and culture, were found capable of subordinating their lesser points of difference to their greater points of agreement-and choosing their common ground of action, took possession of it with much generosity of purpose. It was thought, that in those seemly confederacies some approach had been made towards a sound catholic unity. The hope of a oneness of judgment in all things, seemed to be in good part relinquished, that a oneness of feeling in some things, and those the best things, might be realized. It was a healthy, manly, Christianlike course that affairs were then taking-we are sorry it has been impeded.

But to whom is the fault of this hindrance to be imputed? This is a large, and a somewhat vexed question-our words upon it shall be few. So long as Evangelical churchmen were feeble in respect to numbers and resources, it was natural that they should avail themselves of sympathy from almost any quarter whence it might be obtained. From the hands of the great majority within the pale of their own church they received hard treatment. They were spoken of as visionaries and fanatics. They were described at one moment as in league to undermine the principles of moral obligation, and the next as being righteous over-much; and nothing was more common than to hear them denounced as being no churchmen-as enemies within the camp. Nonconformists, on the other hand, never failed to appreciate their religious earnestness, to rejoice in their labours, and to

deliver honourable testimony concerning them. In many a provincial district, the Venns, the Milners, and the Scotts of those days strained the jealous regulations of their church to the utmost, that they might act as instructors to the ignorant conjointly with dissenters. But, after a while, the times were seen to be changing. The mitre began to grace the brow of evangelical preachers. The titled and the noble stood forth as members of the growing sect. With multitude, and opulence, and rank, came other changes. Sympathy from without was less needed, and was less sought. The pomp of our national hierarchy, which the good men adverted to had been wont to regard as so much haughty worldliness, almost of necessity arrayed against them, seemed now to present itself in a new light, to awaken new feeling, and to put the mind into a new process of calculation. Sober nonconformists were not insensible to this altered state of things, which soon disposed their old friends to move more separately and alone. In their own conduct they could see nothing that should have led to such a change. They were not inclined to judge the case harshly. They knew that evangelical churchmen were railed upon as being dissenters in their hearts, and they accounted it not the most unnatural thing in the world, that some of their number should evince a solicitude to avoid furnishing such railers with unnecessary pretexts. But when charity had done its utmost in this way, the case did not bear an agreeable aspect. It was too much as though even good men had learnt to prefer worldly association in connexion with the principle of an ecclesiastical establishment, to religious association apart from that principle. It seemed to say, that to be a churchman, was, even in the esteem of such men, a more material thing than to be a Christian. Charity, courage, catholic manhood-all appeared to have drooped under the smile of worldly favour. It was not pleasant to be obliged to judge thus concerning men of eminent religious profession, and who were still, no doubt, for the most part, men of sincere piety. But the conclusion seemed unavoidable. The spirit of the earlier evangelical churchmen had almost wholly disappeared. Something different -at times very different-had come into its place. Dispassionate men-men whose hearts were governed by no unfriendly, no unchristian feeling-often said that a day of trial would come, a day in which the evangelical party in the established church would cease as a party, or become more powerful than ever by returning to the more Christian and catholic temper of their predecessors. It will be seen that in these observations we do not refer to very recent times, but to a course of affairs extending to about the close of the first quarter of the present century. Since that

time so much fault has attached to nearly all parties, that we have no disposition to attempt to strike the balance between them. If there be men who can look on the conflicts with which we have been familiar during the last fifteen or twenty years, as proceedings in which all the wisdom has been on one side, and all the folly on the other, we can only say that we have not learnt our philosophy in the school of such men. We still venture to think that wise ends may sometimes be pursued in bad temper by very well-meaning men in every party. But we wish just now to be only so far mindful of the past as may be necessary to our judging with intelligence of the present. The great want of the crisis at which we have arrived is an enlightened, firm-hearted, concord among all good men-a strength of principle which may prompt to acts of resolute self-denial, and an expansive charity which may render us capable of wide agreement on the basis of great truths-and this we may hope to realize by something like a mutual confession of faults, much more than by indulging in sharp recrimination.

It is now about a century and a half since a memorable attempt was made to render the honours and emoluments of the English church, and the Universities, accessible to Romanists. It may not be amiss to advert to the leading facts in the history of that movement, and to mark the points in which they either resemble the present course of things at Oxford, or are distinguished from them. It is observable that neither James II., nor any of his flatterers, ever ventured to question the strictly protestant foundation of those establishments. It was everywhere admitted, that the provisions of protestant law were explicit and unquestionable; and the proposed changes were all to rest on so many acts of dispensation from the crown, which were to be raised above the law.

The verdict of the judges in favour of the dispensing power was obtained on the 21st of June, 1686: and about two months before, James had issued a dispensation in favour of Obadiah Walker, master of University College, Oxford, and two fellows of that foundation, who professed themselves catholics. Licence was also given to publish catholic books from a printing-press in that college, and to celebrate catholic worship within its walls. So early as the middle of December, a dispensation had been granted to one Massey, exempting him from the Act of Uniformity, and the various acts passed to secure the protestant church; and the success of the king in the affair of University College, followed as it was by the opinion of the judges, so emboldened him, that he resolved to appoint this person to the vacant deanery of Christ Church, which would place him at the head of the

largest college in that university, with the rank of a dignitary in the English church. Such, too, was the passiveness of Aldrich, the sub-dean, that Massey was installed, and his dispensation openly accepted. Nearly two years afterwards, the catholic dean of Christ Church presided at a meeting in Oxford to elect a bishop in that city.

In January, 1687, an attempt was made on Exeter College in the same university, but in another form. There were several fellowships in that college founded by the family of Petre, to which Father Petre, the jesuit, in much favour with the king, was related. But objections had been made to the right of the Petre family to appoint to those foundations, and during the last seventy years all such appointments had been made by the authorities of the college, without any interruption from the family of the founder. The case was now brought before the ecclesiastical commission court, the intention being to invest the catholic descendants of Sir William Petre with the power of nominating to the fellowships which he had founded. But the dispute was found to turn upon the nature of the contract between Sir William and the college, and both Jefferies and Herbert agreed in describing it as a matter for a civil suit, and as not coming within the province of the ecclesiastical commissioners. To prosecute it, however, in that form, would have been to give it a dangerous degree of publicity, and with much uncertainty as to the result. The attempt was in consequence allowed to terminate at this point.

Early in February, Alban Francis, a Benedictine monk, who had for some time employed himself in endeavouring to make converts among the students at Cambridge, presented a letter from the king to the authorities of that university, which required them to admit the bearer to the degree of master of arts, without taking the usual oaths. It was obvious that if the dispensing power was to be thus recognised by the university at large, in one of its most formal acts, its freedom and its protestant character were at an end. Peachell, the vice-chancellor, hesitated, but, encouraged by the general feeling, he insisted that Francis should take the usual oaths as the condition of obtaining the degree. He was summoned before the ecclesiastical commissioners, and the university deputed some of the most distinguished of their body to accompany him, among whom stood Sir Isaac Newton, then professor of mathematics at Cambridge, exposed, along with his colleagues, to the scorn and insolence natural to such a judge as the Lord Chancellor Jefferies, and to men capable of acting as his coadjutors. The case was argued several times, but in the end Peachell was deprived of his office as vice-chancellor.