courteous spirit which pervades them, and to the absence both of studied misrepresentations of our doctrine, and of those personal attacks on venerated names which have added needless bitterness to many publications of the same party.

This party, as our readers will be already aware, is the Ritualistic division of the English Protestant Establishment, or, as it is here described, "the Catholic school" in "the English branch of the Catholic Church." For this branch, among other notes of life, maintains a goodly variety of antagonistic schools; and it is one of the main objects of the volume before us to show the failure of all these schools but one, and to claim a fair trial for that one.

"The great Evangelical school has never approved itself, broadly speaking, to the highest or the lowest strata of society. . . . Thus, even if it did not exhibit marks of irrecoverable decay, it could at best rank only as a creed for the middle class. Therefore it can never be more than a subordinate section, with no message for twothirds of those with whom it professes to deal." Moreover, the theology of this large and active school is described as " unmitigatedly bad, irreverent and degrading in its language, and full of Nestorian heresy." And when it was most active, the effect of its activity was that "thousands and tens of thousands of earnest and devoted men renounced the Church and became schismatics."

The school," aptly, if not very courteously, named High and Dry," is summarily pronounced still less effective. Its adherents "do not appear to have ever been a real spiritual power in the country."

Much less is any thing to be hoped for from the Broad Church. "The bland tolerance of our New Academy, the graceful stoicism of our modern Peripatetics, however well they may sit on a courteous gentleman in the repose of his study, or in genial intercourse with those of his own rank and cultivation, are but poor helps by the dying bed of a cancer patient, by the side of a betrayed and deserted woman tempted to despair and suicide, by the remorseful agonies of a sinner in his first thoughts of repentance, by the cloudy perplexities of one who begins to think that the universe is without a God." It is also singularly ill adapted for women and children; it has scarcely any devotional literature; it attempts little in the way of practical Christian work; and its neophytes "seldom or never take Holy Orders; and therefore the school, as a clerical power, carries within itself the germs of speedy decay and extinction."

These schools might be shown to be still further subdivided and variously combined; and we question whether some of the subdivisions and combinations have not a claim to set up as independent schools

themselves. We are told of the Broad Church, that it is already "divided into two sections, the Broad-with-unction and the Broadwithout-unction," which are pursuing opposite roads; the former "being absorbed into the Moderate High Church ranks," i.e., we suppose, the High and Dry, and the latter "drifting daily further away from all sympathy with Anglicanism." However, it is clearly maintained that "all the sections of the English Church, save one, have stood their trials and have failed." "The Tractarian now claims his turn." "The Tractarians are in fair legal possession of their position in the Church of England," and mean to hold it; and they themselves believe, "in common with a large body of intelligent outsiders,"-amongst whom, notwithstanding the compliment, we of The Month should be sorry to be reckoned,—that they are "the only persons with a full and incontrovertible moral right to represent that Church.".

They are a school of very recent formation; for though they do not repudiate the name of Tractarian, it must be understood that it is "the later Tractarian school," "the later phase of the movement," to which they belong. Number 90 was very well in its time; but great advances have been made since then. Whilst the Tractarian movement was in its earlier phase, and "had not progressed beyond what may be called, with no offensive intent, its Tory stage," it did not insist much on ritualism, and thought it best confined to private oratories and cathedrals. In that imperfect state of development, "clerics and their female adherents," and "persons of high rank and station," were nearly the only persons whom it seemed to influence. Moreover, its theology was very incomplete. The secessions in 1845 and 1851 would not have taken place if the earlier Tractarians had been as well instructed as this newer school. "It needs but to contrast the sermons preached, for instance, at the consecration of St. Barnabas, Pimlico, with those we now hear at other churches within the octave of a similar event," to see how much Tractarianism No. 2 is in advance of Tractarianism No. 1. Dr. Newman was a tolerably full-fledged Tractarian in his day, and yet he seceded while still “in a semi-Protestant state." His Apologia showed "how completely he misconceived the very nature of the Catholic Church while he was among us, and, of course, the English Communion also; and it showed almost startlingly the progress of the Catholic faith among us since his departure." What is to become of those Tractarians of the earlier mould who have neither seceded nor managed to progress so vigorously as to see that in 1845 they were only semi-Protestants? Whether they are sufficiently distinct to form another of the Anglican schools, or must be made to drift back into the High and Dry

school, in spite of their many points of difference from it, is not distinctly stated. We are only told that some, "while they continue personally unaffected by the posture of affairs," sympathise more or less heartily-probably less rather than more—with the restorers of magnificence in worship.

The volume before us, then, is an exposition of the views of a subsection of the Tractarian party. They differ from the great mass of the members of the English Church in believing in Baptismal Regeneration and a divinely constituted ministry, with spiritual powers derived from the Apostles. They differ from many who agree with them so far, in holding those portions of specially Catholic doctrine that can be made to consist with their own separated position. They differ from other Tractarians in advocating the utmost amount of ritual splendour of which her Majesty's Ecclesiastical Courts can be induced to be tolerant, and in labouring and hoping for the reunion of the Anglican branch with the Catholic Church and with the Eastern Schism. They present us with eighteen essays on questions of the day, by as many different disciples of the school; and the editor, in introducing his class to our notice, assures us that they have been all "left free to express their individual convictions;" and bids us remark, what it was probably another main object of the publication to show, how "this freedom from editorial interference brings into high relief the evidence of essential harmony amongst the contributors in matters of faith and principle." That eighteen different Anglican essayists, and all but three of them clergymen, could manage to write independently of each other on questions of the day without flatly contradicting each others' statements, seems no doubt something of an achievement. It is a much less considerable one, however, in fact, as we find when we read the table of contents, and still more when we have perused the volume, than the title-page and preface would have led us to suppose. Three of the essays deal only with open denials of revelation and miracles, and with professed infidels like Comte and Professor Tyndal, and contain little that an Evangelical could disavow. Two more on Infanticide and Workhouse Nursing would be acceptable to serious men of all schools. Neither is there much room for evidence of "essential harmony and matter of faith" in disquisitions on University Extension, Cathedral Reform, the Conscience Clause, and Foreign Gothic Architecture; at all events, matters of faith are not touched on in these essays. There remains therefore only half the volume to deal with subjects more peculiar to the school. And in these nine essays on the Reunion of the Church, on Ritualism, the Eucharistic Sacrifice, Religious Vows, and Clerical Celibacy, it is very

remarkable how little is said of doctrine, and how vaguely that little is expressed. On such negative topics as, that the English Church since the Reformation has been, on the whole, a failure; that the ordinary manner of performing divine service in all Anglican churches, except those of the latest school of Tractarianism, is unattractive and uninstructive; that isolation from the rest of Christendom, and the loss of the Daily Sacrifice, are deplorable evils; that little good is to be expected from Anglican bishops; and that Protestant theories of Christianity tend to the denial of all dogma, the tone of writing is free, vigorous, and effective. And their main positions, that all bodies which hold the faith of the undivided Church, and receive the Sacraments from duly ordained priests, however divided from and opposed to each other, remain integral and living parts of the one Catholic Church; and that the English Church is one of these bodies,-are clearly and manfully stated, although very little proof is offered for the second, and none for the first of two propositions which to most "intelligent outsiders" appear not only false but absurd and preposterous. That the disciples of the newest and smallest of the various Anglican schools are agreed on these propositions, and also in the advocacy of elaborate ceremonial as a means of evangelising the multitude, and of maintaining a certain amount of Catholic truth, and at the same time detaining in the Anglican communion those whom the reception of such truth would otherwise attract to the communion of Rome, we make no manner of doubt. But beyond this we find mostly either reticence or haze. And if our eighteen exponents of the "later phase of the movement" were to be asked separately to state, What sort of primacy belongs to the chair of St. Peter, since "the claims of the Papal supremacy have no foundation whatever"? What is the precise amount of honour that ought to be paid to the Mother of God, since her cultus, as at present practised in the Roman Church, is the great obstacle to renunion? What exactly is the true doctrine of the Real Presence and of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, since the Romish doctrine of Transubstantiation is "a metaphysical notion, giving some countenance to gross and carnal views"?—we much doubt if we should elicit ten consentient replies. In the mean time we shall continue to give God thanks that we rest on something far more certain in such important matters than our own private researches into the faith of the undivided Church, or the prospect of such authoritative reinterpretations of the Decrees of Trent and of the Thirty-nine Articles as would bring them into harmony.

We are not going to show again the utter baselessness of the theories advocated more pleasingly and plausibly than usual in this

volume. So much has been written on the subject lately, that we may spare our readers a repetition of it. And indeed our purpose was rather to acquaint them with some of the newest varieties of Anglican teaching than to guard them against its fascinations. before we conclude, they may wish for information on some points of importance with regard to the reunion of the Roman and Anglican branches, and to ask if our study of the Essays has enabled us to give it. Waiving all discussion of the immense probability that Anglican Bishops and priests are mere laymen, compounded, as it is, of the separate probabilities that their first Bishop underwent no consecration at all, that the form long in use was invalid, and that the first Bishops positively repudiated the necessary intention in consecrating and ordaining, and therefore of the probability that the "Eucharistic Sacrifice" of the Ritualists, in spite of chasubles, and lights, and incense, is only the manipulation of a piece of a quartern loaf, and that the absolution so painfully gained by the authoress of An Essay in the form of an Autobiography, after twelve hours' kneeling at the altar-rails in a "large dreary London church," was no absolution at all-waiving the absurdities of a disunited unity, and severed limbs still forming a living body, and the kingdom of heaven without a visible head;—and taking the Unionists on their own ground, it is natural to ask, how the operation is to be brought about. How is the Anglican branch, with its various schools, and its perplexed Bishops, to be brought either to submit to reunion, or to accept any modification of the Catholic faith? And how is the Holy See, which, under the influence of Jesuits and converts, seems determined pitilessly to snub the Unionists, and to refuse every notion of modifying its faith or formularies, to be induced to come to terms?

To the first of these questions we regret to say that none of our essayists give us any means of replying. Indeed, we are left rather in the dark as to whether the union, after all, to which we are invited is to be with the whole branch, or only with the school which has the moral right to represent it. It is proposed that Anglicans should be at once admitted to communion at Catholic altars as a preliminary step, while the more difficult question of recognising the mission and rights of priests is under discussion. But surely it cannot be intended that Broad Churchmen, whether with or without unction, or even the Nestorian Evangelicals, should be so admitted. Yet they are equally members of the English Church with the most orthodox Tractarians. Some test must be necessary; but we are not told what. Still the more probable interpretation seems to be that our friends of the olive-branch invite us to remould our system