certain mysterious events in His human life. But assuredly she has not left us the right to offer wheedling prayers to a mythical Queen of Heaven; she has not left us the right to believe in such puerile stories as the Madonna-stamp on hailstones, in order to induce a comfortably pious state of mind.

The dualism alleged to exist between faith and know ledge will not serve. Man is one, and reality is one there can no more be two orders of reality' not affectin each other than there can be two faculties in the hum mind working independently of each other. The unive which is interpreted to us by our understanding is unreal, nor are its laws pliant to our wills, as the pra matists do vainly talk. It is a divinely ordered syste which includes man, the roof and crown of things, & Christ, in whom is revealed to us its inner character an meaning. It is not the province of faith to flout scienti knowledge, nor to contaminate the material on whic science works by intercalating what M. Le Roy cal 'transhistorical symbols-myths in fact-which do n become true by being recognised as false, as the ne apologetic seems to suggest. Faith is not the bor story-teller of Modernist theology. Faith is, on the

practical side, just the resolution to stand or fall by th noblest hypothesis; and, on the intellectual side, it is progressive initiation, by experiment which ends in er perience, into the unity of the good, the true, and the beautiful, founded on the inner assurance that thes three attributes of the divine nature have one source an conduct to one goal.

The Modernists are right in finding the primar principle of faith in the depths of our undivided perso ality. They are right in teaching that faith develope and comes into its own only through the activity of the whole man. They are right in denying the name of fai to correct opinion, which may leave the character touched. As Hartley Coleridge says:

'Think not the faith by which the just shall live

Is a dead creed, a map correct of heaven,

Far less a feeling fond and fugitive,

A thoughtless gift, withdrawn as soon as given.
It is an affirmation and an act

That bids eternal truth be present fact.'

For all this we are grateful to them. But we maintain that the future of Christianity is in the hands of those who insist that faith and knowledge must be confronted with each other till they have made up their quarrel. The crisis of faith cannot be dealt with by establishing a modus vivendi between scepticism and superstition. That is all that Modernism offers us; and it will not do. Rather we will believe, with Clement of Alexandria, that TOTη n γνῶσις, γνωστὴ δὲ ἡ πίστις.

If this confidence in the reality of things hoped for and the hopefulness of things real be well-founded, we must wait in patience for the coming of the wise masterbuilders who will construct a more truly Catholic Church out of the fragments of the old, with the help of the material now being collected by philosophers, psychologists, historians, and scientists of all creeds and countries. When the time comes for this building to rise, the contributions of the Modernists will not be described as wood, hay, or stubble. They have done valuable service to biblical criticism, and in other branches, which will be always recognised. But the building will not (we venture to prophesy) be erected on their plan, nor by their Church. History shows few examples of the rejuvenescence of decayed autocracies. If the Catholic Church of the future is to have a local centre-which is improbableRome is perhaps the place least likely to provide it. Nor is our generation likely to see much of the reconstruction. The churches, as institutions, will continue for some time to show apparent weakness; and other moralising and civilising agencies will do much of their work. But, since there never has been a time when the character of Christ and the ethics which he taught have been held in higher honour than the present, there is every reason to expect that the next 'Age of Faith,' when it comes, will be of a more genuinely Christian type than the last.

W. R. INGE.

Art. 13.-ENGLISH PARTY GOVERNMENT.

1. The Government of England. By A. Lawrence Lowell, Professor of the Science of Government in Harvard University. Two vols. London and New York: Macmillan, 1908.

2. Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties. By M. Ostrogorski. Translated by Frederick Clarke. Two vols. London: Macmillan, 1902.

3. The English Constitution. By Walter Bagehot. New edition. London: Kegan Paul, 1878.

4. The Law and Custom of the Constitution.

By Sir William Anson. Third edition. Vol. II: The Crown. Parts I and II. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907-8. 'MEASURED by the standards of duration, absence of violent commotions, maintenance of law and order, general prosperity and contentment of the people, and by the extent of its influence on the institutions and political thought of other lands, the English government has been one of the most remarkable the world has ever known. An attempt, therefore, to study it at any salient epoch cannot be valueless; and the present is a salient epoch, for the nation has now enjoyed something very near to manhood suffrage in the boroughs for forty years, and throughout the country more than twenty years-a period long enough for democracy to produce its primary if not its ultimate effects. Moreover, England has one of the most interesting of popular governments, because it has had a free development, little hampered by rigid constitutional devices. It is an organism constantly adapting itself to its environment, and hence in full harmony with national conditions. An endeavour has been made in these volumes to portray the present form of that organism and the forces which maintain its equilibrium.' (Lowell, Pref. v.)

These are the words in which Mr Lowell describes the task he has undertaken. No man was ever better qualified for its performance. He is thoroughly acquainted with the constitutions and the parties of continental Europe; he has meditated long and deeply on the institutions of the United States; he has mastered with an infinity of care every detail of our English parliamentary and administrative system. There is nothing left for him to learn by way of information

from May or from Sir W. Anson, or by way of constitutional theory from Mr Bryce or from Bagehot. He is not a British subject, and therefore approaches the study of our public life with a disinterested impartiality impossible to a public-spirited Englishman who is of necessity immersed in the political conflicts of the day. But he is a member of the great English people. He can look at our institutions from an English, and therefore from the true point of view, and can understand almost intuitively many things which perplexed and misled the analytical genius of Tocqueville, and have not been thoroughly mastered by the learning and the thoughtfulness of Ostrogorski. Hence our author has achieved a success as sudden as it assuredly will be permanent.

Mr Lowell's Government of England' at once took its place among the best of the treatises which, since the age of Montesquieu, have analysed the working and the spirit of the English constitution. There is, however, some danger lest the extent and the minuteness of our author's knowledge should conceal from many readers the originality of his thought; lest the importance of his constitutional doctrine should lie hidden under the mass of his information. The exhaustive chapters indeed on municipal trading, on public elementary education, on the organisation and the revenues of the Church, on the Crown colonies, and a score more of interesting topics, are past praise. They must be read, however, not as isolated essays, but as illustrations or outgrowths of Mr Lowell's constitutional theories. His conception and analysis of party government in England colours every page of his two volumes and constitutes the originality and, to Englishmen at any rate, the importance of his work. The aim of this article is to examine and explain his view of party government in England and to consider how far it deserves complete acceptance.

The leading conception, the idée mère-to borrow an untranslatable French expression-which gives unity to Mr Lowell's analysis of the English constitution, is the perception of the intimate connexion between the Cabinet and our whole party system, as they each exist and flourish in modern England. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in his eyes the Cabinet and party government are but two sides or aspects of one and the

same constitutional fact. This statement needs both explanation and elucidation.

Mr Lowell, in common with every Englishman of intelligence who, since 1867, has written on English constitutionalism, belongs to the school of Bagehot. He has accepted to the full the doctrine revealed by Bagehot's genius to the English public-that the Cabinet is, as things now stand, the true English executive and the very centre of our whole government. This discovery-for it was nothing less-contained in Bagehot's English Constitution,' swept away a whole host of misconceptions which had obscured the nature of English constitutionalism and thereby perplexed all speculations with regard to popular government, in so far as the purported to rest on English experience. It put an end to the literary theory of the constitution; it freed the world, in other words, from the doctrine propounded by Montesquieu and popularised with us by Blackstone, that English freedom and English prosperity depended on a subtle and, in truth, almost inconceivable balance and separation of powers, under which the executive authority of the Crown, the legislative authority of the Houses of Parliament, and the judicial authority of the Courts were played off against one another and somehow secured to each citizen his individual freedom. Bagehot made men use their eyes and look at things as they were. We learnt that the strength of the English constitution lay as much in the fusion as in the separation of powers: that the Cabinet-our true executive-necessarily consists of men taken from one or other of the Houses of Parlia ment; that it is in fact the link or hyphen joining together the executive and the Legislature; that the Courts constantly interfere with acts of executive authority; that the Chancellor, who is the highest judicial authority the land, is also a member of the Government; and that, in short, the dogma of the separation of powers is, and always has been, in the sense most naturally put upon it. in contradiction with the most patent facts of English public life, and has even less of truth than the legal fiction which ascribes every act in which the authority of the State is concerned to the personal action of the King.

Our difficulty to-day is to understand two things which deserve attention. The one is the element of