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of England to the Roman Catholic faith, and this, no doubt, was sincerely meant for our good. Even in higher quarters indulgences have been granted for the same end. It is even said that! the secession of Mr. Newman has been no less than a miracle wrought by the earnest supplications of Roman Catholic churches, not in England only, but also in many parts of the Continent." It would indeed, in our opinion, have been a miracle if he had not seceded from our Church, and most devoutly for his sake do we rejoice at his determination. We pretend not to disguise or to undervalue the loss sustained by the Church of England in a man of his piety, ability, and influence; such a loss perhaps has not been experienced since the Reformation: but in the terrible alternative before his mind, if not a Roman Catholic, what had he been? With regard, however, to her prayers, we might perhaps suggest, in the most friendly spirit, to the Church of France the old adage that wise charity begins at home. The most fervent prayers of her sons, if devoted to the conversion of distinguished individuals, might find ample scope among themselves; and with regard to some, we cannot but bid thein God speed! Have they not to win back their own most powerful writer who has appeared since the Restoration, who having attempted an unholy alliance between religion and the wildest democracy, now stands alone, a banished but not a silent man? Have they not to win back those who, some of them at least, have been estranged and goaded to fury by their ultramontane pretensions and foolish superstitions; men of that kind of eloquence which at least commands a most perilous influence over the youth of Paris; popular novelists whose wide-read volumes counterwork their popular teaching, and implant deeply and permanently a feeling of mistrust, derision, hatred, against their most powerful ally? Have they not to win (a more noble but, in their present spirit, a more utterly hopeless task) the whole higher literature of France? Men of science who, from the height of their • Positive Philosophy,' look down on Catholicism and Protestantism as equally obsolete; men of a more passionate school, who find the final Avatar, the full development of Christianity, in the levelling Jacobinism of Robespierre and St. Just? And even a still higher class (and here we neither augur nor wish them success), the philosophers who labour even on the writings of the Middle Ages with power of thought and with industry which may put to shame the feeble hagiographists of the Church party, yet who maintain a wise and dignified impartiality: the historiansone changed from the most ardent admirer of the imaginative and better part of Mediaval religion, into their bitterest antagonistand others who, in their dignified superiority, arbitrate unanswer.

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ably on all the great questions of history, on the inevitable decay as well as the rise and power of the Medieval Church, on the true development of Christianity out of a pure religion into a vast hierarchical system, and, as they prophetically foresee, out of that hierarchical system into a universal and eternal religion.

We repeat, that so far as intended for our good, we are grateful at least for the spirit of these prayers. But let us dispassionately look to the possibility of their accomplishment; and if there were this possibility, to their inevitable consequences. We address this to some few amiable but young minds among ourselves, who are smitten with a hopeless scheme of Mediævalizing England.

Let us translate the prayer for the conversion of England out of its theologic language, into that of plain practical common sense. It is this: that Divine Providence will be pleased to withdraw at once, or to permit to be read only under close or jealous superintendence, that English Bible, which is the family treasure and record in every household from the palace to the cottage—which has been disseminated throughout the land with such zealous activity, and received with such devout thankfulness-which is daily, or at least weekly, read in millions of families, and is on the pillows of myriads of dying men; that the services of the Church may be no longer in the intelligible vernacular English, but in a foreign tongue-a tongue, not like the Latin to the people who speak any of the affiliated languages, so that its meaning may be partially caught, but one absolutely strange and meaningless to the ear; that the communicants at the Lord's Supper may not merely be compelled to embrace new doctrines, although at variance with all their habits of thought and reason, but be deprived of one half of the precious spiritual sustenance from whence their faith has hitherto derived such inappreciable strength; that in all the public services the priesthood shall withdraw into a kind of unapproachable sanctity-they alone admitted to direct intercourse with God -the people only through them, and at their good pleasure; that from every parsonage in England shall be expelled the devout, the blameless, the charitable wife-the pure and exemplary daughters; that our wives and daughters throughout the land shall be compelled to utter their most secret, their most holy, their most unutterable thoughts in the confessional to some, as it may happen, severe and venerable, or young and comely priest; that England may be un-Anglicised, not merely in her Church and in her religion, but in her whole national character, which has grown out of, and is throughout interpenetrated by, her reformed faith; that we surrender the hard-won freedom of our thoughts, the boldness of our judgments, the independence of our mental being -(for without that absolute surrender there can be no true, full,

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and unquestioning conversion to the creed of Rome-no submission to Medieval Christianity)—that all our proud national reminiscences the glories of our Elizabeth, of the reigns of our William and our Anne, shall be disdainfully thrown aside-the defeat of the Armada become a questionable blessing, the Revolution a national sin demanding the fullest expiation—the accession of the House of Brunswick a crime and a calamity-our universal toleration be looked on as a sin against God-our late-wrung! concessions to dissentients revoked as soon as the Church regains her power-the sovereign of the worst-ruled state in Europe have power to dictate the religious part of our Constitution. Nor is our whole history alone to be renewed and rewritten: our whole literature-not merely our theology from Hooker, and Taylor, and Barrow, down to Paley; but all our great prose writers, Bacon, and Raleigh, and Clarendon, even to the present day; our poets-if Shakspeare be too universal not to stand above even these controversies-yet Spenser, the poet of Elizabethyet Milton, the Italian translation of which we saw the other day in the Index of prohibited books-yet all (but one half of Dryden, and that, however in his class inimitable, certainly no profoundly religious writer, the author of the ، Essay on Man'), down to Cowper, to Scott, to Southey, and to Wordsworth : all must retire or do penance by mutilation; and give place to a race of individuals yet unborn, or at least undeveloped, who in the nineteenth century will aspire to reproduce the poetry, the history, the philosophy of the fourteenth.

Cast now a hasty prophetic glance on the consequences. The destruction of the English Church (to say nothing of the Scotch) may be within the remote bounds of possibility.

Can the recon

struction of the Roman Catholic as a national Church be dreamed of by the wildest enthusiast? One vast voluntary system then pervades the land. In the part (the small part, we fear) still occupied by religion (we set aside for the moment the faithful but. discouraged ministers of our Church), the Methodist, the Independent, the Baptist, with their Bible and hymn-book come into fierce collision with the priest and his breviary; and with whom will the people of England-the middle and lower classes of England-those that have the real sway, the votes, the control of the government, take their side? For one splendid Roman Catholic cathedral would rise a hundred square brick meeting-houses, If a religious war could be expected in our later days, the only safeguard against that war would be the multiplying of sects, and the great numerical superiority of the sectarians. But if any bond could unite them, it would be the inextinguishable hatred of what they plainly call Popery. And in such a war, while one

order

order was vainly seeking its Simon de Montfort, the other would have no difficulty in finding its Cromwell. If these be idle fears at least that wise and noble mutual respect which is rising in all minds for those who are deep, and sincere, and active in religion, and especially where the views of what is religion are rational, enlightened the best sign and the happiest augury of our times— that true toleration which is tenacious above all things of truth, but wisely patient of the slow advance of others to the same truth, would be trampled under foot and trodden out in the fierce conflict. Will this be the worst? Lay before the intelligent and educated-the higher classes; lay before the intelligent whose education is practical life and experience, the artizans and manufacturers of England, the remorseless alternative-the Christianity of the Middle Ages, or none; subscribe the whole creed of Pope Pius, or renounce that of the Apostles;-what man of reason and common sense does not foresee-what Christian does not shudder at the issue?

We would close with one solemn and amicable question: Are we-the Roman Catholic and the Protestant Christian Churchesthe sole competitors for dominion over the minds of men? Is there not an Anti-Christ equally formidable to both? Is this the best way of meeting our common adversary, this internecine, this irreconcilable strife among ourselves-this louder triumph, it should seem, over a few deserters from each other's ranks, than for the reclaiming a host of total unbelievers? What is wanted is a Christianity-not for a few monks, or monk-like men; not for a small imaginative past-worshipping aristocracy; no, nor for a pious, unreasoning peasantry-but for men of the world (not of this world, as we may tauntingly be asserted to mean), but men who ever feel that their present sphere of duty, of virtue, of usefulness to mankind lies in this world on their way to a higher and better -men of intelligence, activity, of exemplary and wide-working goodness-men of faith, yet men of truth, to whom truth is of God, and to whom nothing is of God that is not true-men whose religion is not sadly and vainly retrospective, but present and hopefully prospective. It is our fixed persuasion that the Roman Catholic Church, that is, the church of the Middle Ages, hereafter to the end of time, can be no more than a powerful sect (we mean no offence)—a sect, it may be, of increasing power; but an allcomprehending, all-reconciling-a Catholic Church in the only real sense of that phrase, it can never be. The shadow on the sun-dial of the King of Judah once went back ten degrees; the Jesuits once forced back the human mind for a certain period to the religion of the dark ages; but time resumed its natural course, and human intelligence will so pursue its onward way.

The word

word of God is alone immutable, and that part of Christianity (however it may have been developed) which is the word of God, that alone has the power of endurance to the end of the world. The indwelling spirit of Christ, not confined to one narrow discipline, to one visible polity, is still to be developed in more abundant power, to exalt, to purify the Primal Idea of Christianity, the true, the eternal, the immutable, the real Dominus nobiscum' which is commingled with our humanity.

ART. V.-1. Lives of the Lindsays; or, a Memoir of the Houses of Crawford and Balcarres. By Lord Lindsay. To which are added, Extracts from the Official Correspondence of Alex. Sixth Earl of Balcarres, during the Maroon War; together with Personal Narratives by his Brothers, the Hon. Robert, Colin, James, John, and Hugh Lindsay. 4 vols. 8vo. Wigan, 1840.

2. Case of James Earl of Balcarres, claiming the Title and Dignities of Earl of Crawford, &c. (in the House of Lords), 1845. Pp. 239, folio.

LORD LINDSAY takes for his motto those beautiful lines

of Southey :

'My thoughts are with the dead; with them

I live in long-past years;

Their virtues love, their faults condemn,
Partake their hopes and fears;

And from their lessons seek and find

Instruction with an humble mind.'

He collected and illustrated the memorials of his ancestry with no view to publication, but partly to gratify his own feelings of respect for many excellent progenitors, and partly (we can well believe principally) under the influence of affectionate concern for some younger relations-to whom his volumes are inscribed in a thoughtful and graceful preface. They were printed five years ago-but for private circulation only; so that the extracts which we are about to present will have all the attractions of novelty for most of our readers.

Every family,' says his Lordship, 'should have a record of its own. Each has its peculiar spirit, running through the whole line, and, in more or less development, perceptible in every generation. Rightly viewed, as a most powerful but much-neglected instrument of education, I can imagine no study more rife with pleasure and instruction. Nor need our ancestors have been Scipios or Fabii to interest us in their fortunes. We do not love our kindred for their glory or their genius, but for those domestic

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