ness of times, and holding up God's marvellous counsels to the devout wonder and meditation of the thoughtful believer. As I said at first, Arnold has rather pointed out the path, than followed it to any extent himself; the student will find in his writings the principles of his method rather than its development. They are scattered, more or less, throughout all his writings, but more especially in the Appendix to vol. ii. of the Sermons, the Preface to the third, the Notes to the fourth, and the Two Sermons on Prophecy.' These last furnish to the student a very instructive instance of his method; for, whilst he will recognize there the double sense of Prophecy, and much besides that was held by the old commentators, he will also perceive how different an import they assume, as treated by Arnold; and how his wide and elevated view could find in Prophecy a firm foundation for a Christian's hope and faith, without their being coupled with that extravagance with which the study of the Prophecies has been so often united. His Sermons, also, generally exhibit very striking illustrations of his faculty to discern general truth under particular circumstances, and his power to apply it in a very altered, nay, often opposite form to cases of a different nature; thus making God's word an ever living oracle, furnishing to every age those precise rules, principles, and laws of conduct, which its actual circumstances may require.

I must not forget to add, that his principles of interpretation were of slow and matured growth; he arrived at them gradually, and, in some instances, even reluctantly; and one of the most elaborate of his early sermons, which he had intended to have preached before the University, was in defence of what is called the verbal inspiration of Scripture. But since I became acquainted with him, I have never known him to maintain any thing but what I have here tried to set forth. It is very possible that much of what I have here said may appear to many to be exaggerated; but I know not how else to express adequately my firm confidence that the more the principles which guided Arnold's interpretation of Scripture are studied in his writings, the more will their power to throw light on the depths of God's wisdom be appreciated. Yours, ever,

B. PRICE.

3. Lastly, his letters will have already shown how early he had conceived the idea of the work, to which he chiefly looked forward, as that of his old age, on Christian Politics, or Church and State. But it is only a wider survey of his general views that will show how completely this was the centre round which were gathered not only all his writings, but all his thoughts and actions on social subjects, and which gave him a distinct position amongst English divines, not only of the present, but of almost all preceding generations. We must remember how the Greek science, olivian, of which the English word "politics," or even political science, is so inadequate a translation-society in its connexion with the highest welfare of men-exhibited to him the great problem which every educated man was called upon to solve. We must conceive how lofty were the aspirations which he entertained

To these may be added the posthumous volume of "Sermons, mostly on Interpretation of Scripture."

2 This work he approached at four different times: 1, in a sketch drawn up in 1827; 2, in two fragments in 1833, 34; 3, in a series of Letters to Chevalier Bunsen, 1839; 4, in an historical fragment, 1838, 1841. These have been all published in the 2nd edition of the Fragment on the Church, which in the 1st edition only contained the 4th of those here mentioned.

of what Christianity was intended to effect, and what, if rightly applied, it might yet effect, far beyond any thing which has yet been seen, or is ordinarily conceived, for the moral and social restoration of the world. We must enter into the keen sense of the startling difficulty which he felt to be presented by its comparative failure. "The influence of Christianity no doubt has made itself felt in all those countries which have professed it; but ought not its effects," he urged, "to have been far more perceptible than they are, now that nearly eighteen hundred years have elapsed since the kingdom of God was first proclaimed? Is it, in fact, the kingdom of God in which we are now living? Are we at this hour living under the law or under grace?" Every thing, in short, which he thought or said on this subject, was in answer to what he used to call the very question of questions; the question which occurs in the earliest of all his works, and which he continued to ask of himself and of others as long as he lived. "Why, amongst us in this country, is the mighty work of raising up God's kingdom stopped; the work of bringing every thought and word and deed to the obedience of Christ ?" (Serm. vol. i. p. 115.)

The great cause of this hindrance to the triumph of Christianity, he believed to lie (to adopt his own distinction) in the corruption not of the Religion of Christ, but of the Church of Christ. The former he felt had on the whole done its work-" its truths," he said, "are to be sought in the Scriptures alone, and are the same at all times and in all countries." But "the Church, which is not a revelation concerning the eternal and unchangeable God, but an institution to enable changeable man to apprehend the unchangeable," had, he maintained, been virtually destroyed: and thus, "Christianity being intended to remedy the intensity of the evil of the Fall by its Religion, and the universality of the evil by its Church, has succeeded in the first, because its Religion has been retained as God gave it, but has failed in the second, because its Church has been greatly corrupted." (Serm. vol. iv. Pref. p. xliv.)

What he meant by this corruption, and why he thought it fatal to the full development of Christianity, will best appear by explaining his idea of the Church, both with regard to its true end, and its true nature. Its end he maintained "to be the putting down of moral evil.” "And if this idea," he asks, " seem strange to any one, let him consider whether he will not find this notion of Christianity every where prominent in the Scriptures, and whether the most peculiar ordinances of the Christian Religion are not founded upon it; or again, if it seems natural to him, let him ask himself whether he has well considered the legitimate consequences of such a definition, and whether, in fact, it is not practically forgotten ?" Its true nature he believed to be not an institution of the Clergy, but a living society of all Christians. "When I hear men talk of the Church," he used to say, "I cannot help recalling how Abbé Sièyes replied to the question, What is the Tiers Etat?' by saying 'La nation moins la noblesse et le clergé ;' and so I, if I

were asked, What are the laity? would answer, the Church minus the Clergy. This," he said, "is the view taken of the Church in the New Testament; can it be said that it is the view held amongst ourselves, and if not, is not the difference incalculable?" It was as frustrating the union of all Christians, in accomplishing what he believed to be the true end enjoined by their common Master, that he felt so strongly against the desire for uniformity of opinion or worship, which he used to denounce under the name of sectarianism; it was an annihilating what he believed to be the Apostolical idea of a Church, that he felt so strongly against that principle of separation between the clergy and laity, which he used to denounce under the name of priestcraft. "As far as the principle on which Archbishop Laud and his followers acted went to reactuate the idea of the Church, as a co-ordinate and living power by virtue of Christ's institution and express promise, I go along with them, but I soon discover that by the Church they meant the clergy, the hierarchy exclusively, and there I fly off from them at a tangent. For it is this very interpretation of the Church that, according to my conviction, constituted the first and fundamental apostacy." Such was the motto from Coleridge's Remains, which he selected as the full expression of his own views, and it was as realizing this idea that he turned eagerly to all institutions, which seemed likely to impress on all Christians the moral, as distinct from the ceremonial character of their religion, the equal responsibility and power which they possessed, not "as friends or honorary members" of the Church, but as its most essential parts.

Such (to make intelligible, by a few instances, what in general language must be obscure) was his desire to revive the order of deacons, as a link between the clergy and laity,-his defence of the union of laymen with clerical synods, of clergy with the civil legislature, his belief that an authoritative permission to administer the Eucharist, as well as Baptism, might be beneficially granted to civil or military officers, in congregations where it was impossible to procure the presence of clergy, his wish for the restoration of Church discipline, "which never can and never ought to be restored, till the Church puts an end to the usurpation of her powers by the clergy; and which, though it must be vain when opposed to public opinion, yet, when it is the expression of that opinion, can achieve any thing." (Serm. vol. iv. pp. liii. 416.) Such was his suggestion of the revival of many "good practices, which belong to the true Church no less than to the corrupt Church, and would there be purely beneficial; daily church services, frequent communions, memorials of our Christian calling, presented to our notice in crosses and wayside oratories; commemorations to holy men of all times and countries; the doctrine of the communion of saints practically taught; religious orders, especially of women, of different kinds, and under different rules, delivered only from the snare and sin of perpetual vows." (Serm. vol. iv. Pref. p. Ivi.)

A society organized on these principles, and with such or simi

lar institutions, was, in his judgment, the "true sign from heaven" meant to be" the living witness of the reality of Christ's salvation, which should remind us daily of God, and work upon the habits of our life as insensibly as the air we breathe," (Serm. vol. iv. p. 307,) which would not "rest satisfied with the lesser and imperfect good which strikes thrice and stays," (Ibid. Pref. p. liv.) which would be "something truer and deeper than satisfied not only the last century, but the last seventeen centuries." (Ibid. Pref. p. liii.)

But it was almost impossible for his speculations to have stopped short of the most tangible shape which the theory assumed, viz., his idea not of an alliance or union, but of the absolute identity of the Church with the State. In other words, his belief that the object of the State and the Church was alike the highest welfare of man, and that as the State could not accomplish this, unless it acted with the wisdom and goodness of the Church, nor the Church, unless it was invested with the sovereign power of the State, the State and the Church in their ideal form were not two societies, but one; and that it is only in proportion as this identity is realized in each particular country, that man's perfection and God's glory can be established on earth. This theory had, indeed, already been sanctioned by some of the greatest names in English theology and philosophy, by Hooker in his Ecclesiastical Polity, and in later times by Burke, and in part by Coleridge. But (if a negative may be universally asserted on such a subject) it had never before, at least in England, been so completely the expression of a man's whole mind, or the basis of a whole system, political as well as religious, positive as well as negative.

The peculiar line of his historical studies-the admiration which he felt for the Greek and Roman commonwealths-his intensely political and national turn of mind-his reverence for the authority of law-his abhorrence of what he used to consider the anarchical spirit of dissent on the one hand, and the sectarianism of a clerical government on the other-all tended to the same result. His detestation, on the one hand, of what he used to call the secular or Jacobinical notion of a State, as providing only for physical ends, -on the other hand, of what he used to call the superstitious or antichristian view of the Church, as claiming to be ruled not by national laws, but by a divinely appointed succession of priests or governors, both combined to make him look to the nation or commonwealth as the fit sphere for the full realization of Christianity; to the perfect identification of Christian with political society, as the only mode of harmonizing the truths which, in the opposite systems of Archbishop Whately and Mr. Gladstone, he lamented to see" each divorced from its proper mate."

Accordingly, no full development of the Church, no full Christianization of the State, could in his judgment take place, until the Church should have become not a subordinate, but a sovereign society; not acting indirectly on the world, through inferior instruments, but directly through its own government, the supreme

legislature. Then at last all public officers of the State, feeling themselves to be necessarily officers of the Church, would endeavour "each in his vocation and ministry," to serve its great cause "not with a subject's indifference, but with a citizen's zeal. Then the jealousy, with which the clergy and laity at present regard each other's interference, would, as he hoped, be lost in the sense that their spheres were in fact the same; that nothing was too secular to claim exemption from the enforcement of Christian duty, nothing too spiritual to claim exemption from the control of the government of a Christian State. Then the whole nation, amidst much variety of form, ceremonial, and opinion, would at last feel that the great ends of Christian and national society, now for the first time realized to their view, were a far stronger bond of union between Christians, and a far deeper division from those who were not Christians, than any subordinate principle either of agreement or separation.

It was thus only, that he figured to himself the perfect consummation of earthly things, the triumph of what he used emphatically to call the Kingdom of God. Other good institutions, indeed, he regarded as so many steps towards this end. The establishment of a parochial clergy, even in its present state, seemed to him the highest national blessing,-much more the revival of the Church, as he would have wished to see it revived. Still the work of Christianity itself was not accomplished, so long as political and social institutions were exempt from its influence, so long as the highest power of human society professed to act on other principles than those declared in the Gospel. But, whenever it should come to pass that the strongest earthly bond should be identical with the bond of Christian fellowship,-that the highest earthly power should avowedly minister to the advancement of Christian holiness-that crimes should be regarded as sins--that Christianity should be the acknowledged basis of citizenship,-that the region of political and national questions, war and peace, oaths and punishments, economy and education, so long considered by good and bad alike as worldly and profane, should be looked upon as the very sphere to which Christian principles are most applicable, then he felt that Christianity would at last have gained a position, where it could cope for the first time, front to front, with the power of evil; that the unfulfilled promises of the older prophecies, so long delayed, would have received their accomplishment; that the kingdoms of this world would have indeed become the kingdoms of the Lord and of his Christ.

No one felt more keenly than himself how impossible it was to apply this view directly to existing circumstances; how the whole framework of society must be reconstructed before it could be brought into action; how far in the remote future its accomplishment must necessarily lie. "So deeply," he said, "is the distinction between the Church and the State seated in our laws, our language, and our very notions, that nothing less than a miraculous interposition of