life, and how can he, in the general tenor of his life, obey two masters, the King and the Pope; how can he at once obey the rightful authorities of the Christian Church and the usurped authority of Priestcraft? I lament the very expressions in which the actual dispute is described. It is represented as a contest between the Church and the Government, or between the Church and the State; in which case I think that all Christians would be bound to obey the Church, and, if the State's commands are incompatib e with such obedience, to submit to martyrdom. But, in truth, you are the Church, and the Archbishop of Cologne represents the Church's worst enemy, the spirit of priesthood. It is Korah the Levite, falsely pretending to be a priest, and in that false pretension rebelling against Moses. But this mingled usurpation and rebellion,-this root of anarchy, fraud, and idolatry, —is the very main principle of all popery, whether Romish or Oxonian, whether of the Archbishop of Cologne, or of Pusey and Newman. How either you or we can preserve the Church from it, I do not see; but from the bottom of my heart do I " wish you good luck in the name of the Lord," in this most holy cause.

Connected with this is Rothe's book, which I have read with great interest. His first position,-that the State and not the Church, (in the common and corrupt sense of the term,) is the perfect form under which Christianity is to be developed,-entirely agrees with my notions. But his second position, that the Church in the corrupt sense, that is, a priestly government, transmitted by a mystical succession from one priest to another, is of apostolical origin, seems to me utterly groundless. It may be, that the Apostles, after the destruction of Jerusalem, if any of them survived it, made the government of the Church more monarchical, and less popular; and that they were very anxious to commit it to persons of their own choice, or chosen by those who had been so. But this does not touch the point. Different states of society require governments more or less despotic, and that the Church should be governed according to the principles of Christianity as set forth by the Apostles, is most certain. The mischief of the false Church notion consists in its substitution of the idea of priesthood for that of government, and as a consequence, deriving the notion of a mystical succession throughout all time, which does not and cannot preserve the spirit of the Apostles' principles, but paralyzes the free action of the Church, and introducing a principle incompatible with all sound notions of law and government, at one time crushes the church with its tyranny, and at another distracts it with its anarchy. I am convinced that the whole mischief of the great Antichristian apostacy has for its root the tenet of " a priestly government transmitted by a mystical succession from the Apostles."

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CLXXV. TO A. H. CLOUGH, ESQ.

Fox How, January 29.

I hope to see you before another week is over: still, as in my short visits to Oxford I see every body in some hurry, I wish to send these few lines by Hill to thank you for a very kind letter which I received from you in November, and which you might perhaps think I had altogether forgotten. I was very much obliged to you for it, and pray believe that, whenever you can write to me, your letters will give me the greatest interest and pleasure. I delight in your enjoyment of Oxford, and in what you say of the union amongst our Rugby men there. But I cannot think that you are yet thoroughly acquainted with the country about Oxford, as you prefer the Rugby fields to it. Not to mention Bagley Wood, do you know the little valleys that debouche on the Valley of the Thames behind the Hinkseys; do you know Horspath, nestling under Shotover; or Elsfield, on its green slope, or all the variety of Cumnor Hill; or the wider skirmishing ground

by Beckley, Stanton St. John's, and Foresthill, which we used to expatiate over on whole holidays?

As for the school, Tickell's success was most welcome and most beneficial; the railway and the multitude of coaches will I suppose bring with them their anxieties; but it is of no use to anticipate them beforehand. I trust with God's blessing we shall continue to go on doing some good, restraining some evil, but we shall ever do too little of the former, and leave too much of the latter in vigour, to allow of any feeling of self-satisfaction. But I have an unmixed pleasure in thinking of many of those who have been and who are still with us: and this pleasure more than makes up for many cares. I was very glad to have Burbidge here, and delighted to see how he enjoyed the country. You may be sure that we shall be very glad to have you and him in our neighbourhood in the summer, if his castle is ever built. I have been at work steadily, and have begun the second volume of my History: the first will I suppose now go to press without any farther delays. We are all well, and unite in kindest regards to you.

CLXXVI. TO SIR T. S. PASLEY, BART.

Rugby, February 16, 1838.

You may perhaps have seen in the papers an account of our meeting at the London University; but at any rate I will keep my promise, and give you my own report of it. Every single member of the Senate except myself was convinced of the necessity, according to the Charter, of giving the Jews Degrees; all were therefore inclined to make an exemption in their favour as to the New Testament Examination, and thus to make that Examination not in all cases indispensable. Most were disposed to make it altogether voluntary, and that was the course which was at last adopted. The examination is not to be now restricted to any one part of the New Testament, and it is to be followed by a certificate of a man's having simply passed it, and a class paper for those who are distinguished in it. I think that it will be passed so generally, as to mark very much those who do not pass it; and in this way it will do good. It also saves the University from the reproach of neglecting Christianity altogether. But it does not maintain the principle which I wished; and as on the one hand I think it neither fair nor of any use to go on agitating the question with every one against me, so, on the other, I have no satisfaction in belonging to a body whose views are so different from mine; and I should leave them at once, were I not anxious to see something of the working of our Scriptural Examination, and, if possible, to try to settle it on a good footing. After we left you at Bowness, we had no further adventures. When we came to Lyth, the snow was all gone, and between Lancaster and Preston the roads were quite dirty. We slept at Yarrow Bridge, embarked on the railway the next day at Warrington, and got safe home by about ten o'clock. Our visit to Oxford was very delightful; we saw great numbers of my old pupils, and met with a very kind reception from every one. Have you yet got Pusey's Sermon, or seen the review of it in the Edinburgh Review? That article was written, I am told, by Merivale, the Political Economy Professor; I have looked at it, and like its tone and ability, though I do not think that it takes the question on the highest ground. From Oxford we went to London, where my two days were passed, one at the University, and the other at Mr. Phillips's room, where I sat for my portrait. Then we went down to Laleham, from whence I paid a visit to Eton, a place which has always a peculiar interest for me. And now we are as regularly settled at our work as if we had never stirred from Rugby, and looking forward to the speedy opening of the railway to Birmingham, to effect which, we have six hundred men working night and day, as hard as the frost will let them. I rejoice in the prospect

of a peaceful settlement of the affair of the Caroline; it is not easy to make out the facts exactly, nor, if I knew the truth, am I quite sure as to the law. But one is glad to find the American Government disposed to act justly and in a friendly spirit; and the Buffalo and the Canada Orangemen will not, if this be the case, be able to involve the two countries in war. Alas, for all our evergreens, if these biting east winds last much longer. Poor Murphy's reputation must be pretty well at an end now.

CLXXVII. TO THE BISHOP OF NORWICH.

Rugby, February 17, 1838.

The result of the meeting of the London University, on the 7th, has placed me personally in a situation of great embarrassment; and I venture to apply to you, to learn whether you, on your own part, also feel the same difficulty. On the one hand, the Senate were so unanimous in their opinion, that the admission of unbelievers of all sorts to Degrees in Arts could not be resisted under the terms of the Charter, that I should not think it becoming to agitate the question again. And I think that the voluntary examination which we have gained is really a great point, and I am strongly tempted to assist, so far as I can, towards carrying it into effect. But, on the other hand, the University has solemnly avowed a principle to which I am totally opposed, namely, that education need not be connected with Christianity; and I do not see how I can join in conferring a degree on those who, in my judgment, cannot be entitled to it; or in pronouncing that to be a complete education, which I believe to be no more so than a man without his soul or spirit is a complete man. Besides, my continuing to belong to the University, may be ascribed to an unwillingness to offend the Government from interested motives; all compliances with the powers that be being apt to be ascribed to unworthy considerations. Yet, again, you will believe me, though probably would not, when I say, that I feel exceedingly unwilling to retire on such grounds as mine, while three Bishops of our Church do not feel it inconsistent with their duty to remain in the University; it seems very like presumption on my part, and a coming forward without authority when those, who have authority, judge that there is no occasion for any protest. My defence must be, that the principle to which I so object, and which appears to me to be involved by a continuance in the University, may not appear to others to be at stake on the present occasion: that I am not professing, therefore, or pretending to be more zealous for Christianity than other members of the Senate, but that what appears to me to be dangerous appears to them to be perfectly innocent; and that they naturally, therefore, think most of the good which the University will do, while I fear that all that good will be purchased by a greater evil, and cannot, therefore, take any part in the good, as I should wish to do, because, to my apprehension, it will be bought too dearly. On the whole, my leaning is towards resigning; and then I think that I ought to do it speedily, as my own act, and not one into which I may seem to have been shamed by the remonstrances or example of others—of King's College, for instance; if, as seems possible, they may renounce all connexion with us after our late decision.

CLXXVIII. TO REV. J. E. TYLER.

February 17, 1838.

You will feel, I think, the exceedingly difficult situation in which I am placed. I am personally very anxious to resign; but the engine is so powerful, that I hardly dare to abandon all share in the guidance of it, while

there is any chance of turning it to good. I feel also, that the decision of King's College would greatly assist in determining me how to act. If they break off all connexion with us, and thus leave us wholly in the condition of an University for men of one party only, I should be in haste to be gone: but if they stay on, and are willing to avail themselves of our religious Examination, I should like to stay on too, make that Examination as good as I could. If you know what Hugh Rose's sentiments are on this point, will you have the goodness to write me a few lines about it? Your Consecration Sermon for the Bishop of Salisbury never reached me, or otherwise I hope that I should have had the grace to thank you for it long ere now. I used to think that we agreed well, but I heard that you had been shocked by my Church Reform Pamphlet; and many men with whom I once agreed have been scared in these later days, and have, as I think, allowed their fears to drive them to the wrong quarter for relief. I could tell you readily enough with what parties I disagreed-namely, with all. My own teλɛιótατον τέλος I shall never see fulfilled, and what is the least bad, δευτέρος πλοῦς, I hardly know. . . . . . . . . I heard of your bad illness, and was glad to find that you were recovered again. I, too, have felt lately that I am not so young as when we skirmished in the common room at Oriel, or speared on Shotover; but God gives me still so much health and strength, that I have no excuse for not serving Him more actively.

CLXXIX. TO AN OLD PUPIL. (D.)

Rugby, February 28, 1838.

Some passages of your letter have, I confess, alarmed me, as seeming to show that you do not enough allow for the effect of the local influences around you; that questions assume an unreal importance in your eyes, because of their accidental magnitude within the immediate range of your own view; that you are disposed to dispute great truths, because in the society into which you happen to be thrown, it has become the fashion to assail them. Now, I remember that in Henry Martyn's Journal, written when he was in Persia, there is a passage to this effect: "I reviewed the evidence in proof of the falsehood of Mahommedanism, and found it clear and convincing." It was natural that to him, living in Persia, Mahommedanism should have acquired an importance of which we in Europe can form no idea; it was natural that he should endeavour to satisfy himself of the falsehood of that which we in England may dismiss from our minds with little hesitation. But I think it would have startled us, had we found him attaching so much weight to the goodness and the ability of the Persian Imaums around him, as to conceive it possible that they might be right, and that he might find himself obliged to abandon his faith in Christ, and adopt Islam. Now, you will forgive me for saying that a passage in your letter did startle me nearly as much, when-impressed as it seems by the local and present authority of Newmanism-you imagined the possibility that you might be forced to look elsewhere than in the New Testament for the full picture of Christianity; that you might, on the supposed result of reading through certain books, written in the second and third centuries, be inclined to adopt the views of St. Paul's Judaizing opponents, and reject his own. I think that you state the question fairly-that it does in fact involve a choice between the Gospel of Christ, as declared by himself and by his Apostles, and that deadly apostacy which St. Paul in his lifetime saw threatening,nay, the effects of which, during his captivity, had well nigh supplanted his own Gospel in the Asiatic Churches, and which, he declares, would come speedily with a fearful power of lying wonders. The Newmanites would not, I think, yet dare to admit that their religion was different from that of he New Testament; but I am perfectly satisfied that it is so, and that what

they call Ecclesiastical Tradition, contains things wholly inconsistent with the doctrines of our Lord, of St. Paul, of St. Peter, and of St. John. And it is because I see these on the one side, and on the other not the writings merely of fallible men, but of men who, even in human matters, are most unfit to be an authority, from their being merely the echo of the opinions of their time, instead of soaring far above them into the regions of eternal truth; (the unvarying mark of all those great men who are and have been-not infallible indeed-but truly an authority, claiming à priori our deference, and making it incumbent on us to examine well before we pronounce in the peculiar line of their own greatness against them)-because the question is truly between Paul and Cyprian; and because all that is in any way good in Cyprian, which is much, is that which he gained from Paul and from Christianity,-that I should not feel myself called upon, except from local or temporary circumstances, to enter into the inquiry. And, if I did enter into it, I should do it in Martyn's spirit, to satisfy myself, by a renewed inquiry, that I had unshaken grounds for rejecting the apostacy, and for cleaving to Christ and to His Apostles; not as if by possibility I could change my Master, and having known Christ and the perfections of His Gospel, could ever, whilst life and reason remained, go from Him, to bow down before an unsightly idol.

And what is there à priori to tempt me to think that this idol should be a god? This, merely,—that in a time of much excitement, when popular opinions in their most vulgar form were very noisy, and seemed to some very alarming, there should have arisen a strong reaction, in which the common elements of Toryism and High Church feeling, at all times rife in Oxford, should have been moulded into a novel form by the peculiar spirit of the place, that sort of religious aristocratical chivalry so catching to young men, to students and to members of the aristocracy,-and still more, by the revival of the spirit of the Nonjurors in two or three zealous and able men, who have given a systematic character to the whole. The very same causes produced the same result after the Reformation in the growth and spread of Jesuitism. No man can doubt the piety of Loyola and many of his followers; yet, what Christian, in England at least, can doubt that, as Jesuitism, it was not of God; that it was grounded on falsehood, and strove to propagate falsehood? So, again, the Puritans led to the Nonjurors; zealous, many of them, and pious, but narrow-minded in the last degree, fierce and slanderous; and even when they were opposing that which was very wrong, meeting it with something as wrong or worse. Kenn, and Hickes, and Dodwell, and Leslie, are now historical characters; we can see their party in its beginning, middle, and end, and it bears on it all the marks of an heresy and of a faction, whose success would have obstructed good, and preserved or restored evil. Whenever you see the present party acting as a party, they are just like the Nonjurors,-busy, turbulent, and narrow-minded; with no great or good objects, but something that is at best fantastic, and generally mischievous. That many of these men, as of the Nonjurors and of the Jesuits, are far better than their cause and principles I readily allow; but their cause is ever one and the same-a violent striving for forms and positive institutions, which, ever since Christ's Gospel has been preached, has been always wrong, -wrong as the predominant mark of a party; because there has always been a greater good which needed to be upheld, and a greater evil which needed to be combated, even when what they upheld was good, and what they combated was bad. And if this same spirit infected the early Church also, as from the circumstances of the times and the position of the Church it was exceedingly likely to do, if it infected all the eminent ecclesiastical leaders, whose power and influence it was so eminently fitted to promote,-if they by their credit, (in many respects most deserved,) persuaded the Church to adopt it,-shall we dignify their error by the specious name of the "Consent of Antiquity," and call it an "Apostolical Tradition," and think that it should guide us in the interpretation of Scripture; when we see distinctly in the Scripture itself