of this weakness-for such it plainly is-even in this 'Charge' of Ardeacon Hare. Contenting himself with lamenting instead of investigating, the fall of his brother archdeacon, Mr. Hare calls the attention of the clergy in his archdeaconry of Lewes to 'the increase of the Romish schism in our land.'

He regards this as the most momentous as well as the most disastrous among the events of the last two years.' He deplores the divisions which enfeeble the Church of England, and expresses his regret that there should be occasion, in an assembly of English clergy, to ask why the emissaries of Rome must be resisted. He touches, in passing, on Dr. Newman's assertion that the English hostility to Rome rests on vague, uncertain tradition, and is founded upon fables'-which he meets by characterizing that writer's studies as an ingenious transmutation of 'fable into history and history into fable.' Conceding to him that national feeling is never grounded in critical individual investigation of facts, he yet maintains that, in the present instance, the Marian persecutions, the Smithfield fires, the Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, the reign of king John, and the claim to depose sovereigns and absolve subjects from their allegiance, are huge facts staring out from the surface' of English history; and that no sophist's wand has yet transformed into acts of virtue and national blessings the Slaughter of the Waldenses, the Bartholomew Massacre in Paris, the murders of Henry III. and Henry IV., of France, and the accursed doings of the Inquisition. Very happily does he wind up by saying:

The conceptions of these facts will, doubtless, be incorrect in divers particulars, and yet they will be substantially true. Herein they differ essentially and altogether from the notions entertained concerning Protestantism and Protestants in Romish countries; where, were it not for the contradictions presented by our travellers, we should be looked upon as little better than ogres and cannibals, and, even as it is, are generally supposed to be sheer atheists. Hence, it would be singular that our adversary should bring forward such an accusation against us, were it not well-known that sophists, as is seen in every other page of the Platonic dialogues, have a happy trick of cutting their own fingers. For, if his accusation is to have any force, it should imply that Romish countries are advantageously and honourably distinguisht from Protestant ones by the fidelity of their conceptions concerning Protestants. Yet ours, when divested of their distortions and exaggerations, have a solid basis of historical truth, which we have received from the traditions of our forefathers; theirs, on the other hand, are mere fictions, derived from wilful, conscious, flagrant falsehoods.'-pp. 8, 9.

In his Notes' to the Charge,' which fill four-fifths of the volume, the Archdeacon has treated Dr. Newman to one of those keen and witty castigations in which he is so great a

master, and in the course of it the mental characteristics and controversial habitudes of the great sophister' are laid bare as in burning sunbeams. In like manner he demonstrates, from Dr. Newman's own showing, that, as we have already seen, the Tractarian movement, of which Dr. Newman was the chief leader, and which he boasted of as 'the only sure ground for resisting the arguments of Rome,' is now relied on by its quondam leader as binding his former disciples to follow out the principles of their school to their logical consequences, which logical consequences would infallibly land them, like himself, on the shores of Romanism. Mr. Hare cautions his reverend audience against this tyranny of logic,' and ably exposes the one-sidedness with which men argue themselves from naked, isolated premises into the most hurtful errors. While he acknowledges that the Tractarians had rescued some portions of truth from neglect, he traces their progress in the pushing of the said truths-while they neglected others equally important -to those extremes in which what was true in its harmony with other principles, becomes false because of its separation from them. On the question of the infallibility of the Church of Rome, the Archdeacon reasons calmly, learnedly, philosophically; of the scriptural arguments by which the claim has been propped up,' he is content with saying, in the Charge:'-'They are so futile, so utterly irrelevant, they might as reasonably be brought forward to demonstrate the laws of gravitation as the infallibility of the pope. . . .' 'In no instance, I believe, has the proposition to be establisht been derived even from a misunderstanding of the scriptural text, as a number of sectarian errors have been;' though, as is usual with him, he has discussed these scriptural arguments in the 'Notes,' where a great amount of critical and historical reasoning is devoted to the modern aspect of the controversy.

Not a few of the recent proselytes have been allured to the Roman Church by the delusive vision of UNITY. Archdeacon Hare demolishes the fallacies by which this weak fancy has been defended in the Du Pape' of De Maistre. We must find room for a passage in which the Archdeacon answers his own question:Why are we to resist and repel those who desire to draw us into the Church of Rome? Why are we not to hail them as our benefactors, and to bow our necks thankfully beneath the yoke which they would impose on us?'

'Because it is a yoke, and not an easy one, like that divine yoke which we are bid to take upon us, but a heavy and oppressive human yoke; whereas we are commanded to call no man master upon earth, seeing that we have one Master in heaven, who has called us all to be brethren and servants to one another. Because the dominion of Rome is a usurpation,

founded on no divine right, upon no human right, repugnant to both rights, destructive of both, destructive of the national individualities which God has marked out for the various nations of the earth, and which can only be brought to their perfection when the nations become members of this kingdom. Because history shows, what from reflection we might have anticipated, that the sway of Rome is degrading and corruptive to the spiritual and moral, and even to the political character of every nation that submits to it. Because the pretensions of Rome are built upon a primary imposture; and such as the foundation is, such is the whole edifice that has been piled upon it in the course of centuries; imposture upon imposture, falsehood upon falsehood. Because the evangelical truths, of which, from its portion in Christ's Church, it has retained possession, have been tainted and corrupted by its impostures, and thus have been prevented from exercising their rightful influence upon the moral growth of its members. Because it has gone on debasing the religion of Christ more and more from the religion of the spirit into a religion of forms and ceremonies, substituting dead works for a living faith, the nominal assent to certain words for the real apprehension of the truths expressed by them, interposing all manner of mediators between man and the one only Mediator, changing God's truth into an aggregation of lies, and, at least in its practical operation, worshipping the creature more than the Creator. Because so many of its principal institutions are designed, not so much to promote the glory of God and the well-being of mankind as the establishment and enlargement of its own empire, no matter at what cost of truth and holiness. Because its celibacy is anti-scriptural and demoralizing, baneful to the sanctity of family life, and a teeming source of profligate licentiousness. Because its compulsory confession taints the conscience, deadens the feeling of sin, and breeds delusive security. Because its Inquisition enslaves and crushes the mind, stifling the love of truth. Because its Jesuitism is a school of falsehood. Because it eclipses the word of God, and withdraws the light of that word from His people.' -pp. 36, 37.

The author passes from the Contest with Rome,' to other questions, more or less connected with this, touching the internal condition of his church-such as the wavering of many minds under the delusions which draw men to Rome; the famous Gorham Controversy; certain bills in parliament affecting the authority of The Church;' Diocesan and National Synods; Church Unions; Movements among the clergy in relation to the Privy Council, the Royal Supremacy, and the Papal Aggression;'-matters with which we do not feel called on in this place to interfere. As we have already intimated, Archdeacon Hare has appended voluminous notes to his Charge,' according to his custom. The value of such notes by such a writer is, of course, very great, and we must waive the natural objection which we have to this fragmentary kind of literature.

This writer's own position in the church is one which gives much weight to all he says with the younger clergy and the

more thoughtful of the laity; and among dissenters he is much better known than he is by Dr. Newman, to whom he refers as not well acquainted with his writings. The Archdeacon makes one or two negative allusions to Dissenters, which do not intimate any special respect for them, or care to know them. But as there are very many dissenters who watch the movements of the Established Church with lively interest in all the truth and goodness which it contains within its bosom, we deem this a fitting opportunity for declaring our views of Mr. Hare's manner of dealing with the disastrous evils with which the Church is threatened.

The Church of England,' speaking of the institution historically, and without polemical asperity, is too much like the Church of Rome, in some of her characteristics, to be entirely proof against the wily sophistry of her great adversary. Very few converts to Romanism are made from the Presbyterians of Scotland, the reformed churches on the continent, or the several bodies of nonconformists in England. Contrasting this state of things with the notorious facts which Archdeacon Hare so seriously laments in the recent history of his own communion, it cannot be unfair, nor is it difficult, to find the explanation. Whether necessarily or arbitrarily-whether wisely or foolishly -the reformers of the Anglican Church were as much afraid of the popular freedom enjoyed by the Protestants in other countries, as they were delighted with their rich learning, their profound theology, and their humble, yet high-minded piety. As it was not from the people that the English Reformation derived its impetus and energy, but from the court, the hierarchy, and the great political leaders, it retained as much of the outward forms of past ages as the consciences of the clergy would bear-conservatism rather than innovation being the dominant spirit of the rulers. They saw that they must stoutly deny the authority of the pope; that they must uphold the authority of Scripture; that they must assert the right of private judgment; and, in examining the Scriptures, they were happily led to such views of the main doctrines of the Bible as accord with the tenor of its teaching. But, at the same time, they laid great stress-not unnaturally in their circumstances-on the authority of the ancient church, boldly appealing to that authority, in proof that they, not the Roman Catholics, were the theological and ecclesiastical representatives of the primitive church. In the age of Henry VIII., of Edward VI., of Mary, and of Elizabeth, there was a highly respectable portion of the Anglican clergy who were disposed to go to the highest antiquity, instead of stopping short at the ante-Nicene Fathers; and there were large numbers of intelligent and holy men who felt it to be

their duty to separate from the communion of The Church' at a tremendous cost, for precisely the same reasons which justified The Church' in separating from the jurisdiction of Rome. It was not in the use of honourable means that the Puritan party were overborne by the opposing party, even when they were exiles together from the Marian persecution; and though we do not wish to revive animosities by repeating our wellknown judgment of the process by which the Church of England' became what it was, under the auspices of Charles II., in the rebound from the unpleasant state of affairs so pleasantly known as The Great Rebellion,' it cannot be forgotten, and must not be concealed, that, to a large extent, the 'dissenters' of England are the representatives of the minority among the reforming clergy in the Church of England in the time of the Marian exile. Now, to our dissenters' Archdeacon Hare refers when he says of the Tractarians:- From the first, as I have observed in the Charge,' the party who afterwards obtained the name of Tractarians set themselves to maintain what they regarded as the peculiar position of the English Church against two opposite enemies, on the one side against the Church of Rome, on the other against our English dissenters; and in doing the latter they laid a special stress on that portion of her characteristics whereby she is chiefly distinguisht from our dissenters, her discipline, and her respect and deference for antiquity.' -p. 124.

The learned Archdeacon, we are sure, does not mean, by giving this as the chief distinction between the English Church and the dissenters', that the dissenters have no church;' yet neither he, nor the writers of his communion, ever appear to think it right-while they acknowledge the Roman system as a church-to recognise, either in justice or in courtesy, the churches in England which do not conform to the established worship and discipline. He cannot mean to say that the dissenting churches' have no discipline,' or that they have no 'respect and deference for antiquity.' If he does mean this, we can only regret his want of information. But, whether he means these things or not, he correctly represents his own church as differing from the other Protestant churches in this kingdom and throughout the world, in matters which relate chiefly to discipline and deference for antiquity. The special point, then, to which we now call attention is this-it is by exaggerating the authority of that discipline and the wisdom of that deference for antiquity that the Tractarians have found their way to Rome. But the difference between THE English Church' and 'our English dissenters' lies chiefly in the degree of deference which is paid to antiquity. The dissenters go to