that they dare not proceed to define it that such an attempt would in one hour reveal the falseness of their pretended brotherhood. The sound-hearted and those who love truth are fearful of being reproached with uncharitableness if they should make known the line beyond which they cannot retire, while the indifferent and ignorant, the half-instructed and the secret enemies of truth, are undermining by that loose and popular talk the most sacred principles of the faith and of ecclesiastical polity.

Akin to this is the existing disposition to condemn tests and articles, or to explain them away, as though it were a matter of indifference to a commonwealth whether a man be a Christian or not, or, being a Christian, whether he be a willing and conscientious confessor of his faith. Scotland, from whence, during the last fifty years, so many of our abstract views on all subjects have been wafted to us, has, with her Presbyterian habits of thought, travelled on this road extensively.

We

may expect to have an example set to us there which we shall be invited to follow, whereby our seats of learning shall be swept of their orthodox, or rather of their Christian, defences. Uncharitable men will argue, that because a formula may be and occasionally has been, therefore it must be and always is a cloak of hypocrisy; that because chemistry and mathematics can be taught just as well by an Atheist as by a Christian, therefore all education should at once be cleared of artificial fetters and hinderances, and an open field of competition left, in which the man of ablest natural parts shall carry the day, though he should declare himself (as was lately done by the professor of æsthetics at Tubingen) an enemy of the Lord. Under the cloak of Conscience, Reason has slipped herself in, and with the plausible words of a just plea against men's interferences with one another, Reason has been pleaded for as independent of God, and as having a right equal or superior to that of acknowledged divine revelation. Her sublimest effort, instead of being to perceive the necessity of a revelation, and to bow herself as a learner before Him who is the Truth, is made to

consist in mastering the connexion between the works and the word of God, and concussing the latter to mould itself into some harmony with a fragmentary knowledge of the former.

There is also among our more zealous clergy an unfortunate habit of looking at the Church as a mere assemblage, or conglomeration in space and time, of independent individuals. There is the visible assemblage, and there is the abstract, invisible assemblage. In the former, every one, instead of being and finding himself in the grace and under the obligations of a Christian, has yet to choose for himself whether he shall be a Christian or not. Each individual must, by some process of independent examination, more or less extensive and profound according to his advantages, and leisure, and natural parts, arrive at a judgment for himself upon the claims of the Lord Jesus Christ to be his Lord and Saviour. Men are taught to become unbelievers as the first step to a reasonable faith. The salutary, divine doctrine of relationship to God in Jesus Christ, contracted through the hands of the Church by all her children, and of inherited obligations, is supplanted by the cold, abstract, moral obligation of reason to seek for and embrace truth, and by the offer of that relationship to God as a desirable, future, possible attainment. Baptised men are made to look upon themselves and suffer themselves to be regarded as heathens, that they may begin and seek their own anxious way into faith and peace. Hence books of evidences and arguments for Christianity-which are all very well as charitable efforts to restore such as Satan has prevailed over and brought into a sceptical condition—are unwisely thrust into the hands of our expanding youth, who, but for these books, would most probably never have been troubled with a doubt.

There is yet another way in which we have begun in England too much to approach to the sentiments of Continental Protestantism. We teach and are taught that the object of Christianity is the salvation of the individual, and not the service of God, -the perfection of the individual, instead of the perfection of a body which

shall become the instrument of Christ. Religion is so much regarded as for man, that we are at the door of the doctrine that it is also of man, wherever it is not a mere superstition. Worship, which is the divine end of the Church as such, is becoming secondary to the exercise of intellect in preaching and hearing. Where we write, here in Germany, the pulpit is enthroned, the altar placed beneath it as a footstool, and there is a strong tendency in England to bring them to stand to one another in the same relation. Besides, individual completeness and sufficientness of every one for himself is supposed to be Christian perfection. A state in which every one shall attain as much as possible of every thing, and be within himself a Microchrist,-that is to say, mere congregationalism or independency, in the fullest sense of the word, is greatly sought after. Our good old Church doctrine, that faith, hope, and love alone are the universal qualities of all Christians, and such as ought to be in every individual in the greatest possible degree, and that other things exist only in distribution, that every one is a member of every other, necessary to and also dependent upon every other, is lost sight of; and each is left to fight his separate, solitary way to heaven as he can. The parent leads not the child: that would be interfering with conscience.

The

husband does not use his authority for sustaining his wife in the faith and obedience of Christ. The master, as such, does not command his house after him in the faith and holy observance of the Christian religion. The king is scarce permitted, as such, to ask whether his subjects are Christians or not. The family, the nation, become mere congeries of self-dependent, self-seeking individuals.

Our clergy have to consider that they do not at all stand in the circumstances in which their forefathers stood. We do not speak of the increase of the population; that might be met by building and endowing new churches. We speak of the altered forms of human relationship and habits of society. Formerly, the higher and the humbler were connected by ties not of temporary interest, but almost of relationship. There was, on the one side, the

patron, the godfather, the namefather; on the other, the client, the godchild, &c. The higher classes were, in a measure, the guides, the counsellers, the superintendents of the humbler. No less honourable were the offices by which the latter acknowledged the wholesome influence of the former. This advantage, of which one must at once see the importance to the clergy, is now very much lost. The large mass of our population is made up of the wealthy on one side, and the indigent on the other; of the capitalist and the labourer. The relation is one of interest only. It exists only from day to day. There is scarcely any thing personal in it. The faces of the employer and of the employed do not meet. A noun of multitude expresses to the one the firm, to the other the operatives. Ignorance on one side, a rage for accumulating capital on the other, produce habits of opposition, grudging, and suspicion. Fluctuations in employment, and uncertainty in amount of income, produce wasteful and reckless habits. By the wealthy employer, the people, only arithmetically known, are seen but occasionally in the gross in his factory. He knows not in what obscure abode "the poor hide themselves together." There take place between them no kindly interchanges; no wholesome influences pass from the one to the other. The clergyman cannot now reach the humbler class of his flock through their superiors, and scarcely their children through themselves. Even baptism is often neglected; and marriages, contracted without the Church's blessing, easily knit and easily dissolved, loosening the elementary bond of human society, cut off the channels by which godliness can be kept alive and exercised. There remains, indeed, the inextinguishable instinct of religion, and it seeks for a Christian outlet. But the clergyman is classed with those at whom the masses look with an evil eye. There is about him the tone of genteel society, the uncondescending language of the university. He is utterly ignorant of the people's modes of thought,-his sympathy, at best, reaches not the details of their situation. Ilis ministrations, cold and formal, however excellent, may be suited to another atmosphere than

theirs, but are not real enough to help men who are in such handto-hand conflict with the realities of the fallen and miserable life that is in them. Hence the acceptable ness of the well-meaning Independent, and after him of the Separatist, of the Seducer, the Mormonite, the Socialist.

Another class of society is totally devoted to pleasure. To them the clergyman is acceptable only in so far as the undertaker is. He is unavoidably necessary in hopeless circumstances, in days of mourning and desolation, which must by all contrivances be shortened. All their ideas of him are coloured by this unwelcome association. His presence puts them in mind of sorrow, real or feigned. As a minister of religious truth and benediction, he is unknown to them. While all whose ideas are polarised by money and money's worth, physical men and practical materialists, are weary of the economic anomaly of the Establishment, and greedily encourage the speculations of Independency and Voluntaryism.

One cannot but see, that in these ways, and in many more, we are in danger of falling into that condition which Germany exhibits; the only apparent probable result or solution of which is, the rising up of that personal anti-Christ of whom the New Testament forewarns us. We stand, however, as yet on a remnant of solid land. We possess many advantages. Our liturgy has preserved, for the worship of God, for positive religion, and for sound doctrine, its place in the habits and thoughts of men. The forms of ministry and of discipline remain to us. Our universities are still of a known and positive confession. Faith in a divine revelation is with us still an element of respectability. Irreligious works are undertaken by no publisher of character. We may, therefore, look without panic at those things which are approaching, and so prepare ourselves to meet, or it may be to hinder them.

Our clergy come too little into contact of mind and feeling with the present middle and lower classes of society; yet the dismembered, disjointed condition of society makes

ry necessary that they should.

There is a certain fineness, punetiliousness, and almost prudery of bearing, which distinguish them from the members of the priesthood in any other country, which is annoying, or at least gênant, to men of rough mould, and hinders intimacy, openness, and that self-surrender which are necessary for any one who would receive benefit from pastoral care. The peculiar character of our Church was impressed upon it during its passage through the sifting and winnowing time of the sixteenth century. The royal and aristocratical element was then immensely the predominating one in the English social system; and our Church having received, still retains, in every part, office, and ministry, the stamp of a monarchical and aristocratic period too distinctly.

The taste for sermon-hearing exists and increases. It must be met and taken advantage of. But the taste of a large mass of the community cannot be met by the formal, discreet, polished production of the scholar. As little will mere professional orthodoxy serve, or the systematic points and arguments, of which most men are in our day weary. The mere religious craftsman does not suit for a time in which the daily thoughts and employments of men are so real and earnest. Men must come to the pulpit with a real thing. They must be earnest, and mean what they say. Doctrines about God, instead of actual ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the living substance of all doctrines, can only cultivate intellectual pride and boldness. Ordination is not intended to confer intellectual superiority, but spiritual grace and the power of conveying the blessing of God to men. The clergy deliver up God into the hands of men when they treat religion merely as a science and art, and when they make spiritual the synonyme of intellectual. Intellect soon finds out that it can plausibly cope with revelation, when revelation is brought down from its spiritual platform. Revelation broken into dogmas or points decided by men, still more those outworks of revelation, biblical criticism, which we sometimes hear so unwisely and pedantically brought to the pulpit, and that theology which men, having the grace of baptism

nay, perhaps that of ordination also, have excogitated and called “natural;" all these do but drag the Gospel into the arena of philosophers. Our matter-of-fact men, whom this day of facts has generated, have no patience for such things. Their books at home can give them quite as much of this, and probably a great deal better, than their clergyman can. Either he has something more real to give and ought to give it, or else he, and his religion, and his order, are superfluous. This is not a day for abstract existences. The Church as an abstraction is an object of no interest to our present race of men. It must either stand and bless men with divine light, and dispense forgiveness from Christ, and speak with authority as of God's counsel and in His secret, or else take its place as a thing that has been and has passed away. Men are weary of being argued with. What are arguments after all? Can no stronger intellect be found, or be supposed,

to redargue them? Men know that they ought not to be called upon to sit as judges of God's truth. A revelation that does not teach with

authority is no revelation. The philosopher is as good as the scribe. Men want to be helped to serve God; the clergy are ordained that they may help them. If they are not helped, if their children, their neighbours, their dependents, be not helped to do that which is right, they will, of course, say, "All this expensive machinery is in vain: we can do as well without it." Baptised men must be addressed as baptised men, themselves parts of the Church, essential to it, prospering with it, decaying with it, alive with its life, dying when it dies. The Church must no longer seem to them an object external to them, a city into which they may enter or not as they choose, but as an existence of which they are irrevocably a part-a city of which they are, and can by no act of their own cease to be, citizens.

HOGG has told an amusing anecdote of Wordsworth at Mount Rydal. It chanced one night while the bard of Kilmeny was at the Lakes with Wordsworth, Wilson, and De Quincey, that a resplendent arch, something like the aurora borealis, was observed across the zenith, from the one horizon to the other. The splendid meteor became the subject of conversation, and the table was left for an eminence outside where its effect could be seen to greater advantage. Miss Wordsworth, the poet's sister, who accompanied them, expressed a fear lest the brilliant stranger might prove ominous, when Hogg, thinking he was saying a good thing, hazarded the remark that it was neither more nor less "than joost a treeumphal airch raised in honour of the meeting of the poets." Miss Wordsworth smiled, and Wilson laughed and declared the idea not amiss. But when it was told to Wordsworth he took De Quincey aside, and said loud enough to be heard by more than the person he was addressing, "Poets! poets! what does the fellow mean? Where are they?" Hogg was a little offended at the time, but he enjoyed it afterwards; and we have heard him tell the story in his own "slee" and inimitable manner, and laugh immoderately as he told it. Poor James Hogg! REGINA has reason to remember James; nor was the poet of

demand for it? think it is so.

We falter while we Poets we still have, and poetry at times of a rich and novel, but not a cultivated flavour. Hardly a week elapses that does not give birth to as many different voTumes of verses as there are days in the week. But then there is little that is good; much that was imagination, and much that might have passed for poetry when verse was in its infancy among us. Much of that clock-work tintinabulum of rhyme that cuckoo kind of verse which palls upon the mind and really disgusts you with verse of a higher character. But now we look, and justly too, for something more. Whilst we imitate others we can no more excel than he that sails by others' maps can make a new discovery. All the old dishes of the ancients have been new heated and new set forth usque ad But we forbear. People look for something more than schoolboy commonplaces and thoughts at second-hand, and novelties and nothing more, without a single grain of salt to savour the tun of unmeaningness which they carry with them. It is no easy matter to become a poet,

"Consules fiunt quotannis, et novi proconsules,

Sclus aut rex aut poeta non quotannis nascitur;"

or, as the old Water-poet phrased it,

"When Heaven intends to do some