availed at all to correct your despondency?" "No," I replied, "I cannot see in what you said then any further ground for hope. You merely warned me to be less impatient." "And," said he, "was not that giving you a fresh ground for hope? Is not patient waiting on Providence a more hopeful thing and more secure of a blessing than impatient activity, or the confident ardor of party strength?

"But," said I, "I have a more intimate acquaintance with the state of things at home than you can possibly have. I know how low principles are deeply imbedded in our practice, our literature and our conversation, I know the amount and strength of prejudices and pusillanimous jealousies, and the soft, sentimental character of our English version of the ancient Gospel." "Well," answered he, " and granting that the ardor of youth does not make you exaggerate these evils, granting that your people are absolutely fettered to littleness by unworthy principles, so, remember, was the church of Germany in the tenth century." "But," said I, " as there seem to be cases of single souls being so loaded and suffocated by accumulated heaps of unrepented sin, that they are unable to turn or stir themselves, and the very atmosphere of penance is unwholesome to them, breeding horrible despair rather than contrite hopefulness, so, in the case of a nation, it may happen that bad habits have so worn themselves into it, and have for centuries defiled the fountains of its life and motion, that death seems inevitable, and recovery

out of the question. Good men and good measures may, to be sure, put off the last hour awhile." "What you have said just now," he answered, "illustrates in its way the bad habits of which you speak. It betrays an unhealthy and almost irreverent belief that you have a right to see the fruits of your own doings, and that those doings have sprung from a chastity of motive which should ensure their having fruits at all. Servants of the Church are not laborers in the sunshine. They must wait and work and be contentedly absorbed in the present, as Jeremiah was. As with him, so with you, there must be a sanctity and self-abasement even in your deploring of your own unfruitfulness; otherwise, as it is written in Ezekiel, God will pollute you in your own gifts,' and that is the last and worst thing which can befall a Church or people. Young priest! (he added with an almost menacing solemnity) a hundred and fifty-three years of high talking about superior privileges, reformed practices, and purer faith, even when used to set forth your responsibilities, and a hundred and fifty-three years of cold and sullen neglect of the rest of Christendom, must have told upon the character of your clerks and laics both, and have debased one way or another the tone of your Church. See to it, that you are not already polluted in your own gifts. Foreigners have oft-times been fain to smile sadly at you islanders, even when from your temporal power or successful diplomacy they have feared you most. But I do not wish to rail.

I am willing to believe from the peculiarity of its history, that a high destiny may be yet in store for your Church. You have drawn a comparison between the repentance of nations and individuals. My answer to your objection shall be taken from the same comparison. Do you not know how important an element in each man's repentance is enthusiasm, a vehement yet self-distrusting enthusiasm in the certainty of his victory over the spiritual evils which encompass and confine him? If a man prays against impurity, yet feels sure while he prays that he will be impure again some time, what chance has he of victory? While he deplores some evil overt act, and prays for grace against it, yet entertains a mournful conviction that he has not committed that act for the last time, does he not betray a dishonest purpose himself, a fear of God's wrath without a fear of sin or a detestation of it, and likewise a want of faith in the aid of the most blessed Spirit? Such a modest enthusiasm must be kindled among a people and in a Church when kept low by former pride and carnal vaunting, and doctrine debased by being unrealized." "You mean then," said I, "that as we have sinned as a people, so it is as a people that we must repent." "No, that is not my meaning," he replied, "I do not understand repenting as a people, further than as it is exhibited by public acts of national humiliation, national change and national retribution. In any other sense it is unreal. Nay, it is even a form of words of which I would have you beware.

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It is a skilful invention of laymen to keep their own sins and the unpleasant austerities of penance at arm's length from themselves; for what is every man's business is no one's. National repentance is no other than an accumulation of single repentances, except where the phrase imports such public acts as the sense of many penitents forces from an unrepenting majority."

"But," said I, "such acts must be parliamentary, and that leads us back again into the region of politics, where we have already suffered so much." "Surely," he answered, "you do not complain of that. Surely you should treasure up in your memory as one of the proofs to yourselves of being a true Church, that you have ever thriven under political shades, and that political sunshine has been found to wither and tarnish the pastures of your sheep." "Do you not think," I asked, "that we should be in a more healthy state, if there were a greater indifference to politics amongst us?" "No," replied he; "I know of no indifference which is healthy, except indifference to money. The Church has a great duty to perform in politics. It is to menace, to thwart, to interfere. The catholic statesman is a sort of priest. He does out in public the secular work of the retired and praying priesthood; and he must not be deserted by those spiritual men, whom he is arduously, wearily, and through evil report, conscientiously representing. Remember that the clergy are not the Church. No revival of better things deserves a

chance of success in England, which does not force that great truth upon the unwilling laity. One by one the strictnesses of the Gospel have been separated off from the laity by themselves, and gathered round the priesthood as a nucleus. Two sets of religious requirements have gradually come to be recognized among you,-things right or wrong for the clergy, and things right or wrong for the laity. Hence has followed an extreme secularity among the laity, and, out of that, a jealousy of clerical interference in secular matters, which interference they were bound to put forth, whether as teachers or as ensamples. Believe me, a pyramid may as soon rest firmly on its apex, as a Church make use of her priesthood for a foundation. If it be important that the people should learn that the clergy are within the Altarrails, and themselves without it, it is no less important to compel them to acknowledge (for the reluctance will be on their side) that they are at least within the Church, not living outside its doors. The scene of Theodosius' penance was a strange place, my good friend, for advocating political indifference."

"But," continued he, "I am most anxious you should not now return to the old, but outworn, English doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings." "Ah!" said I, "were I deprived of this doctrine, I should feel as though I had lost one of my first principles." "I even repent,” he replied, " of having called it a doctrine,--it is but a dim feeling, which plays and hovers around the gorgeous, associations