THE promotion of Dr Hook from a laborious town parish to the comparative leisure of a deanery will not have been without its public fruits, if it does nothing more than furnish us with a good readable History of the English Church. It was much wanted; for drier food than was usually presented to the reader under that title can hardly be imagined. Much painstaking research, a very conscientious balancing of authorities, and a large amount of out-of-the-way learning, has been employed upon several of our modern Church Histories. But, however these may meet the wants of the student, they are for the most part sadly unattractive to the general reader. The old monkish writers, with all their marvellous stories unpruned, were much more entertaining; for when the super natural items, which are the anecdotes of medieval history, come to be explained away, the residuum may be very innocent and unobjectionable, but it is often terribly insipid.

The Dean of Chichester is not to be placed above his predecessors in

ter.

this department of history, so far as extensive learning or research is concerned; probably he would himself be the last to claim any such superiority: the praise which he deserves and it is really praise

is that of being eminently readable. If the student will not have learned much which could not have been gained elsewhere, he will find the facts put together in a clear and pleasant narrative. With the miraculous element, that sore stumblingblock to all who have to deal with the old ecclesiastical authorities, Dr Hook deals manfully and summarily; he rejects it altogether. "It is inconsistent," he says, "with the principles of our holy religion to expect the performance of miracles under the Christian dispensation." (We presume that we are meant to understand, since the days of the Apostles). "Such miracles would not have been permitted to take place if not absolutely necessary, and miracles cannot be necessary in a church which professes a completed Bible." Such a canon is at least a very simple one, and facilitates the study of early ecclesias

VOL. XC.-NO DXLIX.

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tical history considerably; and it is convenient for the reader to have it laid down thus dogmatically at the outset. Whether it has not its weak side, we shall not here stop to inquire. It was not always part of the author's own creed, as he honestly reminds us; he has adopted it only after mature consideration; we do not mean to say it is the less to be respected on that account. But when it comes to be applied practically to each particular case, it is beset with the difficulties which accompany all scepticism, theological or historical. To deny the miraculous is a very easy process; but when you come to philosophise the fact into the prose of ordinary life, the explanation commonly demands as much faith as the miracle. It is so with the juggler's sleight-of-hand: when he gives you back your watch safe and sound, you feel satisfied it is not the same which you saw hammered to pieces a minute ago; and you are right in your conclusion; but if you are not content without proceeding to explain to a friend your own notion of the real process, it is most likely that you will be unintelligible, and pretty certain that you will be wrong. Surely the simpler way of dealing with these old chronicles is to tell the tale as the monkish historian told it; but to separate the fact from the fiction will continue to be the temptation of the historian.

When Dr Hook goes so far as to say that "it is only in modern times that we have learnt to distinguish between credulity and faith," we think many readers besides ourselves, having a vivid recollection of what men profess to believe and to disbelieve, in the year of grace 1861, will be somewhat slow to follow him. But it is a strong feature in the historian of the Archbishops that he claims for himself, bravely and honestly, to be a man of the age. He wastes nothing in regrets for the past or dreams of the future. The religion of this nineteenth century he considers (apparently) the model of Christianity. "In

these days, the ordinary Christian, taught to use the world without abusing it-to blend the duties of a contemplative with those of an active life; to distinguish between self-discipline and asceticism; to aim at practical usefulness instead of a theoretical, unattainable perfection-is superior to the greatest saints of the middle age, to whom at the same time we tender the homage of a charitable respect."(P. 38.) We hope we shall not incur the charge of undue reverence for medieval Christianity, if we venture to think that some of its "greatest saints were really not inferior to "ordinary Christians even of this century. We think we shall be able to show, from Dr Hook's own pages, that there were occasions on which, though they asserted no miraculous powers, their life and death were notes of sanctity better than a miracle.

We are not by any means going to assert that every Archbishop of Canterbury in the volume before us was a saint, in any sense of the word. Such an assertion could hardly be made, without some limitation, even of St Palmerston's modern episcopate. Nothing is more patent, in most cases of bishops and archbishops, than their humanity. There were as many varieties of the episcopal type in the Church's early days as in our own. The material which the royal prerogative worked up into a bishop-for royal prerogative it always was in the Anglo-Saxon Church-was various in its texture, then as now. There was the schoolmaster bishop, Theodorus, and armed with an actual power of flogging his refractory canons, which one hopes was exercised with moderation, but which would be very terrible in the hands of some schoolmaster bishops of modern date; the dilettante primate, Nothelm, busy with his illuminations, in which he was no mean proficient, and which were to him all that Archæological Institutes and Arundel Societies are to modern ecclesiastics; pious and learned divines,