decay and the distincter form of a new movement of religion, that period of growth when the plant is assimilating to itself all the juices of the decay of the old plant."

Mr. Brooke is a believer in revelation not being completed, but being continuous and full of life fitted for its age. He quotes lovingly words of Jesus which show that the Master himself desired to inflict on men no frozen formality, but to breathe into them a living and expansive spirit:- "I have many things to say to you, but ye cannot bear them now." And again, "When the Spirit of Truth is come, he will guide you into all truth, . He will take of mine, and will show it unto you."

His notion of Christianity is not of a laboured scheme, but an influence whose "direct end is not to make men moral, but to awaken in them those deep emotions, and to present to them those high ideals, which, felt and followed after, will not only indirectly produce morality, but aspiration and effort to do far more than men are absolutely bound to do by the moral law." There is a meaning here, and a touch of that spirit of truth whose influence is to make us free-free to do good earnestly, without measure, and without fear.

Mr. Brooke's plan of liberalising the Church is by infusing it gradually with the larger ideas proper to its own original elements. narrow and restrictive time in which they were proclaimed, gave them a dwarfed form; if the present time is truly broad, it has but to undo those unnatural bandages, and let the truths be seen in their integrity. "Nothing," says Mr. Brooke, "is doing to give a religion to the really powerful ideas, to those wider conceptions of man, which, first taken up in England by the poets, have now filled nearly every sphere of thought with their influence: and that nothing is doing is a great pity for the sake of the ideas themselves, for they only possess half their normal power without a religion in harmony with them; nor have we any notion how they would push their way if they had a theology behind them which should represent them. Till that is done we shall have our scepticism."

"And it is this work which, of all religious bodies, the Church is most able to do. It has greater freedom of movement within itself, and it can afford to do it quietly and temperately. No sudden change in the teaching of the whole Church is asked for; nor indeed would it be wise were it possible. For there are a vast number of persons who still hold to the old political and social theories which have come down to us, and whom the theology that represents those theories supplies with the means whereby they reach God. Were the teaching of all the clergy changed, these would be left without a faith." The inference of the last passage may be open to question; if people have a faith, they have it, no matter whether their creed be fixed or expansive. If they have only the simulacrum of a faith, it may be a pity to disturb them, but they might

surely have as much even under new teaching, for they scarcely could have less.

Mr. Brooke continues the subject in words that we may take to represent his convictions of his own right work: "Those within the Church who see the position at which the world has arrived, have a clear duty and a noble work to do. They have first, to take away from theology, and especially from its idea of God and His relation to man, all exclusive and limited conceptions; all also that are tainted by the influence of those ideas which crept into it from the spirit of the imperial, aristocratic, and intolerant ages. They have to harmonise theology with the progress of the world, by asserting in it ideas as universal with regard to man and God, as those which the Spirit of God has taught the world with regard to man and his fellow-man. They have, in fact, to bring the outer teaching of Christ's revelation up to the level of that inner one which has now become outward in society and politics; to confess and to accept this as the work of God, and having done that, to look back to Christ's words and life, and say, 'At last we are free from perversions of his thoughts-at last we breathe his atmosphere-at last we know what he meant―and since this is what he meant in society, we will make our theology mean the same." This argument, which was preached before the University of Oxford, might seem somewhat over elaborate, say, to a pure theist for instance, but the situation is confessedly a difficult one.

Mr. Stopford Brooke has watched through and fought through a very difficult time with regard to the Church. And he has watched and fought through this time with an openness to receive what the age has had to say, affording thus a pleasant and hopeful augury for the possibility of a fuller reconciliation and harmony to be obtained in the future between the Church by position and the Church of thought, which twain ought never to have been allowed to be divided.

"The Church ought to demand agreement in certain fundamental doctrines, but not to define the way in which those doctrines must be held; to tolerate every form of opinion on those doctrines which does not absolutely contradict them in a sense to be determined by the law; nay, more, not only to tolerate but to desire such expression if it represent any phase of English religious thought; to listen to it, though it seem to nine-tenths of the members of the Church absurd and heretical; to encourage debate on every new view, and to remember that the only unmixed evil is arbitrary restriction of opinion. For if the clergy of the National Church do not represent all the religious ideas of its children within the most extensive limits consistent with its existence, it is no longer national."

Mr. Brooke, in his frank, fair efforts after spiritual freedom, cannot have been without his dark times. When the judgment upon "Essays

and Reviews" was pending, he may be imagined to have been at least anxious. "Suppose," he has expressed himself, "that judgment had gone the other way; every conscientious clergyman holding Broad Church views would have found his position in the Church untenable." Mr. Brooke not only claims a place for the Broad school, but he is fully tolerant, and would not thrust out the Anglican or the Evangelical. If they are not broad and tolerant, he would be. "Should they all have gone," he asks, "what would have become of the representation of a large and increasing body of religious thinkers? It was wisely determined to retain them all. So far our progress to the establishing of a true idea of a Church has been steady. Quickly, soberly, the State has met the feverish excitement of ecclesiastical blindness, and said 'No!' I will not permit my Church to become a sect. I will have, as far as possible, representatives among my clergy of all my national religious thought. I will have variety-not uniformity. Try to live together without quarrelling; fall back on primal principles; differ in ceremonies, in opinions, but agree in spirit, and work for one end-the making of my nation better."

Mr. Brooke's passionate earnestness after freedom is really and harmoniously at one with his faith: "China is dying of prolonged infancy.

If we insist on reducing the Church to the standard of China, it will die and deserve to die; if we accept, as necessary elements of the age in which we live, the excitement, controversy, criticism, revolutionary opinions, which are now disturbing us, and set ourselves to find means of bringing order out of disorder, we shall step into a more vigorous existence than ever."

We should be inclined to say that Mr. Brooke has more in common with the historic breadth of the "Essays and Reviews" school than with the fanciful idealism of Coleridge. But yet he feels that faith is a beautiful and a grand thing, dimly though we may see why it is so; and he labours towards that faith manfully, not being ashamed to allow candidly if it prove difficult to reach.

The following passages from Mr. Brooke's Essays on "Freedom in the Church of England" may remind us now of Jowett, now of Froude ; but he differs from both, perhaps by being of a more affectionate and æsthetic nature, prone to greater simplicity and a more sweet and childlike, yet not unmanly, quality of faith.

"Criticism has proved that there are discrepancies in the historical books; it has rendered it probable that the more archaic narratives in Genesis and elsewhere are of little historical value; it has shewn that the authors of many of the books were not contemporaries of the events narrated, and that the details are necessarily traditional, and share in the uncertainty of traditions."

"The Bible, approached in the same manner as we approach any other

book, has gained in reality, in interest, and in power....

It has

become not less the book of religious circles, but more the book of humanity."

With regard to the too ready accusation of dishonesty which is brought against the broad thinkers because they do not leave the Church, it is well to note what Mr. Brooke has to say. His apology is at least a logical one.

"To all who are afflicted with the painful disease of an intolerance which demands absolute uniformity of opinion in the Church, there would be no medicine so effective as a course of Church History. They would see that the largest differences of opinion have been permitted in the Church and prevailed; that in the face of this fact there is but one view to take of the Articles-that they were articles composed with the intention of leaving opinion as free as possible; that, wherever they could, consistently with the preservation of necessary truth, they chose to be ambiguous and refused to define or to limit; that judgment after judgment, delivered by the highest court, has confirmed this view of them, and that this view of them is the only possible one, since it is incredible in the midst of a body of men who have spoken on the whole so freely as the divines of the English Church, that rigid Articles could have lasted to the present day."

According to this view, the Articles may be likened to a constitutional monarch who occupies the throne under a fiction of sovereignty, and in so doing prevents any political party or sect from assuming to itself the right of dictation to the rest.

"It is no mere shuffling and word splitting, then," continues Mr. Brooke, "which enable Evangelicals, Anglicans, and Broad Church persons, of resolute and opposed opinions, to subscribe to the Articles, and to be content to live within them as long as they last. In holding that the Articles are indefinite with regard to opinions while they are definite with regard to main truths, they hold that they are carrying out the intention of the writers; that they are founding themselves on the repeated action of the law; and that they are true to the idea of the Church of England.

"And the last decision of Parliament with regard to subscription confirms us in the opinion that this is the right view to take of the Articles and the Prayer Book, for it has changed, with the consent of all the Bishops of the Church, the form of subscription from an unfeigned assent and consent to the doctrines to an assent to the doctrine of the Articles and Prayer Book."

"As to impatient requisition on the part of many that we should know our mind, and state it clearly, I partly do not and I partly do sympathise with it. I do not sympathise with the impatience. Every man who really cares for true views, and who has investigated truth

with some precision, knows the difficulty of arriving at clear statements. on any political or economical question, much more on any metaphysical or theological question, which will satisfy an accurate intellect. . . . He who has read many things and followed the long labours of the mind. of man for centuries on these topics, and marked its ceaseless change, its infinite variety; he who has himself felt with many men, and met, in all the phases of religious opinion, those who lived noble lives; he who has recognised the necessity of diverse channels of religious opinion to enable different characters to come to God; he who has seen portions of truth at the root of many theories which he considered erroneous, and feared to denounce them too violently lest he should lose the truth; he who has so constant a reverence for truth that he cannot bear to hastily formulate an opinion until he has looked upon every possible side of the question-he will sympathise with those clergymen who shrink from defining clearly their theological views, and prefer to preach that spiritual life of Christ which they know to be right-he will not be impatient with those who do not define, because they have a minute reverence for truth." ("Freedom in the Church of England.")

In times like these, the clear statement of his position made by one may greatly help another who feels himself in a difficulty. There is much for which Liberals, who both respect the supremacy of truth, and love the inspiring dreams of religion, have to be grateful to Mr. Brooke. He has aided in fighting their battle, not by bringing in the artillery of acrimony or the laboured bulwarks of crumbling evidences, but by cleaving to a charity of spirit which seems not so very unlike the main original attribute of practical Christianity.

In preaching, Mr. Brooke has a musical voice and an agreeable delivery. In private life he is gentle, kindly, sympathetic. He is fond of travel, and of a sunny southern climate. He is a connoisseur in art, and an appreciator of the beauties alike of Turner's drawings, and of Nankin China. Attentive to his duties, and earnest in his work, he is man as well as parson, and would think it no sin to be seen without a white cravat. How many friends the clergy would win were more after this humanitarian pattern! There is "no subject," believes Mr. Brooke, which does not "in the end run up into theology, which might not, in the end, be made religious." This would be a truism were there not so many narrow minds which cannot expand to its truth. Accordingly, he institutes, when he can, instructive discourses and lectures in churches at times when there is no regular service. Politics, art, literature, science, the drama, the press, he sees no reason why these should be dissociated from life, and if not from life, why from Divine life. He lectures on "Theology in the English Poets," and in so doing, helps to bring back its old charm of poetry to theology, which rightful property it ought never to have lost. The morose face of Johannes Calvinus must have