perous or adverse, that arises. It is true, that in this country at least, she has not been tried by losses as by gains; but she whose dominion is from sea to sea, and whose reign is without end, how should she feel her rights infringed, or her existence perilled, by the apostacy, to any imaginable extent, of individuals, and even of nations? She holds a "charmed" and chartered life, and can bear to part with each several limb without prejudice to her vitality. She can lose with composure all that she ever will lose; that whereof the loss would threaten her safety, and the anticipation, therefore, of whose loss would disturb her peace, is inalienable; and in that security she both lives and rejoices. Compare with this unspeakable privilege and the effects which result from it, the way in which in heretical and schismatical communions, and even in one which presents so many claims upon our regard as the Established Church, the defection, or disaffection, of individuals is, we do not say deprecated, deplored, condemned, (for in such dispositions there is of course nothing uncatholic,) but resented as an offence upon the mere instinct of self-preservation. The transaction between a Church and its members is treated not as an interchange of spiritual privileges and spiritual obligations, in which the earthly representative is a mere agent in bringing about and cementing the supernatural tie, but as a kind of social compact and honourable understanding, like that which mutually binds the governors and the governed, the conferrers and recipients of benefits, in some human institution or temporary relationship. A club, or coterie, a college, or civic corporation, may well be the victim of such passions, or the prey to such apprehensions; but surely, surely, they are unworthy of that Divine Society which represents our blessed Lord on earth, and has the privilege of indefectibility secured to it by His unerring word. And if of it, then of any communion which is an integral part of it. Again, we know of a case in which the exercise of religious influence by a convert to the Catholic Church in a "A Church cannot with proper self-respect, hear her own ministers throwing doubts upon her existence, and not feel the offence. It is part of her very existence to feel it. A Church must, in simple consistency, assert her own life, and therefore must naturally feel resentment at the denial of it."-Christian Remembrancer, No. 51, p. 169. This anxiety about her own existence is one of those many cares of which the Catholic Church is happily unconscious. neighbourhood in which he had formerly been connected with the Establishment, was described by one who wished to say a strong thing against it, as an "unhandsome" procedure. We are not speaking censoriously, or even critically, but merely of facts, as facts, and for illustration's sake. The influences of the Established Church we verily believe to be of such a nature that few indeed can be proof against the danger which they involve of representing even the most sacred subjects to the mind through a secular, or at best merely human medium. What Mr. Froude, we think, denominated the "gentlemanlike" heresy, is not one of the least subtle snares of the Establishment. But even those who have escaped it, and they serious and sensible men withal, fall naturally and unconsciously into a style of language which betrays the genius of their system with a clearness sufficient to outweigh the force of the strongest arguments they can bring to the defence of it—a style of language which it is no sin in them to use, and no merit in us to want, but the mere result, in both cases, of our several positions. Did they but know in what light these modes of expression appear to Catholics, how strongly symptomatic, that we may not rather say conclusive, of the sectarianism which their employers so indignantly disclaim, surely this same "self-respect" would be a security against their use. But we gladly resign this irksome portion of our task into hands infinitely more capable than our own of doing it justice. We allude, of course, to Mr. Faber's bril liant pamphlet, which reaches us most opportunely at this period of our work. Mr. Faber has entitled himself to our warmest gratitude, as well as to that of his companions in his recent step. He has said severe things, which must be said, which none but a convert can say, which no convert but himself could say so well, which few desire to say at all, and which none need now say again. Rarely, indeed, have we met with a defence at once so spirited and so gentle, so considerate, and so uncompromising. It is a new thing for Mr. Faber to speak severely, and for that reason, especially, it is, that he speaks so well. His pamphlet arrives too late to allow of our giving it the prominence it so well deserves. We must therefore content ourselves with a single extract; and we select one in which the author deals, in a masterly way, with one of the most favourite defences of the Anglican ground. "You say, you have not tried all the means of grace which your present position affords, and it would be wrong for you to abandon it till you have done so. What strikes me at once as suspicious about this argument is, that it is equally applicable to a Jew, a Mahometan, or an idolater. No heathen, who, by God's Holy Spirit, has obeyed the dictates of his conscience in the middle of his darkness, ever acts up quite to what he might do; the Unity of the Godhead involves more than the best Mahometan ever performs; the Methodist class-meeting affords means of humiliation, of affectionate counsel, and of spiritual direction which are not always, or often, found in the Establishment, and not the best of Methodists ever make use of them; and till he does, on your theory, it would be immoral in the rector of a parish to urge him to join the Establishment.......On your principle, no one ever could be converted from falsehood to truth." (p. 14.) But controversy, though a useful, is but a poor weapon at last. It exhibits but one phase of our minds, and that neither the most interesting nor the most real. It is oftener a blind than a reflector; it leaves our neighbour hardly wiser than it finds him as to what is going on "in our heart's core, yea, in our heart of hearts." Nay, it even conceals us from ourselves, and leads us to think that we are not ourselves, but the men we look on paper. And yet it has its own uses, and some which are not directly its own. If we aim at what the philosophic Bishop Butler calls" sincere" writing; if we do not consciously misrepresent ourselves, labour after effect, or victory, as mere orators, or mere pleaders; haply God may give us a response in the heart while we seem to aim but at the satisfaction of the intellect. At any rate let us bear in mind that grace, and not intellect, is our point of distinction from the spirits of evil; so let us handle warily all such weapons as are not surely of God, till they have formally received the impress of His benediction. And thus we end as we began. ART. IV.-The Lamp of the Sanctuary. A A Catholic Story. WRITER in the British Critic some years since, in reviewing that most beautiful work, "Undine," made one observation with which we heartily coincide. We have not the article at hand; but we remember that the writer complained most grievously of the utter disregard of the imagination, in that system of education which, till quite lately, had been growing into fashion in the Anglican church; and he ended with expressing his confidence, that if such a system had not failed of acceptance from the first, as it ought to have failed, from the deformity and hatefulness of its features, at least it would be universally exploded after trial, from its proved inefficacy and absurdity. Most certainly, in the education of all classes, the task of eliciting and gratifying the perception of the high and the beautiful, is an unspeakably important element, or rather an essential one. How intimate its connection with that which must ever be the one central, paramount, and harmonizing object of all sound education-the object, namely, of thoroughly imbuing the whole of man's nature with the religious principle! The discipline of the reasoning and intellectual faculty, however indispensably requisite, is surely less immediately connected with religion than is the cultivation of the poetical and imaginative; and very much less is that mere inculcation of what is called useful knowledge, which has of late been the object of so degrading an idolatry. We except, of course, from this latter observation, the instructing young persons in the mechanical duties of their calling; because that obviously stands upon grounds altogether distinct. Nor have the acts of the recent high-church Anglican party belied the professions of their organ. There is nothing more remarkable, than the amount of literature which they have originated with a view to the young, and the great portion of that literature which is imaginative. Let any of our readers take up one of Mr. Burns's catalogues, and see the variety of writers and of mythologies which he has pressed into his service-the "fables," and the "Eastern stories," and the "metrical tales," which he publishes for his juvenile readers; and when one sees the extremely low price at which they are published, and when one hears of the very remunerating terms at which the writers are engaged, it is evident that they command a most surprisingly extensive sale, and must be really influencing the English mind, and especially that portion of it the most susceptible to impressions, in no ordinary degree. To this we are bound to add, that the care employed has been very great and laudable, to keep these works clear of all that might possibly corrupt (in the common sense of that word) the souls of the young. We have no desire to be unduly critical: but yet we heartily wish we were able to sympathize more simply than we are able, with efforts so spirited, so well-intentioned, and based on so much of right feeling and principle. But the more highly we think on the value and influence of imaginative writing, the more carefully we are bound to watch its nature and probable influence. If it be true-as we suppose is maintained by the writer in the British Critic, and by Mr. Burns's supporters in general-if it be true that all addresses to our perception of the awful or the beautiful convey with no ordinary power moral impressions, true or false, how essential does it become, to take due care that the said impressions may be true, and not false. The true Church has her exhibitions of grandeur and loveliness; and false churches and false religions have theirs. And surely, without at all refining, it is a very hazardous and anxious matter, to say the least, that in a land calling itself Christian, nay, through the agency of a party who (however serious their errors) have a real desire to forward the work of Christianizing it, so large a proportion of minds are to be moulded in their tenderest years on a poetry (for all these works may most truly be called poetry,) which, with few exceptions, makes not so much as a professsion of being the expression and the organ of Christian ideas. We are not here speaking, as is plain, of directly didactic works, but of imaginative: nor again of tales where the imagination is interested by human incidents and adventures of a romantic character, however Christian the tendency of the whole: nor yet again of allegories, however beautiful and however significant of religious truths. Such literature as this, we fully confess and give credit for it, abounds in Mr. Burns's collection. The effect, indeed, of |