of Queen Anne, and (we fear) experienced the same difficulty in bringing up their families which Lord Stanhope thinks peculiar to the reign of Queen Victoria. If the Church was cheerfully maintained, it must be owned that her ministers were scurvily treated and indifferently provided for. Here again Lord Stanhope and Lord Macaulay pull different ways instead of pulling together.

The first sentence of a paper in the 'Spectator' by Addison (No. 21), on the redundancy of the three professions, runs thus:

'I am sometimes very much troubled when I reflect upon the three great professions of Divinity, Law, and Physic; how they are each of them overburdened with practitioners, and filled with multitudes of ingenious gentlemen that starve one another.'

When Lord Stanhope states that the number of claimants or expectants has indefinitely augmented, he forgets that the number of callings which a gentleman's son may fill without losing caste has indefinitely augmented too. In fact, there is hardly a conventional restraint left on honest industry. A peer's son may be not merely a civil engineer, or the keeper of a sheepwalk in Australia, but a wine merchant, a coal merchant, or a stock broker. As to the clerkships in some of the public offices, they have been so multiplied and so monopolised by young men of family and connection as to constitute a new description of aristocracy.

There is one marked feature in the social life of the first half of the eighteenth century which alone might have disenchanted Lord Stanhope; namely, the institution of the led-captain, the never failing dependent on the lord or squire in the shape of a poor relation or chaplain, and the menial offices performed by them without murmur or complaint; as when Squire Western sends Parson Supple from London to Bagshot for a tobacco-box. We cannot believe that men well born or well educated would have submitted to such degradation if honourable employment was to be had for the asking.* In the 'Spectator' (No. 108), Addison describes his meeting with Will Wimble at Sir Roger de Coverley's:

'He (Will Wimble) is now between forty and fifty; but, being bred to no business and born to no estate, he generally lives with his brother (a baronet) as superintendent of his game. . . Will Wimble's is the case of many a younger brother of a great family who had

The fashion for hangers-on is caricatured by Fielding in his description of the suite of a travelled man of fortune in Joseph Andrews':- The gentlemen of cur-like disposition who were now at his house, and whom he had brought with him from London, were an old half-pay officer, a player, a dull poet, a quack doctor, a scraping fiddler, and a lame German dancing-master.'

rather

rather see their children starve like gentlemen than thrive in a trade or profession that is beneath their quality. This humour fills several parts of Europe with pride and beggary.'

It is unlucky and disagreeable to be obliged to differ so often from a writer whom we respect and admire, who so ardently desires truth if he misses it; who writes so eloquently, and with such laudable elevation of tone, when he is wrong. But the occasions in which we are the least justified in shrinking from the discharge of our critical duties are when what we think error is plausibly or ingeniously expressed; and we were the more anxious to discuss Lord Stanhope's views and speculations because, being presented in a popular and pleasing manner, they cannot fail to add to the attractiveness of his work.

ART. II.-1. The Church and the Age: Essays on the Principles and present Position of the Anglican Church. Edited by Archibald Weir, D.C.L., Vicar of Forty Hill, Enfield; and William Dalrymple Maclagan, M.A., Rector of Newington, Surrey. London, 1870.

2. Principles at Stake. Essays on Church Questions of the Day. Edited by George Henry Sumner, M.A., Rector of Old Alresford, Hants, and Chaplain to the Lord Bishop of Winchester. Second Edition. London, 1868.

T has become the fashion of late years for parties religious,

of a collection of Essays. Ritualists, Reformers, Economists, Educators, have all had their say in this fashion, and now we have before us two substantial volumes representing the opinions held by the two most numerous and important parties in the Church of England, the parties which we may call, if we must have names, the Moderate Evangelical and the Moderate Anglican. They bear, however, no antagonistic relation; their enemies are, for the most part, common enemies, and their doctrines, so far as they are evidenced by the volumes before us, differ on no vital point. The difference between the two volumes is in truth rather in range than in tone; Principles at Stake' is mainly the protest of the moderate party in the Church-of such men as Lord Arthur Hervey and Dean Howson-against the extravagant theories and offensive practices of the so-called Ritualists; while The Church and the Age' takes a wider range; it furnishes a tolerably complete view, from the stand-point of the moderate Anglicans, of the

leading

leading principles of the Church of England, as exhibited in its constitution and formularies, in the works of its leading divines of the seventeenth century, and in its actual status at the present day; of the various energies which it is putting forth in the evangelizing of neglected populations, in education, and in missions to the heathen; and again, of the questions which stir the age in which we live, whether those which are strictly within the Church, as relating to the priesthood and the sacraments; or those which derive their force from certain general tendencies which agitate modern society. The two books, taken together, give us, in fact, a very complete view of the condition of thought and action in the English Church, and are distinguished by thoroughness, learning, and ability.

In The Church and the Age' the first place is occupied by a name which men of all parties have learned to respect. The Dean of Chichester, a veteran labourer in the fields both of pastoral work and of literature, than whom no one has a greater right to speak with authority on such a matter, sets forth his conception of the principles of the reformed English Church, to the following effect. The Reformation is an epoch which cannot be defined; there is no one enactment, no particular revolutionary act, to which we can point as the Reformation;' it is the especial glory of the English Church that its continuity has never been broken. By a series of changes, extending over more than a century, the ritual, the formularies, and the political status of the Church have been made what they are, and they differ widely from those of the fifteenth century; but we have never cut ourselves off from the past; we still recite the same creeds and many of the same prayers that our forefathers did from the very beginning of the English Church; bishops and deans and canons occupy the same thrones and stalls in the same cathedrals as of old; the clergy throughout the land are instituted to the old benefices; whatever cavils may be made by enemies against apostolical succession in the English Church, there can be no doubt whatever that, in the eyes of the historian and the constitutional lawyer, Archbishop Tait is the true successor of Augustine and Lanfranc, of Becket and Warham. We may almost say that, in strictness of speech, in England alone was there a true Reform' of existing institutions; the continental Evangelizers were compelled, either, as in Luther's case, by force of circumstances, or, as in Calvin's, by deliberate preference, to destroy and re-constitute; there was a break of continuity; consistories and presbyteries came in place of the time-honoured Church organization, and the societies so constituted have never gained the prestige of the old churches. It

has

has even been, in some respects, a blessing for England that there was found among the Reformers no one man of preponderant force, no Luther or Calvin; we might have been Cranmerites or Parkerists; we are Church of England men as our fathers were.

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And nothing is more characteristic of this reformed Church of England than the deference which it has paid to the 'old Catholic doctors;' heresy was to be tested, not by the dictum of some fashionable theologian of the day, but by the authority of the canonical Scriptures or by the first four General Councils ;'* Elizabeth declared to foreign princes, that no religion was set up in England, but that which was practised by the primitive Church, and approved by the Fathers of the best antiquity; the same Convocation-that of 1571-which enjoined subscription to the 39 Articles, also decreed that nothing should be taught as an article of faith but what is supported by Scripture and Catholic tradition;' some of the most earnest Reformers pressed earnestly upon their disciples to follow the old fathers and doctors, to follow the Catholic and universal consent. Thus was the Church of England distinguished from bodies founded mainly on the dicta of individual theologians.

The real character of the Church of England, its tone and influence as distinguished from mere organization, was determined mainly by the influence of its ablest men, especially its ablest writers on theology. Mr. Haddan, in an admirable essay in 'The Church and the Age,' an essay written with a fulness of knowledge and a clearness of exposition which leaves nothing to be desired, contends that the men who beyond all others gave a definite tone and character to the theology of the English Church, were the leading divines of the seventeenth century; the divines to whom of late years the term 'Anglo-Catholic' has been applied. From the ranks of these men proceeded the most learned theological treatises, the best aids to holiness and devotion, the most eloquent sermons, that the English Church has even yet to boast. This school recalled men's minds to the contemplation of the Church Universal, and to the necessity of a Rule of Faith distinct from the opinions and system of some 'great mufti' (to use South's term) of Wittenberg or Geneva. It introduced order and proportion into theological teaching, not permitting a single dogma, as justification by faith, or predestination, or Papal infallibility, to overshadow the whole of the ecclesiastical horizon. In a word, it gave strength to that vigorous constitution which has enabled the English Church to

1 Eliz., c. i. §. 36.

The Church and the Age,' p. 23.

resist those fever-fits of heresy and infidelity which have so often shaken the Protestant communities of the continent. These divines had their defects no doubt; in particular, their somewhat stiff and jejune commentaries on Scripture are not worthy to be compared-Mr. Haddan truly tells us with the almost revelation of knowledge which, on this subject, German criticism has undeniably given to us;' such works as those of Dr. Tregelles and Mr. Scrivener, Canon Westcott and Professor Lightfoot, still lay in the far distance; the great questions respecting the Being and Nature of God, the evidences of Christianity, the aspect in which miracles were to be regarded, were as yet but lightly touched; liturgical science was comparatively unknown; yet their defects belonged rather to the age than to the men, and in what they did, they set an admirable example of careful and thorough investigation and treatment. When Dr. Arnold said that the seventeenth-century divines were incapable of treating any great question, he forgot that the questions which were most prominent in his own mind had hardly dawned upon Pearson or Bull; though students of the divines of this period must often have been surprised at the anticipations of modern difficulties which they meet with.

In all that Mr. Haddan says in praise of the weighty and moderate Anglo-Catholic school we entirely concur; Englishmen will, we trust, always give due appreciation to the able and learned men who produced treatises not unworthy to be set in competition with the great works of the contemporary Gallicans. Yet, on the whole, we do not think that the influence of this school upon the general mind and tone of the English Church has been by any means so great as is sometimes supposed. The influence of the seventeenth-century Anglo-Catholics did indeed descend to us, but it flowed through the eighteenth century in a very thin stream; the greater part of it was diverted into a side-channel by the Non-jurors, and never rejoined the main waters. The source of the theology which really pervaded the Church from the days of Charles II. almost to our own time, is to be found in a body of men whom Mr. Haddan barely mentions, the Latitude men' of the latter part of the seventeenth century. True, Cudworth and More founded no school; but the men whom Burnet describes in a well-known passage, who regarded the promotion of virtuous living as the main end of revelation, who thought more of the difference between Christian and infidel than of the controversies between Christian and Christian, who cultivated science and polite literature as well as theology-these were the men who gave the tone to English thought on religious matters from the

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