our manuals of doctrine, from the mutilated medleys of the Christian Knowledge Society "adapters." Is it a wonder, then, that our missions are what they are ?—and we own, that to us it seems but of small use to attempt to improve upon our present practice: we must lay the foundations afresh; it is as though we had better never have attempted to convert the heathen, until we could have sent out the Church in all its perfection-its bishops, priests, and deacons; its discipline; its avowed and authorized doctrine (and here we own, that the English Church labours under deficiencies which we scarcely like to face); its revised and enlarged services, with such powers of adaptation as should not only present an antagonistic principle to heathenism, but should, admitting the divinity of all religion," seek out some common principles of belief, from which the peculiar doctrines of the Christian faith may be evolved, and thus recommended to the acceptance." (p. 266.)

And, perhaps, nothing proves, with a more melancholy emphasis, our deplorable ignorance and defect of the true method of preaching to the heathen than the total absence in our literature of such books as the Lettres édifiantes ; but, when we have done nothing, we have, of course, nothing to tell. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, in the second part, is about the only popular book which enters practically into the duty of converting the heathen, though it is significant that a Roman Catholic Clergyman is the chief mover in the matter; and Bishop Berkeley's proposal for founding a missionary college in Bermuda is the solitary memorial alike of our selfishness, and of self-denial and zeal on his part, which stands alone in three centuries assuming to be especially "pure and apostolic." It would be well, in our selection of missionaries, to remember such qualifications as Berkeley, one among the greatest men of any age, with all his fervid energy, thought indispensable.

"It is further proposed to ground them thoroughly in religion and morality, and to give them a good tincture of other learning; particularly of eloquence, history, and practical mathematics, to which it may not be improper to add some skill in physic. During the whole course of their education, an eye should be had to their mission; that they should be taught betimes to consider themselves as trained up in that sole view, without any other prospect of provision or employment; that a zeal for religion, and love of their country, should be early and constantly instilled into their minds, by repeated lectures and admonitions; that they should not only be incited by the common topics of religion and nature, but further animated and inflamed by the great examples in past ages."-Works, p. 388.

Missionary teaching cannot begin too early; and while we have a large school especially devoted to the orphans of the Clergy, we cannot be said to be without a class of youths whom providential dispensations, by withdrawing them from home comforts, and by early initiation into habits of discipline and denial, seem especially to qualify for the stern duties of Evangelists. Why is not the Clergy Orphan School made, as it were, a nursery for a future College of missions?

40

1. Justorum Semita. Saints and Holydays of the English Kalendar. Part II. London: Burns. Edinburgh: Grant. 1844. 2. The Life of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. From the Latin of St. Bonaventure; newly translated for the use of Members of the Church of England. London: Toovey. 1844. 3. Lives of the English Saints.-No. 2. The Family of St. Richard the Saxon.-No. 3. St. Augustine of Canterbury, Apostle of the English. Part I.-No. 4. Lives of the Hermit Saints. London: Toovey. 1844.

It is remarkable enough, how, in a course of years, controversies shift their grounds. We scarcely know whether to be hopeful or distressed, that the opposing claims of the two great divisions of the Western Church come to us in a very different form from what we have been trained to expect. Strictly speaking, the direct controversy with Rome we may hardly look to see revived: there are no large stores of theology and polemics upon which to draw; that is, which either side has sufficiently mastered to reproduce. The days of blow for blow-Andrewes and Perron -Laud and Fisher-Bramhall and Smith (Bishop of Chalcedon)-Bellarmine and Hammond-of Twysden, Ferne and Isaac Barrow, have departed: the technical forms which writers, both Anglican and Roman, trained and exercised in disputations and scholastic divinity, wielded with such intellectual mastery we can scarcely expect to see worked in our own time, though, possibly, the recent recurrence to the statutable practice at Oxford may contribute to the increase of a more scientific study of theology. Anyhow, the Canons and the Fathers, we, from our own reading, know very little about; and, from all that we can learn, the foreign schools, save at second-hand, know as little. It is useless to seek reasons for the present state of things. The breaking up of the Spanish universities, the Napoleon wars, the suppression of the Jesuits, on the one side of the channel, and on the other the losses which, in every way, of grace as well as of principle, we suffered by the results of the Rebellion of 1688, will naturally suggest themselves. But more than this; not only in theology, but in other pursuits, we are living under a different cast of mind, and in another mould of thought, from those of our great Fathers. For good or for evil, there is a great subjective influence at work, which seems likely to pervade everything, to which inquiry can attach. It is not so much facts which we seek, as principles, and these rather for our own than for their own sake. Patient analysis, like another Astræa, has departed. Men are as though they had too much to do, and too little time in which to do it, to get more than a rapid, and, therefore, incomplete, generalization of view upon any given subject.

Of course, this change has not been unattended by very serious disadvantages. Incapacity and inactivity of mind pass off, in many quarters, very showily for a dreamy philosophy; and people think themselves justified in deciding controversy rather by temper than by facts. Time was, to take the example which is most in our thoughts, when the great question of schism, and all that depended upon, or contributed to the proof of, it, was the point to be settled between us and Rome: what constituted schism; which side, if either, had incurred it; to what degree and by what acts, if of the Church, or of the state; then the true nature of unity came in; then the historical proof, or disproof, of the supremacy; then the distinction between the Church and court of Rome; then the authority of this or that Council; the points of agreement or difference on specific articles of faith; Patristic interpretation as applied to separate doctrines or texts; the searching throughout the whole range of Christian antiquity for authorities, either for or against recent statements, in which a controversialist felt bound, by the terms of the dispute, often to prove a negative, and to appeal to nothing short of the collective testimony of ten centuries. The day of these things has disappeared; we have found a royal road, a pleasanter, an easier, but we are not so sure, a safer, path: one with fewer thorns, but, it may be, many other dangers. And yet we do say, that the controversy which has divided the Western Church is not to be settled by taste, nor by temper, nor by feeling, nor by wishes, nor by regrets in individual minds; but by hard work, hard reading, hard thinking, and a patient weighing of evidence. Converts are making on every side from us (we have never been backward to own it); Rome is growing upon us; but can it be said, by the old strategy? Geraldine takes the place of Bellarmine; the cut of a chasuble is debated by, and has its influence on, those who once would have been wrangling upon the authenticity of a canon. Even the essential notes of the Church Catholic seem to have changed, or to have been remodelled: unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity, are not so much surrendered as made to bear new senses, and to involve new elements. Sanctity, for example: it is not said, perhaps even it is not suggested, but still the impression is getting abroad that the note of sanctity implies the existence in the Church of such facts as the following:-a perpetual succession of miracles; relics of the saints, attended by the odour of sanctity at death (S. Winibald, p. 110), and incorruptibility of the body itself (ibid. p. 111), and a miraculous flow of healing oil or balsam from their bones (S. Walpurga, p. 95), as well as general miracles accompanying such relics; the efficacy of the prayers of the saints in later ages of the Church to work miracles for their own especial benefit and safety (S. Walpurga, p. 82), and the like. It is not so much that we desire to dispute the fact of the continuance of miracles in the Church: we are rightly reminded

more than once by Mr. Newman that "they are the kind of facts proper to ecclesiastical history," (Advertisement, p. iii. to "Lives of S. Richard," &c.) We are not inclined even to deny their possibility or probability—or, it may be, existence among ourselves: * we are convinced that it is the weakness and scantiness of the general and diffused faith of the Church alone which prevents the apostolic gifts being poured out in apostolic profusion it cannot but be that where faith and holiness are the highest, there miraculous powers admit the least doubt: the Church has power to claim the "signs following." But, with all these admissions, we are not prepared to allow that where these miracles are not matters of visible appeal, there Christ's Church is not. We do not say that the recent legendary (we do not use the word offensively) Lives of the Saints necessarily involve this conclusion: certainly they do not state it: we are not bound to conclude that they imply it: but we deprecate private people, especially the young and ardent of either sex, drawing it for themselves. It is no very unnatural inference from the facts; but it is not a necessary one.

Bramhall (Discourse III. recent edition, vol. ii. p. 25) reminds us of the great difference between a true Church and a perfect Church: indeed the distinction is admitted by Romanists: it is Stapleton's own. Metaphysically, a Church may be true: yet morally imperfect; but where there is the lowest development of the essence of a Church, true sacraments, true creeds, and a true ministry, there, if it be God's providence that we are born, we must remain. Supposing, even-which we only admit for the sake of taking the lowest ground—that another communion has gifts which we have not-and we put this rather as a theory than a fact-we are not at liberty to change our communion on such a ground, if true. Spartam quam nactus es orna; if we desire to behold miracles, and this in disregard to some, we say not what, especial blessedness attached by our Lord Himself (John xx. 29) to their absence, let us make ourselves holy, obedient, and faithful, and we may have miracles of our own. Anyhow, we are afraid of the tendency towards choosing our own Church and communion according to our own temper. What we most fear is the substitution of a mere subjective fancy, a cultivation of the affections and tastes apart from the will-a dreaming Church idealism-an optimism, and undeveloped perfectibility in the place of personal duty and obedience and striving.

When till a period-so recent as that of Queen Anne (and probably later, but we only speak of what we have ourselves seen),- -our Service Book contained a form for Touching for the King's Evil: and when our present canons (canon 72, “Ministers not to Exorcise, but by authority,") appoint "the license and direction of the Bishop of the diocese first to be obtained and had under his hand and seal before a minister shall attempt to cast out any devil or devils," it cannot be said that the Church of England denies the continuance of miraculous powers in the Church.

We do not say that the authors of the Lives of the English Saints are unreal; but they may be the unconscious cause of very serious unreality in others: their books are eminently beautiful and instructive: we have so long and so coldly estranged ourselves from the ancient Catholic Church of these countries that we are under the very deepest obligations to them, and to a kindred spirit—the author of Justorum Semita, for the narrations at once animating and subduing of the self-denial, piety, and zeal of those who have gone before us, and have exceeded our age in true holiness far beyond our thoughts and sympathies to ascend. If, then, we question the propriety of suggesting doubts as to the standing of our Church in the minds of the uninformed, which these "Acts," it may be, cannot, in their present form, be required to remove, we shall not be misunderstood and misrepresented as feeling other than very earnest and cordial concurrence with their general spirit, or than admiration of their literary execution: though occasionally we recognise a studied, and not, unfrequently, a feeble imitation of the Mores Catholici, especially in the volume on the family of S. Richard.

One-sided, as they say, such lives cannot but be we cannot quarrel with a little over-statement and high colouring on the comparative excellence of the religious and ascetic life; in the way of principle we are not ready to refuse credence to the instances of ecclesiastical miracles, though it is other than rationalism and faithlessness, to be certain that as there have been spurious acta sanctorum, so there have been fictitious miracles; and, therefore, we might, perhaps, fairly claim in the present series a little more detail in the way of evidence. But, with all this we, perhaps, had a right to look in the series for some such statement as what we venture upon supplying: "Good English reader: you have been brought up in a cold, selfish, and indulgent system, or lack of system: you are now about to accompany us to the ages of higher faith and love: God did not then withdraw His power from the Church: His grace worked mightily among the sons of men: it is not so now: we are in the world's autumn: nowhere are there such fruits as we are about to display all this degraded state is because the Church is rent, and love has waxed cold; if anywhere high gifts and saintliness reside, they are not such as they once were: the Spirit hides Himself because we are not worthy of His gracious visitings: as for ourselves, if ours is a low and degraded state, it is that in which God has placed us, and in which He has given us the New Birth: a blight is upon every branch of the Vine of Christ; even though our own be very scorched and barren, we shall find all Christian lands, in several degrees, but fruitless also: let us, then, by our own lives of prayer and self-denial and contempt of the world, teach others the more excellent way, and then, through mercy, we