by John Mill, M. Comte really proposed to destroy all books except one hundred, or except one hundred and fifty according to the list given by Dr. Robinet; a list which includes 'Tom Jones' and excludes Plato.' It cannot, however, be denied that the disciples of Comte are devotees in truth, although the causes of their devotion must, to those who know anything about its object, ever remain a mystery. Listen to his epitaph, as given by Mr. Harrison in the 'Fortnightly Review' (June 1873). "The great brain and heart of him whom every line in these pages recalls to us, now rest in peace beside the Rhone, near her who ceased not to live in his life, as he too will be continued in the lives of many more hereafter.' The reader need hardly be reminded that the lady referred to in this touching language was not Madame Comte, but Madame de Vaux, so that sometimes 'Social arrangements are awful miscarriages,' even in Positivist circles. But listen further to the epitaphist : 'He sleeps there in the body, but his soul is not sleeping,-' How could it, when he had none? 'What consciousness there may be to such an one we know not, and of that we keep a solemn silence.' These words were written in 1873, but that solemn silence has been amply and profusely broken in 1877. 'But we know that the life is not ended here on earth, that its better part amongst us is but begun, and that we of all others have a right to say, "O Death! where is thy sting? O Grave where is thy Victory?" 'Le coq français est le coq de la gloire, Dans les revers il n'est point abattu ; But Mr. Harrison beats the Frenchman, for he crows loudest over the immortality of the soul, while he does his best to prove that the soul never had any existence in this life, and never will have any existence in a life to come. Of course every one knows what Mr. Harrison means. Why should he stoop to disguise his meaning? It would be much more manly, nay, much more honest, if he would hoist boldly the black flag, and not attempt to delude us by false phrases which sound like a promise of Immortality, but are in reality the Gospel of Annihilation. ART. IX.-1. Euchologion Græcorum. Operâ R. P. F. Jacobi Goar. Parisiis, 1647. 2. Commentarius de Sacris Ecclesiæ Ordinationibus. Joanne Morino. Parisiis, 1655. Authore 3. De Antiquis Ecclesiæ Ritibus libri tres. Collecti atque exornati à Rev. P. Domno Edmundo Martene. Editio novissima, Antverpiæ 1763. 4. Commentarius historicus de Sacramento Pœnitentiæ. Auctore J. Morino. Antverpiæ, 1682. 5. Collectio Conciliorum Regia. Ed. P. Harduin. Parisiis, 1715. 6. Pontificale Romanum Clementis VIII., Urbani VIII. A Benedicto Papa XIV. recognitum. Venetiis, 1844. 7. Monumenta Antiqua Ecclesiæ Anglicana. Ed. Maskell, 1846. 8. Marshall on the Penitential Discipline of the Early Church. Reprinted in the Anglo-Catholic Library, 1844. WO things in the Book of Common Prayer at present 'vex' the Church of England. These things are, the direction printed immediately before the Order for Morning Prayer, commonly though inaccurately termed 'The Ornaments Rubric,' and the form of words by which the Anglican Communion alone in Christendom, conveys orders to her priests. The former of these documents seems, to the uninstructed mind, to prescribe the use of the 'vestments' in Divine Service in the Church. The latter appears likely to bear out the assertion made by Dr. Pusey in a letter to the 'Times' of Nov. 29, 1866, that 'so long as those words of our Lord, "Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven," are repeated over us when we are ordained, so long will there be confession in the Church of England.' Of course the reader will observe that Dr. Pusey's statement is not quite accurate. The words used in our Ordination Office are not the words of our Lord, for He spoke in the plural to all the Apostles, and, as some think, to all the disciples present; and it by no means follows that words addressed to a number number of persons, comprising an order or a society, are capable of being applied in the same sense when they are pronounced over individuals. The Ornaments Rubric has indeed lately been explained by the highest judicial authority in the realm in such a way as completely neutralises its apparent meaning. Whether the appeal the Judicial Committee makes to the history of the rubric will succeed in inducing people in general to put upon it the construction at which the Committee has arrived, remains to be seen. Without presuming to differ from the high authority which has thus fixed its legal meaning, we may, perhaps, be allowed to express a regret that the strange alteration slipped into the rubric at the last revision of the English Prayer-book, apparently in order to simplify it, should lend itself to an agitation which threatens to break up the Church. We dare not suspect the Revisers of 1661 of having aimed at re-introducing the long-forgotten vestments by an omission, the drift of which no one seems to have suspected at the time. But whilst the legal meaning of the Ornaments Rubric has been settled by the late decision, the Ordination-formula, on the other hand, has never been definitely explained by any authority sufficient to fix its meaning. We shall not be so presumptuous as to attempt doing that which has been left hitherto undone. But we conceive that a brief account of its introduction into the ordinals of Western Christendom, and of the peculiar place it occupies in the ordination service of our own Church, may be useful at the present time; and this the rather because the matter has not hitherto attracted the attention it deserves. For whilst the most ancient Eucharistic offices of the Church have been abundantly dwelt on, the earliest Greek Liturgies having been recently reprinted in the original, and translated by Doctors Neale and Littledale, in a form which renders them universally accessible, though the translation is not always to be relied on,* little or no attention has been paid of late to the ancient ordinals. Except the specimens of English pontificals which appear in Mr. Maskell's Monumenta Antiqua Ritualia Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ,' a work now out of print and difficult to get, we are not aware that any of the older ordination services have been given to the public since the volumes of Goar, Morinus, Martene, and Assemanni made their appearance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These works are likewise out of print, and *For instance, in the 'Cherubic Hymn,' the aorist vrodekάuevos is translated by these gentlemen, that we may receive,' as though it were the future! The dogmatic intention of this bears on the Greek practice of Eucharistic adoration, as contrasted with the Latin. some some of them not merely very scarce, but excessively expensive. And their not been reprinted, in so far as they bear on the ordinals, is the more to be regretted, inasmuch as the Ordination services, even more than the Liturgies, give most important and interesting information on the gradual change of doctrine in the Church with respect to the functions of its ministers. The Liturgies, indeed, even the most ancient, bear clear marks of interpolation, and their testimony, therefore, can never be taken as valid for an earlier time than that to which these interpolations point, at least by any persons who do not rejoice in the infallibility of modern German critics. Once, however, that this time has arrived, we find few reasons to doubt that these liturgies substantially presents its views: thus the Canon of the Mass contains expressions which would hardly have been introduced into it after the authoritative definition of Transubstantiation. In fact, the extreme veneration paid to the Eucharistic rite served in great measure to preserve the Eucharistic services intact, even when some alteration might have better adapted them to the more developed notions of a But the Ordinals, at least in the Western Church, were not treated with the same conservative, almost superstitious reverence: besides which, they varied, except in so far as they were merely copies of that of the Roman Church, from nation to nation, nay, from province to province; in England even from diocese to diocese: and thus it is that in them we find almost a history of the successive developments of doctrine and practice on the subject of the Christian ministry. later age. Our knowledge of these matters does not appear to have materially increased since the great works of Morinus, 'De Sacris Ecclesiæ Ordinationibus,' and of Martene, 'De Antiquis Ecclesiæ Ritibus,' were first published. The inducement of the former to undertake the researches which ended in its publication, and which, for the first time, enabled the Church at large to understand the subject, may best be stated in his own words. We shall therefore give them from the Preface to his book, slightly condensed. 'Summoned,' he says, 'to Rome in the year 1639, by Cardinal Barberini, a few days after my arrival he wished me to assist a certain congregation of theologians, in which, by command of the reigning Pope, Urban VIII., the Cardinal's uncle, the "Euchologion" of the Greek Church was being reviewed, and each portion of it carefully examined and weighed by the norm and balance of the Catholic Faith. When I was first enrolled in this congregation, the inquiry into the Ordinals of the Greek Church had begun; and these were being judged judged on different principles by different divines. To me,' he proceeds, 'it seemed by no means safe to pronounce on a matter of such moment merely in accordance with the dictates of the schoolmen' (the very men whose doctrines on the great subject connected with the ordination office are now taught by those in our communion who are so anxious, as they say, to restore to it the heritage of Catholic' tradition); for I found that they had not the least tincture of Greek customs, not the least acquaintance with the Greek language: that they had never thought of enquiring what ordination offices the Greeks possessed, how many of them there were or of what character. I thought it therefore unjust to try Greek orders by the axioms of the schoolmen only, as by a touchstone: to approve whatever agrees with them, to disapprove whatever differs, merely because it differs, and to reject all such differing rites from the rank of regular and valid ordinations. . . . For as the schoolmen had before their eyes and in their hands only those Latin ordination rites which were in common use in their own time, most of them laid down doctrines which if universally accepted, it would be all over with Greek Orders; they would be devoid of all evangelic power, would have neither matter nor form, and would indeed be more properly termed shadows of Orders than any true and solid substance of that sacrament. 'Turning over these things in my mind, therefore, I conceived that a different way of examining the subject was imperative, in which there would be no danger of mistake, but an assurance of attaining truth. And here a twofold course seemed open. First, to enquire in what way, since the schism, the Roman Church received into her bosom Greek priests and bishops who should abjure that schism. For if, in the act of receiving, she did not re-ordain them, it would be clear that she approved and confirmed Greek orders. Secondly, a point of not less moment, to compare the rites with which the Greeks now and since the schism, ordain, with those which they used to observe before the schism. For if both sets of rites are the same, or vary in no point of importance, then beyond all doubt, as the rites used by the Greeks before the schism were valid, so the rites they now use are valid also. On comparing ancient euchologia, of a date anterior to the schism, with those used later on and in modern times, I detected,' he proceeds, no differences of moment. I found that all that S. Dionysius hands down in his books concerning the ecclesiastical hierarchy, all, too, that S. Clement delivers in the apostolic constitutions' (he seems to have believed both these authorities to be genuine), 'agreed with the ancient and modern ritual of the Greeks, especially in the omission of those very things which so many schoolmen have declared to be the sole requisites for valid ordination. I found that exactly the same was the case with the ancient Fathers, Latin as well as Greek; in all of whom there was a profound silence concerning all those things in which most of the schoolmen suppose the matter and form of the diaconate, presbyterate, and episcopate, to inhere.' (He might have added that some expressions of certain of the |