AP 4.

B63

THE promotion of Dr. Hook from a this department of history, so far as laborious town parish to the com- extensive learning or research is parative leisure of a deanery will concerned ; probably he would not have been without its public himself be the last to claim any fruits, if it does nothing more than such superiority: the praise which furnish us with a good readable he deserves-and it is really praise History of the English Church. It is that of being eminently readwas much wanted; for drier food able. If the student will not have than was usually presented to the learned much which could not have reader under that title can hardly been gained elsewhere, he will fi be imagined. Much painstaking the facts put together in a clear and research, a very conscientious bal- pleasant narrative. With the miraancing of authorities, and a large culous element, that sore stumblingamount of out-of-the-way learning, block to all who have to deal with has been employed upon several of the old ecclesiastical authorities, Dr. our modern Church Histories. But, Hook deals manfully and summarhowever these may meet the wants ily; he rejects it altogether. It of the student, they are for the is inconsistent," he says, "with the most part sadly unattractive to the principles of our holy religion to general reader. The old monkish expect the performance of miracles writers, with all their marvellous under the Christian dispensation." stories unpruned, were much more (We presume that we are meant to entertaining; for when the super- understand, since the days of the natural items, which are the anec- Apostles). Such miracles would. dotes of medieval history, come to not have been permitted to take be explained away, the residuum place if not absolutely necessary, may be very innocent and unobjec- and miracles cannot be necessary tionable, but it is often terribly in a church which professes a cominsipid. pleted Bible." Such a canon is at The Dean of Chichester is not to least a very simple one, and facibe placed above his predecessors in litates the study of early ecclesias

Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury. By W. F. HOOK, D.D., Dean of Chichester. Vol. i.-Anglo-Saxon Period. London: Bentley, 1860.

tical history considerably; and it these days, the ordinary Christian, is covenient for the reader to have taught to use the world without it laid down thus dogmatically at abusing it-to blend the duties of the outset. Whether it has not its a contemplative with those of an weak side, we shall not here stop to active life; to distinguish between inquire. It was not always part of the self-discipline and asceticism; to author's own creed, as he honestly aim at practical usefulness instead reminds us; he has adopted it only of a theoretical, unattainable perafter mature consideration; we do fection-is superior to the greatest not mean to say it is the less to be saints of the middle age, to whom respected on that account. But at the same time we tender the when it comes to be applied practi- homage of a charitable respect."cally to each particular case, it is (P. 38.) We hope we shall not incur beset with the difficulties which ac- the charge of undue reverence for company all skepticism, theological medieval Christianity, if we venture or historical. To deny the miracu- to think that some of its "greatest lous is a very easy process; but saints" were really not inferior to when you come to philosophise the "ordinary Christians" even of this fact into the prose of ordinary life, century. We think we shall be able the explanation commonly demands to show, from Dr. Hook's own as much faith as the miracle. It is pages, that there were occasions on so with the juggler's sleight-of-hand which, though they asserted when he gives you back your watch miraculous powers, their life and safe and sound, you feel satisfied it death were notes of sanctity better is not the same which you saw than a miracle. hammered to pieces a minute ago; and you are right in your conclusion; but if you are not content without proceeding to explain to a friend your own notion of the real process, it is most likely that you will be unintelligible, and pretty certain that you will be wrong. Surely the simpler way of dealing with these old chronicles is to tell the tale as the monkish historian told it; but to separate the fact from the fiction will continue to be the temptation of the historian.

no

We are not by any means going to assert that every Archbishop of Canterbury in the volume before us was a saint, in any sense of the word. Such an assertion could hardly be made, without some limitation, even of St. Palmerston's modern episcopate. Nothing is more patent, in most cases of bishops and archbishops, than their humanity. There were as many varieties of the episcopal type in the Church's early days as in our own. The material which the royal prerogative worked up When Dr. Hook goes so far as to into a bishop-for royal prerogative say that "it is only in modern times it always was in the Anglo-Saxon that we have learnt to distinguish Church-was various in its texture, between credulity and faith," we then as now. There was the schoolthink many readers besides our- master bishop, Theodorus, and selves, having a vivid recollection of armed with an actual power what men profess to believe and to flogging his refractory canons, which disbelieve in the year of grace 1861, one hopes was exercised with modewill be somewhat slow to follow ration, but which would be very him. But it is a strong feature in terrible in the hands of some schoolthe historian of the Archbishops master bishops of modern date; that he claims for himself, bravely the dillettante primate, Northelm, and honestly, to be a man of the busy with his illuminations, in age. He wastes nothing in regrets which he was no mean proficient, for the past or dreams of the future. and which were to him all that The religion of this nineteenth Archæological Institutes and Arundel century he considers (apparently) Societies are to modern ecclesithe model of Christianity. "In astics; pious and learned divines

Ift.

of

like Bregwin the German, loth to ceeding reign. It is true that the Archquit his studies, and protesting an bishop of Canterbury could never be honest nolo episcopari against his said to represent the Church as the elevation; Latin verse-makers, like king did the realm of England; but Tatwine, before whom a false quan- he serves as a centre-point none the tity would hardly have reckoned as less, and helps to localise in the a venial sin, who wrote classical reader's memory facts which, in enigmas in rather enigmatical Latin, themselves, are not so readily rememand, in other respects, "passed his bered as the more stirring events life in the quiet routine of episco- in the life of camps and courts. pal duty." There were men who The one point in which the successeemed to have mistaken their voca- sion of archbishops fails to answer tion: Odo, the Dane, who was this purpose as conveniently as that three times on the field of battle of the kings has been found to do, after his consecration, and saved is this,-that as the latter usually King Athelstane's life from the succeed either by hereditary descent Northmen in the great fight of or by conquest, most of the needful Brunanburgh, whose combative spirit, Dr. Hook thinks, would in these days have found its natural vent in the House of Lords, in some trenchant onslaught upon the opponents of orthodoxy (possibly the Liberation Society, or the Essays and Reviews); and statesmen like Dunstan, who would have found in any vocation the road to power. We are seldom able to trace with much certainty the motives which led to their election in each particular case, but probably these were as various as the men. Their appointment rested, as we have said, entirely with the king; their confirmation by the clergy of the chapter seems to have followed as a matter of course. The pallium conferred by the Pope was as yet rather a token of honour than an investiture of office; and though the Roman See assumed the right of arbitration in appeals, its pretensions were set at naught whenever they were inconvenient.

be

particulars of the early life of each
before his accession will have been
naturally comprised in the reign of
his predecessor; whilst an arch-
bishop, succeeding to the primacy
at a much later period of life than
the king to the throne, and having
a previous personal history to
told, quite distinct, in many cases,
from that of his predecessor, obliges
both author and reader continually
to retrace their steps in point of
time, in a manner which to the
latter is sometimes rather bewilder-
ing, and which is the only incon-
venient feature in Dr. Hook's present
arrangement.

The Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, then, is nothing more or less than a History of the AngloSaxon Church from the mission of Augustine into Kent. The annals of the early British, or rather Celtic, Church, are merely glanced at in an Introduction. The form which the author has chosen for his work neIt was a happy thought to com- cessarily precluded any further noprise a History of the English Church tice; for there were no British archin a series of biographies of its bishops of Canterbury. And the primates. Dr. Hook very fairly difficulties which beset the eccleobserves, that it is quite as natural siastical historian, in any attempt to an arrangement as that to which sift truth out of the pious fabulists we are all so well accustomed in who have enlarged upon the first secular histories of our own and planting of Christianity in Britain, other countries-the making the are certainly so formidable, that even king the central figure, grouping Dean Hook's courageous spirit may the contemporary facts round him, be excused for declining to grapple and dividing the history into those with them. The Welsh writersarbitrary but convenient periods always strong in genealogies, tempowhich begin and close with each suc- ral or spiritual-make out amongst

When the present David Jones traces his descent in a long series of aps up to King Arthur, although the historic truth is not conclusive, the principle is intelligible; or when a man tells us that his ancestor came over with the Conqueror, and points to his name on the roll of Battle Abbey, there is a certain amount of probability in the claim, whatever it may be worth, and there is room for a charitable hope that the Norman rider, when the fighting was over, brought his wife across seas, and lived a decent and respectable life afterwards; but a true-born AngloSaxon is a genealogical absurdity. It is very well for a poet like Mr. Kingsley, when he sings his song of the North-East Wind-we hope, by the way, that he has had the "Viking's blood within" him stirred sufficiently during this last spring-it is very well for him to tell us that his forefathers came

them that a majority of the apostles what proportion of Saxon blood be were in one way or another con- has in his veins? No people seem cerned in the evangelisation of their to have cared less about pedigree. island. One almost wonders that they do not insist upon some at least of that body having been Welshmen by birth or descent. But probably Dean Hook's natural sympathies have had something to do, even though unconsciously, with this limitation of his ground. If there is one thing upon which he honestly prides himself, it is that he is an Anglo-Saxon. He evidently thinks much more of it than of being Dean of Chichester. "That indomitable spirit of independence which, inherited from our Saxon ancestors, is the glory and the characteristic of the English race." Such are the concluding words of this volume, and their spirit may be traced throughout. We confess that our Celtic feelings are slightly ruffled by the constant reiteration, by modern writers, of these Anglo-Saxon pretensions. The old national self-glorification (always pretty strong in the little island) used to content itself with the term Britons, which has grown quite oldfashioned and obsolete. It is the Anglo-Saxons who are to go every where, and do everything, in these days. There is no particular objection to a man calling himself an Anglo-Saxon, if he is so disposed; but the precise ground of this form of family pride is rather difficult to understand. At the best, AngloSaxon blood is but a successful cross. The modern Englishman who insists upon the title is quite as likely to be a combination of Celt and Dane. The Dean of Chichester's surname, no doubt, is of anything but Celtic derivation; but if we had his family tree drawn out from Woden downwards, we have little doubt but that his excellent moral and intellectual qualities would be found to be the result of a continued "natural selection" from the various national stocks which have peopled the island in succession, from Albion the seagiant and Brut the Trojan down to the latest Flemish immigration. How can any man tell, in these days,

"Conquering from the eastward,
Lords by land and sea."

We have not the Kingsley genea-
logy before us, but it is quite as
likely that a proportion of all our
forefathers were the conquered in-
stead of the conquerors, or came, in
the language of his parodist,

Blasting, blighting, burning,
Out of Normandie."

So far as the "great Anglo-Saxon
race," as it is now the fashion to call
it, has gone forth to rule or civilise
the world, east or west, the Celt has
gone with it, and has not been the
last in the adventure, whether it were
peace or war.

But although Dr. Hook precludes himself, by the very title of his book, from dealing with the early history of Christianity in the British Islands, he does justice to the claims of the Celtic Church, in contradistinction to the Italian mission of Pope Gregory, to be the fathers of the Gospel. He admits in his Introduction what is undeniably true, that these claims "have been under