which directed that there should be no Celebration except there be a good number to communicate with the priest, according to his discretion, and to fortify their view of its being a mere commemorative rite by a rubric which denies a real and essential presence; and they may from various motives give their preference to other statements or implications of the Second Book of Edward VI. We are not attacking them, but humbly submit that those are more loyal to the existing Church of England who proclaim their adhesion to its existing Prayer-book, in preference to that from which it presents such remarkable alterations and to which it has added so much. Indeed there cannot be found a greater proof of vitality in the Church of England than her recovery from the deadness of 1552, first at the somewhat amended state of affairs under Elizabeth, and then at the great step made at the Hampton Court Conference, by the addition of Sacramental questions and answers in the Catechism; and still more at the important changes which followed the Conference at the Savoy in 1662. We say, then, that the traditional element which was violently ejected at the time of the Reformation, has been gradually and surely returning into the system of the Church of England. And this is the more remarkable because, amidst the countless sects into which the Protestant world of this country is divided, there is not one that presents any appearance of resemblance to this recovery. Tradition is alike the bugbear of Presbyterians and Independents, Quakers and Socinians. They have not the faintest inkling of understanding the appeal which the Church party has now for so many years been making to the voice of Christendom of the past, or to the decisions of an Ecumenical Council when such can be assembled together.

And now that we have taken the liberty of flatly contradicting Dr. Manning's assertion of the decline of the respect for tradition in the Church of England from 1558 to 1688, we will just stop for a moment to inquire what the phenomena are that he speaks of in such strange perversion of language. The appeal that was made by Jewel to the early Fathers in the impassioned sermon that he preached at Paul's Cross is well known. They were taken as the key-note of the English Reformation, and the argument was supposed, genuinely enough by himself and the other Reformers, to be unanswerable. They had to justify their position against modern innovations by an appeal to antiquity. It was a telling argument; and though Jewel was not learned enough or sufficiently well read in the first three centuries to know that prayers for the dead, the doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice, and other things that he did not believe, could be proved from them, he had read enough to know that

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they did not contain anything very conclusive against the hypothesis which he adopted. Learning did indeed disappear from the Church of England, for the Church of England was herself all but extinct during the few years of Puritan ascendancy; but surely it cannot seriously be contended that tradition had gradually less and less weight assigned to it, when the names of Bull, Cosin, Thorndike, and Hammond remembered, for the period of the Rebellion and the Restoration. As for the half-century that succeeded that, when the Church of England was again convulsed to its very centre, and seemed scarcely likely to survive the storm, Dr. Manning seems to be of opinion that the Latitudinarian divines carried the Church of England with them; whereas the fact is quite otherwise. We are not concerned to deny the evil fruits that the Protestant feeling of the country has produced in such abundance; but surely the prevailing view of the Church of England will be admitted to be represented by the various writings of Waterland, which belong to the first half of the eighteenth century, whilst the republication, in 1738, of all the controversial works of James the Second's time in the three ponderous folios of Gibson's Preservative against Popery,' attests the value which was still supposed to be possessed by the argument from antiquity against modern Rome. Again, Bingham's 'Antiquities of the Christian Church' is a work which shows that the clergy at least had not forgotten the idea of continuity as an essential element of the Church's existence. We confess we see no reason for taking Tillotson and Burnet as the representatives of the system of the Church of England at a time when Wake and Potter were living, just because these were at the moment in a lower station, from which they afterwards emerged to occupy in succession the see of Canterbury. The facts we have mentioned are evidence enough to disprove any gradual declension of the value of tradition in the eyes of English Churchmen. If Archbishop Manning feels inclined to attribute the deadness of religion through the dreary eighteenth century to the ascendancy of the ante-Roman view in this country, we would ask him to what he attributes the same phenomenon as it manifests itself simultaneously in the religious Communion which he wishes to uphold? We have said enough to show that the Revolution of 1688, whatever other damage it temporarily inflicted on the Church of England, did not drive out the traditional element from it; and if in the conflict with infidelity which occupied the latter part of the eighteenth century English divines were driven to the task of defending their religion by the aid of reason, we do not find that Roman divines of the period did much to aid in the victory which it is admitted the English divines achieved. All that

Archbishop Manning is able to see in this state of things is that in the Church of England it is certain that the school of tradition was finally overthrown by the school of private 'judgment. It lingered on in a few writers, and, for the most part, it went out with the Non-jurors, and with them it died.'

If the Archbishop had opened his eyes wide enough to take a comprehensive survey of the state of Christendom, instead of confining his attention to that of England only, he might perhaps have been able to attribute the universal decline of morals to other concurrent causes besides the prevalence of Protestantism. He seems to be in a state of blissful unconsciousness of the recoil upon his own head of the passages he quotes at secondhand from David Hartley's 'Observations on Man.' The author speaks of the decay of religion and corruption of manners as likely to issue in the ruin and desolation of the present States of Christendom. There is not the slightest appearance of his wishing to restrict what he says to Protestant countries. On the contrary, the mode of life which prevailed in the great towns of the continent of Europe, which were still Catholic, gives point and colour to the accusation he is making against the existing state of morals everywhere. Yet this decline in the morals of European Christendom is actually quoted by the author of 'England and Christendom' to prove that the decline of morals in England was owing to the throwing off the element of tradition which had survived through the reigns of Elizabeth and the Stuarts to the Revolution. We will give it to our readers in the Archbishop's own words. After giving the quotation at length, ending as it does with the words: "All these things have evident 'mutual connexions and influences, and, as they all seem likely 'to increase from time to time, so it can scarce be doubted by a 'considerate man, whether he be a religious one or no, but that they will sooner or later bring on a total dissolution of all the 'forms of government that subsist at present in the Christian 'countries of Europe.' With these words actually staring him in the face, the writer proceeds as follows: Thus much have I quoted in proof of what has been affirmed, namely, that the 'second collision of England with the Catholic Church in 1688 'produced a far more violent recoil and a far wider departure 'from faith, than the first in 1562; and I do so for the purpose of showing that the tendencies of faith and unbelief at this time 'give reason to fear that another collision may come hereafter, of which the result would be a still greater recoil from faith and a wider departure from Christianity.' Let us hope that as Archbishop Manning has been so ludicrously mistaken in his description of the past, his sagacity in conjecturing the future may be as signally at fault To do him justice, he does not

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speak very confidently about the future, and admits that his prophecy may sound strangely in the ears of those who entertain hopes and daily offer prayers for the conversion of England. He states the other side of the case with candour and fairness, with fewer solecisms of expression, and upon the whole, as it appears to us, more truly. He tells us that unbelief and immorality reached their climax about the middle of the last century; that from about the year 1750 men have been returning to the belief, first, that Christianity was reasonable, then that it was true, then that certain elementary doctrines such as that of the Trinity and Incarnation, and subsequently those of atonement, sacrifice, and grace, began to reappear; and with this remark he lands us at the year 1830-the commencement of that wonderful era in the Church of England, which in less than forty years has produced the extraordinary state of things out of which Dr. Manning's volume has arisen.

Let us take Dr. Manning's assertion for what it is worththat the tone of the Church of England has been gradually rising since 1750. We are afraid we should hardly have ventured on a date so remote. But at least it is on his principles an absolutely inexplicable phenomenon that out of three centuries which ought to have been centuries of gradual decadence, a period considerably exceeding a hundred years should have been a period of growth and recovery. The Archbishop does not affect to conceal this view of the case. He dilates upon it, and, if anything, overstates the case. He traces the development of Anglican doctrine from 1830 in the Oxford movement, which gradually permeated the country; and if we cannot quite go so far as to think that a majority of the clergy were predisposed to receive its principles and spirit, yet the favour which this movement met with up to the publication of No. XC. of the 'Tracts for the Times' was certainly very wonderful. It was not perhaps to be expected that Dr. Manning should be much at home with the state of things which has existed amongst us since he quitted our communion. He does not appear to us to have formed any tolerable estimate of the immense growth of those principles and the greatly deepened hold which they have upon the affections of people since the disasters of 1844 set in. The movement at its commencement was too popular. There were many attracted to it because of its mere novelty, and by its offering a form of religion free from the ridiculousness of Puritanism; many took it up because it was manifestly the most intellectual thing going, and was headed by the first intellect of the day. But all was not right when the conversation at a ball in the intervals of the dances turned upon the revival of the daily service of the Church; nor was it to be expected that the

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fever would be of long duration which prompted young ladies to rise at seven to go to church and on their return home to to bed again to sleep till near mid-day. There was so much of outside about the movement in those days that there was wanted something in the shape of persecution or suffering of some kind or other to winnow the chaff from the wheat. And without doubt it came with unusual severity. First, the loss of the leader of the party detached all the merely intellectual hangerson; the evident prospect of being left behind in the race of life, by the coming unpopularity of the system, shook off all who were lukewarm adherents; whilst a large number, finding that there was nothing to be made of it, without actively forsaking their friends, gradually subsided into neutrality, and have lived on ever since shutting their eyes to the controversies in the midst of which we have been living for these twenty years, or at least, excluding from their minds any consideration of the true issues of the case.

The result of the whole has been such an extraordinary development in the direction that Dr. Manning would most wish, that we should have expected nothing from him but a song of triumph instead of what is now like the wail of despair. But the Archbishop of Westminster, as we have already implied, seems incapable of holding two ideas together. We do not pretend to define his meaning when he protests that no 'consecutive mind' could follow such and such a course. But the chief reason of his arguments being so little consecutive seems to us to consist in this, that he is unable to entertain at once in his mind the whole of any given case. He wraps himself up in a part of it, which to himself is most striking, and he has not grasp of mind to comprehend the mutual relations between the parts. He sees the results of the trials on appeal before the Privy Council, which have been, with a single notable exception, such as to shew that anything is tenable in the Anglican Church, so far as the ability of the law goes to dispossess the holder of his preferment. It used to be said by that very comfortable class of clergy who held preferment which a little exceeded the limits of what the law allowed, that you could hold anything if only you could hold your tongue.' The aphorism has to be enlarged to meet the present case. To hold opinions in the Church of England, it is no longer necessary to be able to hold the tongue. Those who have spoken out the loudest against Church doctrine have been under one plea or another let off, and though they probably will live the rest of their lives under the suspicion of nine-tenths of the clergy and laity of the Church of England, they will remain in undisturbed possession of their preferment.

This is the point against the Church of England. which the