such need for, encouragement in carefulness? Is it not because our people are debarred from learning lessons of frugality from the land, the mother of all thrift? What is the first supreme lesson in economy, which, indeed, is taught to all people and to all countries, but least of all to the people of England? Is it not the dependence of man upon the harvest; is it not in the fact that there is a seedtime and a harvest; that there is no continual harvest; that store must be made for those seasons in which there is no harvest? The people who have been withheld from that school-the primest and chief of all schools-have never displayed, and never will display, the cardinal virtues of thrift and frugality. In the subservience of our Legislature to the maintenance of those perishing laws and practices which favour the aggregation of land in a comparatively few families, there have been now and then displayed feeble and futile efforts to inculcate carefulness. But it would be as easy for well-meaning philanthropists to push this island from its solid foundations in the earth to a junction with France, as to make the English people thrifty so long as they are divorced from the soil. The true and the best National Thrift Society' will be composed of those who are the most earnest and the most successful in the demand for free land.

ARTHUR ARNOLD.

RITUALISTS AND ANGLICANS.

AMONGST the many hotly contested subjects of discussion which occupy the public mind in the present day, and with which its current literature is filled, the raison d'être, position, and future of Ritualism are not the least important. Assertion is confronted by assertion, argument by argument, until the minds of those who wish to comprehend the relative position of parties in the Church, and the justice of their respective claims, are completely bewildered.

What then is Ritualism, and who are the Ritualists? The original and accurate meaning of the term is, the science of, and the proficients in, the order and history of those forms which have grown

up round the public worship of the Church. Such a one was Durandus; and from the extreme care for, and value of, stately and dignified forms of service shown by the advanced party in the Church, the name was originally given to them. But the essence of Ritualism consists, not in that carefulness for the order of service which is its leading motive in the eyes of the general public, but in its implied appeal to primitive antiquity for Church doctrine and practice. The Ritualists claim that their principles are the legitimate and logical outcome of the revival of 1830, the first object of which was to assert the long-forgotten truth of the Catholicity of the English Church, and to clear away the mists which Puritanism had, for a hundred years, drawn across the teaching of our early Reformers. The main position of the Ritualists is that, assuming the first stand-point of the early Tractarians, viz. the Catholicism of the English Church, as proved, the members of that Church inherit all privileges, usages, and rites common to all Branches of the Church, which are not specifically forbidden by her own Canons or Articles. Every jot and tittle of law, doctrine, and ritual, which were accepted by the Church prior to 1548, are, say they, ours now in 1880, except such as have been definitely rejected by the united action of Convocation and the proper State authority. In short, they claim for her as much right to the title and privileges of Catholics, as the Americans have to consider English history, down to the War of Independence, their own history.

Let us now see how this position is regarded by the other so-called schools of thought within the Church.

The Evangelical party meet the assumption of the Ritualists with a flat denial. They assert, on their side, that the work of the Reformation was to pull down the existing fabric of the Church, overgrown as it was with fallacious traditions and practices, and to reconstruct a Church founded on the teaching of the Bible and the Bible only.' They hold, in the main, that nothing is binding on the clergy of the English Church but what can be proved to have been held binding, and laid down afresh as such, by the Reformers and compilers of the Prayer-Book. And, following this out, they practically refuse to accept anything beyond, even on the authority of history, as binding on Christian people. They consider the teaching of the Ritualists pernicious, and their work harmful, because it is based on the principle that Catholic tradition and teaching are the heritage and should be the standard of the English Church, and because they hold that on the assumption alone of her claim to Catholicity can the authority of the Reformed Church be accepted at all. In their hearts, each party, we believe, respects and honours the other for the earnestness, devotion, and practical religion which both share, but opponents they are, and must, to all appearance, remain, while their fundamental principles of thought and action are so opposed that union or compromise seems to be impossible. And as, in political warfare, men think and speak strongly, while yet respecting and honouring their opponents, so with regard to the two opposite parties in the Church, words run high and strife is fomented between those who should be working side by side in the great work of reclaiming the populations of our large cities from the depths of ignorance and degradation.

There is again another party within the Church, and this a large and influential one, which, though classed by the Evangelicals as one with the Ritualists, yet looks on the latter with much distrust, and which, while it will not altogether repudiate them, at least refuses them its hearty co-operation, standing aloof from the strife now going on. This is the High Church,'' Anglican,' or 'Moderate' party, variously so called to express the distinction between them and the Ritualists. The leaders of this party also claim for their adherents that they are the legitimate descendants of the Revivalists of 1830; and protest that they have adhered to the basis of that great movement, while the Ritualists have progressed, and, in progressing, have lost the original stand-point which formed the safeguard of that revivalthe Prayer Book. They accuse the advanced party of disloyalty, of Romanising, of exceeding the teaching of the Prayer Book, and of indulging in eccentricities of Ritual, by the constituting of which as essential they are endangering the peace of the Church. They are, say the Anglicans, a new sect, not of us, and the tendencies of their teaching are nothing less than revolutionary. This School, in fact,

draws an arbitrary line in the middle of the Catholic system, and refuses to admit that the Ritualists are carrying out their own premisses to a logical conclusion. Nevertheless, the claims of the Anglicans are, in the main, identical with those of the Ritualists. They insist on the complete Catholicity of the English Church, and they base their teaching on the same Sacramental system. They hold that the form of government by Bishops is jure divino, and, as regards the National Church, that Convocation is the only appeal of Churchmen in all matters lawfully coming under its jurisdiction.

This was the original ground taken up in 1830. Since then the Prayer Book has been critically and exhaustively examined, and every office and rubric traced to its true source. The Anglican Divines of the seventeenth century have been studied, and been found to have deduced their arguments, and based their practice, in every possible instance, on Catholic foundations; and thus the Church party has, with another succeeding generation, advanced its claims and enlarged its borders, while yet accepting to the full the position and work of the men of 1830.

Repeated assertion, however, is a weapon of acknowledged power, and by repeated assertion it has come to be an accepted fact that the two great sections of the Church party, the Historical High Church and the Ritualists, are radically divided, and the onus of the division has consequently fallen on the smaller and numerically weaker party.

Considering, however, the basis of agreement which the two parties have, and the far greater importance of the points of union than of those of difference, it should not be too much to hope that in a crisis like the present, where interests equally vital and dear to both parties are at stake, they may arrive at such mutual comprehension as may enable them to present a united front to the dangers which threaten both alike. The points of issue between the two parties may broadly be divided into three :

I. The limits and extent of episcopal jurisdiction.

II. The degree in which the English Communion may claim for her own the doctrine and practice of the Pre-Reformation Church. III. The amount of Ritual on which it is right to insist in the present state of the English Church.

I. First, then, comes the question of the limits and extent of episcopal jurisdiction. The instinct of Englishmen is so invariably to obey, even while indulging in the proverbial grumbling which is said to accompany their obedience, that any party resisting an established claim of authority is regarded with immediate suspicion, and weighted to the full with the burden of proof of the justice of its claim. In the present case such adjectives as lawless' and self-willed' have been freely used against the Ritualists by all classes in the country, simply because they have raised the question of the limits of ecclesiastical obedience.

Whatever may be the difficulties surrounding the new courts of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, there exists surely, say the Anglicans, the inalienable jurisdiction of the bishops over the clergy. Why not then resign personal responsibility and private judgment concerning the justice of the legal decisions which are causing such deep anxiety amongst the clergy, and throw the burden of deciding on a line of action, in each particular case, on the bishops? They are by acknowledgment the divinely appointed pastors and fathers of the Church; why not yield to their authority the full measure of obedience typified in the precept, Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it'? A clergyman once said to the writer, ' I take the eastward position, and am ready to defend it against all the law courts in the land; but if my bishop were to order me to do so, I would go round to the north side to-morrow.' Is not this, it may be said, illustrative of a truer Catholic spirit than the conduct of those who say, 'We do not see our way to obeying either courts, bishops, or any other existing authority'?

6

This, we conceive, is one of the main questions which divide the Church party at the present crisis; and it is one of the greatest importance, involving as it does the whole relations between the bishops and the inferior clergy, from the acceptance of the ordination oath to the smallest details of action in Church discipline and arrange

ment.

What does episcopal jurisdiction mean? Does it imply absolute or limited authority? And if, as we propose to show, it is only a limited authority, by whom or by what is it limited?

In answering this question, all would agree to accept the custom and opinion of the undivided Church of the first centuries as the foundation of our own, could it be possible to arrive at such with any certainty. The first difficulty which meets us on inquiry is that of realising the true conditions of Church government in those primitive times. We are met indeed with maxims which, taken independently, are sufficiently arbitrary in their tone to suit the narrowest Episcopalians of our own day. Such dicta of the early Fathers regarding the duty of obedience to bishops are indeed numerous; but it is manifestly impossible to accept such isolated maxims as binding, without comprehension of the system under which they were inculcated. The bishop was, for the first four centuries, in some true sense, the shepherd of the flock, personally acquainted, as far as possible, with all under his jurisdiction, and acknowledging a personal responsibility for the welfare of their souls; and only gradually did the evils creep in on the Church, attending the exaltation of the bishop to the position of a civil dignitary. Thus, for instance, such maxims as the somewhat hackneyed one, Do nothing without the bishop,' presuppose social and ecclesiastical conditions which it would now be impossible to revive, and imply possibilities of inter