The fact is, that since the Reformation, daily service is a failure, unless in some exceptional place like All Saints in London. It is most hard to see for whose advantage the cathedral services are kept up. Chance strangers are those who enjoy them most: but of course they are not kept up for chance strangers. You have a magnificent church and a noble worship; but you cannot get people on the spot to care for them. I fear, sorrowfully fear, that the usefulness of cathedrals is outgrown and their day is past. Bitterly I lament that it should be so. I wish every inhabitant of every cathedral city loved the worship as George Herbert did the worship at Salisbury, long ago. But it is certain that ninety-nine in each hundred of the inhabitants do not care a rush for the daily prayers. Then a cathedral is a costly establishment. I am told that to maintain the staff of one costs from 5,000l. to 12,000l. a year. What is the return for that expenditure? Two daily services, which hardly any mortal will go to. And a certain number of fairly paid and dignified positions, meant to reward those who have done good work for the Church, or to maintain those who are doing it.

That is the theory of deaneries and canons' stalls. How about the practice?

:

It is not so easy to job a deanery to do so causes an outcry. Yet the appointments to many deaneries have been scandalously jobbed. At this moment the Almanac lies open before me, at the page which is headed English Prelates and Deans of Cathedral Churches. The Deans are now in question. And considering that a deanery is a dignity and a reward, and that there are innumerable clergymen in the Anglican Church who are distinguished for learning, eloquence, skill and industry in managing difficult parishes, and the like, it is curious to see in the list of deans various names of men who

are distinguished for no kind of merit or service whatsoever. They are simply men who have been able somehow to get hold of the prize: no one fancies they deserve it. If all deans were like the deans of Canterbury, Chichester, Chester, Ely, St. Paul's, Norwich, Westminster; or even like those of Ripon, Exeter, and Carlisle, one could understand how they got there. As for the canons, the wholesome check of public opinion has little influence on their appointment. Jobbery is here the rule: the other thing the exception. Very many canons are men who have not done and are not doing anything for the Church. It would be a cruel mockery to ask many such, what it is they do in return for their thousand a year of the Church's money, or their six hundred, or whatever it may be. And as the Church's money must now be regarded as the nation's money, to be disposed at the nation's will, it seems quite certain that the present system of canonries is doomed: the present race of canons must be brushed away. The nation is willing, I doubt not, to pay well for good work done, but assuredly it will not pay men well for doing nothing, or what is worth nothing. There are various ways in which a clergyman may be eminent: and he may be very eminent in one way and very deficient in others. Very attractive preacher and no scholar and no practical tact: very deep theologian and ripe scholar yet no preacher: wonderful man for setting ecclesiastical machinery in operation and collecting money and building schools and restoring churches yet neither preacher nor scholar: let us liberally reward each of these. But as for the man who is nothing and can do nothing, except perhaps look beautiful and call himself Hon. and Rev., the day for the promotion of such a man is past, happily past.

Let the writer, who is a tory, and

fond of the old ways if people could be got to stand them, confess that his study of cathedrals has landed him in the conclusion, that they are magnificent things which the world. has left behind it. I do not say it has got on to something better: but it has got on to something else. The Irish Church was doomed, when even those who wished to keep it up, confessed that they would never have dreamt of establishing it of new, were it to do again. And possibly it indicates a like weakness in the cathedral system, that no human being (however devoted a churchman) would think, as a practical thing, of building a new Canterbury, or Wells, or Ely, or Lichfield, or Lincoln. They did not intend, the men who built those grand naves, that their work should be used for visitors, more or less ignorant and gawky-looking, to walk up and down in, and look up, and gape about them. Those naves were built for use; and the Protestant Church cannot use them. For it need not be said that an occasional evening service in a nave, is not using it. A cathedral is an essentially Roman Catholic building. The Roman Church turns every corner of it to account. Look at St. Jacques at Antwerp, crowded with worshippers on the morning of every day of the week: with every bay of the nave occupied by its own little chapel, with its own little congregation: with the thorough feeling of habitation and warmth in every nook of the edifice. And one could

name scores of such instances in Roman Catholic countries. The Roman cathedral is like a shell, occupied by a creature that fairly fills up every corner of it. The Anglican cathedral is like a great lobster shell, that has been appropriated by a creature which lives entirely in one of its claws.

Do I mean by this that I think the Roman system a good one; or that I think the Anglican Church should give back its cathedrals to people who believe as those who built them? By no means. The Roman system is inconsistent with human liberty and progress; the Anglican Church has a right to these churches, and can wholly support and partially use them. But walking now up and down in the quiet of a cathedral close; looking at the green grass and the old trees; poring on the lovely sanctuary of many generations; feeling the audible stillness and the slumberous air; who can help thinking that this peaceful retreat must shortly have its unquiet days? Men, little able to sympathise with the life of worship and song and pious withdrawal from outer worry, will lay rude hands upon all this: excited crowds, gathered round the hustings and the polling booth, ignorant, envious, knowing nothing of Gothic styles and Gregorian tones, will have to say what shall be done with cathedrals. And what such may say, the writer can hardly doubt; though he, for one, may lament it bitterly.

A. K. H. B.

THE

modern ears.

over

HE word credit has a sound full of mystery and perplexity for It tells of a vast power, scattering riches and ruin along its fitful career, hard to understand, impossible to define, yet apparently unbounded in the immensity of its effects. It strikes terror into the imagination by the revolutions which attend its path, whilst the understanding fails to apprehend its nature, or to discover the secret of its might. It is proclaimed to be the foundation of modern trade, it exalts or throws the City, it shakes kingdoms, and has been charged with the guilt of political convulsions; and yet what credit is, where it dwells, what are the peculiarity and the essence of its strength, are questions which not only the commercial, but even the philosophical mind finds it hard to answer. Whenever times are bad, and disaster befalls commerce, we are sure to hear much of the sinister influence of credit. If speculation prospers, and large undertakings enrich promoters, the merits of credit are certain to be loudly extolled, and wealthy bankers and merchants speak with pompous words about the mysterious essence whose power they wield, and of which they alone possess the unutterable and inexplicable secret. There are no limits to the faith which mankind at times places in the workings of this indescribable power. A whole people believe a law to be capable of making everybody rich by the talisman of its wonderful might. In our own days, Europe, and most of all England, swarms with men who believe that by a clever handling of credit, every disaster can be retrieved, every broken fortune repaired, every calamity sent by nature can be fully remedied. Even economical writers are not impervious to the universal

illusion, for is not the thought precious to great authorities as well as to the mercantile mind, that in the subtle management of the instru ments of credit lies the secret of a wisely regulated and ever prosperous trade? The very nature of these agents intensifies the mystery: are they not pieces of paper, lines in books, mystic words uttered in bank parlours, and yet are not the fortunes of private

men and of nations made or broken by these thin yet omnipotent nothings? And then, when the hour of rain is come, do not people wonder how it has all happened, and by what inconceivable trick they are suddenly plunged into poverty, and sage senators and oracular authorities strain their eyes to catch some glimpses of the inward essence of these wonderworking agents, and utter profound remarks to persuade themselves as well as others that they have had a vision of the seat where its power dwells?

No one who has followed commercial discussions in these modern times, whether in the books of science, the debates of Parliament, or the dissertations of the press, can have failed to perceive how universal and how profound is the impression of the mysterious nature of credit. Every one feels that modern trade moves on the wings of credit: and when credit is impairedwhatever credit may be proved to be great loss and confusion are sure to follow. Then the financial agent in these recent years has greatly changed its character. Its operations are guided by gigantic institutions, all reposing on a very complicated machinery of banking. Banking itself is wholly made up of credit: and we all see what proportion banking has assumed and is daily yet more assuming. A haze

of obscurity soon settles down on transactions so varied and so vast: but worse enemies than mere size and diversity assail the clear understanding of credit. By what fatality has it come to pass that money, which was so clear to Aristotle and to many a thinker of the ancient days, should have become for us moderns an entangled web of sophistry and jargon? Can we be surprised at the puzzle which besets the understanding of credit, when we see what money has become in the exposition of the City and economic authorities? Banking is identified with money; and thus every confusion which attends money passes over into banking; and at last we have the fact, so salient to the eyes of every observer-the ignorance of bankers and merchants as to the real nature of banking. If this fact is doubted, it is easy to put it to the test. Let any one ask the first banker he meets the question, What does a banker deal in? and he will speedily discover the chaos of the banker's intelligence about his own business. A grocer, if asked what he deals in, would instantly mention tea, sugar, candles, and the other articles which he sells; a bookseller will feel no difficulty in replying: but what answer would come from the banker's lips? Money, or Credit, are the only answers I have ever procured to this testing question of which the first is utterly false, and the second as utterly not understood. Yet these are the men who are looked to for explanations and counsel when panics overwhelm the City and traders are driven to distraction by the dearness or impossibility of discount. How can the phenomena of credit be explained, if the real nature of its mode of action is not firmly grasped? How can bankers, however wealthy, however eminent, or even however acute in many details of practice, expound to themselves and others the vicissitudes of their

own business, when they are ignorant of what it is they handle, of what they receive, and what they lend? And if the foremost and most influential of them in times of great difficulty and distress can think of nothing better than the shuffling about of pieces of paper, and an alteration of the laws regu lating the emission of bank-notes, can any one marvel if the world is perplexed, and can get nothing but bewilderment from such language? To be sure, if the anxious inquirer asks how pieces of paper can save commerce, he will be told that these written words are instruments of credit, and that credit is a great power and can work wonders: but the more he ponders over the ora cular response, the less will be the meaning that he will be able to extract from it.

Let us then consider whether credit and its modes of action are really wrapped in impenetrable obscurity, obscurity so great as to baffle every attempt at clear and explicit statement. It is in the highest degree important to bring light into this dark and unexplored region, if light is indeed obtainable. It would be a prodigious relief to the mind, and possibly an immense benefit to the pecuniary interests of many, if a clear and rational explanation could be given of the nature of those banking operations which are mixed up with almost every trade that is exercised in the kingdom. What then is credit? What is the meaning of the word, what the substance of the act which it describes? Credit is trust, and in these matters it is applied to the trust of a man who gives his property to another without receiving payment at the time of sale. He trusts the buyer for making the payment, for delivering the money stipulated at the sale, at a future time. Such a transaction implies two things,-a right on one side to enforce payment at a later period;