ject to all the accidents and mutations of public opinion. Yet it has no hold upon human life in any of its forms. It treats politics, science, literature, as secular; but it dabbles with them, pretends to reform them by mixing a few cant phrases with them, is really affected by all the worst habits which the most vulgar and frivolous pursuit of them engenders. It trembles at every movement, at every thought which is awakened in human hearts, at every discovery which is made in the world without. But it does not tremble at its own corruptions. It can see its members indifferent to all the precepts of the Bible in their daily occupations as shopkeepers, employers, citizens; yet if they put the Bible on their banners, and shout about the authority of the inspired book at public meetings, it asks no more; it boasts that we are 'sound at heart;' it congratulates itself that spirituality is diffusing itself throughout the land. Meantime each of its sections has its own Bible. The newspaper or magazine, which keeps that section in conceit with itself, and in hatred of others, is to all intents and purposes its divine oracle, the rule of its faith, the guide of its conduct. For this religious world is an

aggregate of sections, a collection of opinions about God and about man; no witness that there is a living God, or that He cares for men. Its faith is essentially exclusive, and so is its charity; for though it devises a multitude of contrivances for relieving the wants of human beings, nearly all these seem to proceed upon the principle, that they are creatures of another race, on behalf of whom we are to exercise our graces; not creatures who have that nature which Christ took, as much sharers in all the benefits of His incarnation and sacrifice, as their benefactors are.

*

There has been a consciousness for many years past among the members of the English Church, that they are not meant to be mere portions of a religious world; that they utterly belie their high vocation, when they act as if they were. We must be churchmen,' we have said; we must claim a calling from God, and a connexion with the past; we cannot acknowledge ourselves to be mere nominees of the civil power; we cannot admit that

*And He said unto them, The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be so. Luke xxii. 25, 26.

we have merely formed a set of opinions, or established a certain fellowship for ourselves.' But in the endeavour to escape from this position, and to find a more safe and tenable one, we have, I fear, shewn how much the low notions and habits of a religious world are cleaving to us. Trying to be something more than a sect, we have exhibited much of the narrowness of a sect; nay, those who exult in what they call their feelings of brotherhood to all Christian people, have been able to represent us as narrow and exclusive beyond all others. So far as I can see, the English Church must either lose itself in the mass of sects, and perish when the sentence, of which there are so many precursory tokens, so many trumpets of warning, goes forth for their destruction; or else must sink into a portion of the popedom, and bring down upon itself a portion of that judgment which miserable sufferers in the dens of Naples and Rome join with the saints beneath the altar, in invoking against a power which has usurped the name of Christ, and counterfeited the government of the Father, for the support and propagation of fraud and cruelty-a power which no visitations of

God have been able to teach wisdom and righteousness—unless we believe that our peculiar standing ground has only been given us, that we may be witnesses of God's blessings to mankind, that we may claim the members of all sects as portions of God's great family, that we may bring the members of all churches to understand, that when they lose their Pope, they only exchange a phantom for a reality, the government of a present High Priest and King for that of an usurping vicar.

But when we speak of a church taking up

Must we wait

a position, what do we mean? till the English Church recovers what we hear so much about in newspapers, its synodical action?' That will come, I doubt not, when it is good for us. May God prevent it from coming a moment before! Are we to wait for some decrees or decisions of the rulers of the Church? Thank God for the mercy which has made those decrees so few, which has hindered our bishops from pronouncing judgments in deference to public opinion, or in conformity with the wishes of any faction! So the Church has been prevented from sinking into a sect, so its ministers have been obliged to learn, in spite of themselves, that

when God brings them into a church, He becomes their teacher; He provides them with the means of learning His will and doing it; He gives them a living lore, for which the dead lore of decrees never can be a substitute; which it may crush and stifle. Thus they are taught that when God brings them into a church, He wishes them not to shut out the light which is pouring in on all sides from members of partial sects, from artists, from scientific men, from political experience, from the conflicts and contradictions of the time; but that all these are their lesson-books, which His great lesson-book may enable them to understand, to appropriate, to harmonize. Thus they are forced to learn that their business is not to seek for themselves a quiet regulated atmosphere, where they may be safe from the intrusion of perplexities, where no wind of heaven may visit their faces too roughly; but that their place is in the dusty highway of the world, or on the open sea; that they are to be exempt from no vulgar interests or temptations to which others are exposed; that they are to be acquainted with all shoals and tempests, since only by such experience can they understand the might of a present