ward affections, with external provisions for repose and security, and the absence of Doubt, are the demands of such minds. The living action of the Heart, and the voluntary stillness and inaction of the Intellect, is their desideratum in Religion;-an impossible requirement. For such minds Puseyism (we follow Mr. Milnes in our use of the word) provides but an airy and temporary habitation. The Intellect never long consents to be a sleeping partner in spiritual concerns. It will awake and disturb the Heart, demanding harmony between the affections and the powers of thought. The proper sphere for such minds is, we will not say Dissent, for that is negative, and moreover would only suggest some one of the existing forms of Dissent, but independence in Religion, freedom for individual development; the Religion, not of an external Church but of an inward soul; the authority, not of an arbitrary and undefinable era in ecclesiastical history, but of the spiritual nature quickened into the intensest sympathy with Christianity, and speaking as with the spirit of the Lord. It is unmanly and effeminate for such minds to cling to the Authority and Catholicism of the Church; not because their Intellect and higher powers are lifted to God, but because their Imagination is awed and soothed, and the lowest class of the rational faculties artistically affected. Dissent requires minds like Mr. Milnes' to bring into it, Grace, and Art, and all the æsthetic influences in which it may be deficient; and no less does Mr. Milnes, and men of his order, require the freedom and individuality of Dissent, to set the Intellect at peace with the Imagination, to baptize the whole higher being into Religion, and to feed the Heart and the Imagination by the highest powers of thought. Authority, in the sense of Infallibility, such minds do not require: it has been an accidental accompaniment of the artistical and poetic influences which have been their essential demands. It would be a noble mission for such minds, intensely religious, and at the same time intensely ideal and imaginative, to unite all the powers of the soul in the worship of God, to reconcile Grace with Truth in Christianity, and with individual liberty to associate the Heart's indispensable demands for the solemn, the tender, and the lovely. Would to God they would break through their cobweb Catholicism and manfully take it up! Mr. Milnes declares that he has taken up the defence of the Anglo-Catholics because they are prohibited from defending themselves. Now that "the expression of the desire of a single Bishop" has arrested the series of 'Tracts for the Times,' "a layman offers apologetically to public notice this One Tract more"." We do not understand, on his own principles, with what consisVOL. III. No. 14.-New Series. 2 F tency a layman, any more than a clergyman, can hold himself justified in disregarding episcopal divines. Mr. Milnes, as a good Anglo-Catholic, should have observed that submissive silence which his religious guides and superiors have not dared to break. Shall a layman intrude where Priests are forbidden to venture? Neither can we find that safety to the commonwealth which Mr. Milnes discovers in that "element of unconditional submission to ecclesiastical rule which will effectually check any extravagant excursions of individual fancy, and any illegitimate assumption of individual will." In the collisions and corrections of “individual wills," we could find the proper protections against individual fancies and individual tyranny,-but in an "unconditional submission to ecclesiastical rule," we can only see a whole nation prostrate before the fancy and the will of a few individuals, our only security being that the Bishops still 'retain their individualities, and possess, upon this subject, conflicting fancies and discordant wills. The professed object of this 'One Tract more,' is to supply a fair Criticism, presupposing no opinions, and implicating no doctrines, but simply inquiring into the true meaning of Puseyism, its relation to the past, its connection with the present, and its tendencies for the future. This task, however, is executed in the spirit of an advocate, rather than of a critic. The unity of the Church of England is at once abandoned, and the three parties into which it is split graphically delineated. Mr. Milnes, with a little more of oratorical artifice than can be natural to so earnest a mind, speaks of these as the "three very distinct aspects under which the Church of England shows itself to different minds,"-as if it was precisely the same object that produced these different impressions on different minds. But does not the same mind distinctly perceive these three parties in the Church? Mr. Milnes is an individual, yet he can see, so as very vividly to describe, these conflicting aspects in the uniformity of the Church; the Evangelical, or low Church; the Church and State, or High Church; and the Puseyite, or Catholic; and to show how clear to his individuality are the lines of demarcation, we shall give his own accurate and instructive descriptions. "The Evangelical section necessarily feels a very subordinate interest in any part of Church history, which is not of a purely spiritual nature. Accustomed to study the sacred records themselves in a passive mood, and being far less anxious to realize the historical events with critical care, than to discover in each passage some secondary and suggestive meaning applicable to some known state of mind in themselves or others, the Church of the Fathers, of the Middle Ages, and even of the English Reformation, is little more to them than any other social institution. If they do turn their attention that way, it is to follow out certain doctrines, or rather the single doctrine of justification by Faith, according to the prominence or obscurity of which the Church is held to be pure or polluted. The ministerial Functions and sacramental Ordinances of the Church are hardly necessary for the completeness of this religious system, which can with consistency only receive them as designating or exciting certain internal processes: neither can the ties of church-membership be very strong where the chief sympathy is with spiritual experiences, without relation to external communion. The English Church appears in truth, to such minds, but as a happy accident, a wise dispensation of Providence, showing forth, in a visible institution, the vital truth which is in the hearts of men. Thus with them the interest of the Reformation increases, the further it separates itself from the hierarchy of Rome, until it finds in Calvinism its complete exposition: thus too the early Puritan divines share, if they do not supersede, the attention given to the writings of the fathers of the English Reformation, and their favourite reading embraces a large range of subsequent Dissent, from Nonconformity to Methodism. In this point of view, therefore, the Church of England is simply useful as a public recognition of Christian faith, as ordering and facilitating the public offices of Christianity, and perhaps as preventing some other absolutely injurious or dangerous shape of hierarchical authority from occupying its position in this country. "The High Church party in England has always comprised two very discrepant elements; the one secular and political, the other philosophical and religious. The theory of the former is what is usually called Erastianism the Church is there the creature of the State-a high police, established by authority and organized by law. Accepting as a fact the religious desires and wants of the Community, it is requisite that some power should exist in every well-ordered society, which should provide at once for their satisfaction and discipline. In ancient Heathenism the State was in one sense the Church, and the worship of Minerva of the Parthenon, and of Capitoline Jove, was the most solemn act of citizenship, as the hereditary assumption of the Pontificate was the principal form of the imperial usurpation over the Roman world. Christianity, however, being from its very nature the religion of baptized men of all nations, a national Christianity seemed almost a contradiction in terms, and the Church and State could only be identified under such conditions of universal empire as the Popes of the middle ages attempted to carry into effect. If there was to be a fusion of the temporal and spiritual authorities, then, the spiritual authority being Catholic, the temporal authority must be Catholic also, and kingdoms and principalities must be held by the same tenure as ecclesiastical dignities and trusts. This experiment failed: the will and wit of mankind were never directed to so mighty an object, and the struggle continued through a large tract of History with more or less purity of motive, and more or less probability of success; but the practical truth seems gradually to have worked itself out, that all union of Church and State implies the subordination of the former to the latter. The mere doctrine of the Papal supremacy had no power to prevent this consequence, although it has been the most clearly demon : strated in countries formally separated from the Roman See; the Spanish Inquisition was a State-tribunal, directing its violence towards political objects, such as the domination of the Spanish race over the Hebrew and the Moor, or the exclusion of those principles of individual freedom which the Reformation had aroused in Europe, far more than towards the preservation of doctrinal orthodoxy in France the interests of the Church were generally but a veil for the supposed advantages of the State; the persecution of the Albigenses was carried on against the will of Innocent III. as the persecution of the Huguenots against the remonstrance of Innocent XI.; and the latter circumstance may remind the reader of the Prince of Condé's saying, that if Louis XIV. thought fit to go over to the Protestant Church, the clergy would be the first to follow him.' To a political high-churchman there is nothing objectionable in this state of things: regarding the State, whether represented by a King or a Parliament, as the only legitimate Source of Power, he looks on all resistance to it on the part of the Church as a priestly usurpation, on Dunstan and Becket as ambitious agitators, on the Reformation as the epoch of the recognition of the full and just rights of the State over the Church, and of the consequent Establishment by it of the Church of England, its powers and its privileges, according to the laws and customs of the nation. In this system it follows logically that the transmutation of the Church by Queen Mary, and its destruction later by the Parliament then supreme in England, were acts of exactly the same nature as its institution; and that any act of the legislature which has taken or may take place for altering, mutilating, or even annihilating the Church, is just as authoritative as that which raised it into constitutional existence; what the State can do, the State can undo; where the State can bind, there can she loosen. In this system the Church of England stands in relation to other Christian bodies, as the one decided by the State to be the best and purest form of Christianity, the doctrines of the Articles as selected to be the true exposition of Christian faith; its origin is but little earlier than the Zuinglian community (which among other peculiarities rejected baptism as an idolatry) settled by permission of the same authority, in London, in the fourth year of Edward the Sixth; its bishops are officials, which the State, in the person of Queen Elizabeth, might unfrock, or, in the person of King William, might deprive at pleasure, elected by a congé d'elire which makes the non-election misprision of treason, and consecrated at the absolute and undisguised command of the crown. Queen Elizabeth put to death the Roman Catholics who refused to acknowledge her supremacy over the Church, as the Roman Emperors martyred the Christians who refused to burn incense before their statues ; in both cases it was a refusal to recognise religious, on the part of those who acknowledged secular, authority. It was too in this theory of the Church of England that the Continental Protestants nicknamed it Parliament faith, and that Melancthon mentions that the German Lutherans named those that had suffered for the reformed cause in England, the Devil's Martyrs. Of what constitutes Church-membership in this view no very dis tinct account can be given. A Bishop in the last century went the length of saying, that the Church of England included every man who believed in the divine mission of Christ;'-' a most expansive definition,' remarks de Maistre, seeing that it embraces the whole Mahometan world.' But these principles would in strictness require some political conditions as terms of communion, something analogous to the obligation of fealty to the Czar which the act of admission into the Russo-Greek Church imposes on all, whether infant or adult, native or alien. The use of the Sacrament of the Eucharist, as a test of political capacity, was of this kind; but, now that this practice is relaxed, and that even adherence to the Roman Church debars any man from only two or three offices of state, it is hardly clear what constitutes a member of the Church of England. Yet, although foreigners can join its communion, without becoming naturalized (and it is evident from Archbishop Wake's Formula for the reception of such persons, that such cases were anticipated), the general feeling among men of this way of thinking is that an Englishman is a member of the Church as he is a member of the State; that he pays his tithes and Church-rates as he pays his other taxes; that he attends the public worship as a profession as much of civic morality as religious duty; and that Church and State, or Church and King, have at least co-ordinate claims on his devotional regard. "The practical atheism reconcileable with this system, and in fact reconciled with it by Hobbes, has naturally embarrassed many religious minds, who have taken refuge in the speculation of a State-Conscience, of something in the state itself of a religious nature, and involving religious responsibilities. In this view the State has duties to the Church which it must fulfil under penalty of national sin, and will consequently assist and co-operate with the Church instead of oppressing or hampering it. The idealization of the State in the ancient World, as the great object of patriotic devotion and personal sacrifice, contained much of this principle, and in those times we find the combination of Church and State in the same authority, very practicable and successful. But the Conscience which Christianity deals with is of a character so much higher and finer, that the question becomes very complicated. The Christian requirement is of virtuous motives as well as actions. Now a motive implies a will, and the State must have one clear and absolute will before it can have a Conscience. An absolute king, reigning of divine right, might, in some sense, represent the Conscience of the nation which merely followed his bidding; for, if resistance to his authority were a crime, he must take on himself the responsibility of enforcing that authority, and thus his individual conscience would become the conscience of the State. But if an act of the State be nothing more than a result evolved from a number of discordant wills, by certain constitutional processes in which the wills of the minority are by mutual consent submitted to those of the majority, to regard the act as that of one intelligent responsible Will, is surely rather fanciful than philosophical. No possible process can give one pure and free Will as the sum total of a series of discrepant wills, or bring one simple Conscience out of a |