limits of the claims of Scripture, reason, and tradition,-and in this respect we do not know that the Roman Church, since the Reformation, has made much more progress than the Church of England, it seems at least fair to point out the delusion into which Archbishop Manning has fallen from his indulged habit of viewing everything Roman en couleur de rose. The author traces the downfall of Anglicanism in what appears to us a very strange method. He divides the period of three hundred years which has elapsed since the Reformation, into three portions; the first, which he calls the Traditional Period, lasting till the Revolution of 1688. During the second period, when the Scriptural element had the ascendancy, the Rationalistic element was gradually working. This began with the Revolution, and was overthrown in 1830. From that time the Latitudinarian school has been dominant, and gives every sign and promise of a complete final ascendancy. Now we do not know whether to call this ignorance or perverseness. It is so far from being the truth, that it is hardly at all like the truth. Surely the very idea of the Reformation in its first stage, and all the way down that dreary sixteenth century, and the beginning of the seventeenth, till Laud checked it, was that Scripture was paramount. The idea appears on the face of the Thirty-nine Articles. It was the view of things under which Henry got rid of his first wife, and married Anne Boleyn. It was this view which Henry would have pressed, if he had been forced to such an alternative, in appointing bishops without consecration. It was the hypothesis under which alone general councils could be admitted to have any value. The traditional element was as entirely gone from the view of Edward's and Elizabeth's divines as if there never had been any such thing. To the obscurity of the first three or four centuries of the Christian era they were indeed content to refer, feeling satisfied that there was not much to condemn them there, and that it made a good show to refer to the times nearest the Apostles, but they never willingly adopted this view, nor till pressed to it by their adversaries. Unintelligible as the view of settling things between individuals by reference to Scripture is to us in the present day, who have seen a hundred different sects making their confident appeal to the Bible in justification of a thousand contradictory statements-and the latest vagaries are those of Mormonism and Irvingism-the case was very different three hundred years ago, when the appeal to Scripture was in its infancy, and had scarcely produced any fruits at all, excepting the burning of a few heretics who had interpreted it in contradiction to certain Catholic doctrines. The Reformers were driven, as it were, unwillingly to rest the interpretation of Scripture on the early writers of the first few centuries.

Tradition, as the interpreter of Scripture, was the special and peculiar badge of the Caroline divines. It may indeed be said that they are the lineal descendants of Bishop Andrewes; but then it can hardly be alleged that Andrewes represented the theology of the Church of England at the close of the reign of Elizabeth. The process that has been going on is exactly the reverse of what Dr. Manning represents. The Caroline divines found that Scripture, in the sense of the Reformers, would not do. They were pressed by Puritan interpretations of Scripture, which they had the wit to see were nearly as good as their own, or at least would be thought quite as good by those who wished them to be true, and so they took the ground which has never yet been deserted by the Church of England, that the voice of the undivided Church must be considered decisive when it was to be found. We are not concerned now to defend or attack this view. All we insist on is that it is unfortunate for Dr. Manning's point that the historical course of the Church of England has not been what he fondly thinks it ought to have been-that it has been all along, from 1552, a process of recovery, instead of one of decadence. In saying this we of course are committing ourselves by implication to the statement that there were grievous deficiencies in the formularies, and equally grievous mistakes in the practice, of the reign of Edward VI., and there will be those who will be glad enough to carp at us as disloyal to the Church of England, just because we are so very loyal as to approve from our inmost hearts of every change she has made from that time to this. We are willing to admit that in the second stage of the English Reformation we are unable to find any person whose conduct we can approve of, or any result in which we can rejoice. Of the return to Roman obedience under Philip and Mary we are not now going to speak; but omitting this episode, and treating the history of the Church of England as it has developed since the separation from Rome under Henry VIII., every step that has been made is such as to represent the difference between Rome and England as less and less. We repeat, we have no sympathy with Edward's Second Prayer-book. We do not know why we should have any; it is quite a different book from the Prayer-book of 1662. There may be persons who regret that the word minister of this book has been altered into priest in our own Prayer-book. They may sorrow over the addition of the present words which are taken to imply the doctrine of the Sacrifice. They may wish that they could recur to the form, "Take and eat this in remembrance,' 'Drink this in remembrance,' and may desire that they had it in their power to justify the rare celebration of the Holy Communion by falling back on a rubric

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

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 are 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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