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ness of their performances. They acquired a transitory reputation under the specious pretext of reforming and purifying Christianity; they sank to their proper level when it was discovered that the true result of their principles was not to reform, but to destroy. Such will ever be the fate of that spirit of minute cavil and negative inquiry which applies itself to overthrow the hope and the trust of ages, to substitute in its place, not a belief, but the criticism of a belief. Powerless alike as a source of good and as a defence against evil,-powerless alike to satisfy there ligious needs of the longing soul and to restrain the violence of unruly passions, it may stand for a while in the calm weather of a lethargic rationalism," too proud to worship and too wise to feel; " but it falls prostrate as soon as the sense of spiritual want is awakened in the heart, and men begin to ask with trembling, "What must I do to be saved?"

mission in 1689, to substitute, in the place of all former declarations and subscriptions required of the clergy, a mere promise to submit to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Church of England,—a proposal which strongly reminds us of that ingenious casuistry of the present day which maintains that a man may "allow," as a law, articles which he would "be horror-struck" to have enacted. To this succeeded the pleas of Clarke and Sykes in behalf of Arian subscription, and Hoadly's denial of all authority in the church to legislate or interpret in religious matters; while; about the same time, the Independent Whig propounded the notable discovery, which an Oxford professor has not been ashamed to revive in the present day, that subscription to definite statements of doctrine is a hindrance to the attainment of truth. * The movement reached its culmi

trash"

*The Independent Whig was a periodical We have described with some detail, as our publication commenced in the year 1720, and main subject, the progress of the unbelief of principally devoted to the laudable purpose of abusing the clergy. Its authors were Thomas the last century, as regards its direct antago- Gordon (the Silenus of the Dunciad), John nism to the doctrines of the church. But the Trenchard, and Anthony Collins. Its contents parallel between that age and the present, are characterized by Mr. Pattison-certainly not and the lesson to be learned from that paral- less trash." an unfavorable judge as "dull and worthThose who have read Professor lel, would be incomplete, did we not also Goldwin Smith's "Plea for the Abolition of bear in mind another feature of the move- for themselves how far the learned professor's Tests in the University of Oxford," may judge ment, of which our limits will permit only a argument and temper are anticipated in the folpassing notice; namely, the indirect antago-lowing extract from this "dull and worthless nism by which the same doctrines were assailed through the securities which constitute their external safeguards. The Church of England at that day, here again offering a remarkable parallel to her condition at the present time, had lost, by the secession of the Nonjurors, much of the zeal and learning, and yet more of the catholic spirit which still lingered round the close of the golden age of her theology; and the extravagance which disfigured this spirit in some of its later representatives fostered the reaction which political causes had introduced. And thus, side by side with the progress of freethinking within and without the church, there arose, as its natural accompaniment, a series of attempts to evade or abolish those subscriptions and declarations of belief, which, so long as they exist, constitute a distinct self-condemnation on the part of those who remain in the ministry of the church while rejecting her doctrines. These attempts may be regarded as commencing with the pro- now to be received without inquiry. . . . As of statesmen, but become sanctified by time, and posal of Tillotson, at the time of the com-clergymen, so educated, cannot, for the reasons

"I think I may therefore safely affirm that whatever body or society of men are the most restrained by themselves or others from reasonthe most important of all, are the least qualified ing freely on every subject, and especially on to be the guides and directors of mankind. I will now examine how far this is the circumstance of the clergy in most countries. They mother, but they are delivered over to spiritual are no sooner discharged from the nurse or the pedagogues, who have seldom the capacity, and never the honesty, to venture at a free improper channels to convey any to their puthought themselves, and must consequently be pils. From hence they are sent to the universities (very commonly upon charity), where they and subscriptions, and obliged to swear to noare hamstringed and manacled with early oaths tions before they know what they are. Their business afterwards is not to find out what is maintain those doctrines which are to maintain truth, but to defend the received system, and to them. Not only their present revenues and subsistence, but all their expectations are annexed by popes and synods in corrupt and ignorant to certain opinions, established for the most part ages, and even then often carried by faction and bribery, in concert with the designs and intrigues

nating point half a century later, in the to the foregone conclusions of a traditionary "Confessional" of Archdeacon Blackburne, belief. As yet, this advice is presented to us and the Feathers Tavern Petition. The lan- for the most part in its fairest and most atguage of Burke, when this last document tractive aspect, advocated by accomplished was presented to the House of Commons in and estimable men, adorned with all the glo1772, might almost have been uttered yester-rious hues and brilliant polish with which day, so exactly does it describe the position genius and refinement can invest it, recomof those who are now complaining of a similar grievance.

"These gentleman complain of hardships. No considerable number shows discontent; but, in order to give satisfaction to any number of respectable men, who come in so decent and constitutional a mode before us, let us examine a little what that hardship is. They want to be preferred clergymen in the Church of England as by law established; but their consciences will not suffer them to conform to the doctrines and practices of that church; that is, they want to be teachers in a church to which they do not belong; and it is an odd sort of hardship. They want to receive the emoluments appropriated for teaching one set of doctrines, whilst they are teaching another. . . . The matter does not concern toleration, but establishment; and it is not the rights of private conscience that are in question, but the propriety of the terms which are proposed by law as a title to public emoluments; so that the complaint is not that there is not toleration of diversity in opinion, but that diversity in opinion is not rewarded by bishoprics, rectories, and collegiate stalls.

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mended by the charm of good purposes and pure intentions. We say for the most part; for there are. not wanting, even at this moment, threatenings of a rougher treatment and a more hostile temper; and in one instance, at least, the claims of free inquiry have been advocated in a spirit of rudeness and bitterness toward the clergy in general, which is, perhaps, the nearest approach which the manners of the present day will permit toward the coarse invectives of a Tindal or a Collins. But whether the means be blandishment or bullying, promises or threats, the end proposed is the same,-that, namely, which in the last century was ushered in by Collins under the plausible name of Freethinking; and which, now that that name has acquired a somewhat evil reputation, is offered to us, with a very slight change of style, under the imposing titles of "free handling in a becoming spirit," and "honest doubt," which has "more faith than half the creeds."

It is, unhappily, only too true that religious unbelief is widely prevalent at the present time; but it is neither so novel nor so significant a phase of religious thought as its apologists would have us believe. In much of what is now presented to us as the fruit of the superior knowledge and conscientiousness of the present day, we recognize an old acquaintance in a new dress: much of the teaching which boasts of its freedom from traditional methods of treatment is but the revival of an obsolete tradition, which became lish deism of the last century, like the Engobsolete because it was worthless. The Eng

In the present day, when the voice of religious doubt is again making itself heard in English literature and in English society, there are not wanting those who tell us that the best mode of dealing with such a state of things is to permit and encourage “free inquiry" among the ministers of the church; to abandon those obligations which record the existence of definite religious doctrines as essential parts of the Catholic faith and which bind the clergy to teach according to that faith; and to substitute in their place a sort of roving commission to a body of charter-lish gentleman of the same period, has made

the grand tour of Europe, and come home with the fruits of its travels. It has rein

ed libertines to seek for the truth as their consciences may dictate, unfettered by adhesion aforesaid, be fair and impartial judges them- forced the homely bluntness of its native temselves of what is truth, so their authority can give but little weight to such doctrines as they per by the aid of the metaphysical profundimay think fit to teach to others. The first ques-ties and ponderous learning of Germany, and tion asked of a suspected witness, in every court of judicature, is, whether he gets or loses by the the superficial philosophy and refined sentisuccess of the cause; and if either appears, he is mentalism of France. Yet under a good deal constantly set aside, and not trusted with an of foreign lacquer and veneer, we may still oath."-Independent Whig, No. V., Feb. 17th, 1720; compare Plea for the Abolition of recognize some of our own cast-off goods reTests," p. 88. segg. turned upon our hands; and discover that

66

free thought, no less than orthodoxy, may Christian teacher to press the practice of rehave its foregone conclusions and its tradi-ligion upon the consciences of his hearers than to inculcate and assert its doctrines. tional methods of treatment.

"Again, a dread of the pernicious tendency of some extravagant opinions, which persons, more to be esteemed for the warmth of their piety than the soundness of their judgment, have grafted, in modern times, upon the doctrine of Justification by Faith,-a dread of the pernicious tendency of these extravagant opinions, which seem to emancimoral law, hath given general credit to pate the believer from the authority of all another maxim, which I never hear without extreme concern from the lips of a divine, either from the pulpit or in familiar conversation; namely, that practical religion and morality are one and the same thing; that moral duties constitute the whole, or by far the better part of practical Christianity.

We are now told that the right mode of dealing with this state of things is to endeavor to repeat under happier auspices the latitudinarian movement which marked the close of the seventeenth century; to throw away distinctive doctrines and exclusive formularies, and to welcome within the pale of the church the roving spirit of doubt, provided it retains a nominal allegiance to some kind of Christianity. If this be the true remedy, latitudinarianism is indeed like the spear of Achilles, which can heal the wounds it has itself inflicted. The history of English deism is the history of a latitudinarian movement which commenced under the recommendation of qualities not less estimable than those by which it attracts us now. If brilliant intellectual endowments, a high personal character, a conciliatory and amiable temper, are the chief qualifications needed in a teacher of the truth, there is no name among our English worthies which has a better claim to be selected as the representative of these qualities than that of John Locke. And the fruits of the system which Locke and his fellow-latitudinarians inaugurated, is to be found in the history of the greater part of the eighteenth century, the age of rational religion and undogmatic Chris-liness, to be the apes of Epictetus. tianity, an age whose spirit, so far as it manifested itself in hostility to the church, may be seen in the writers whose works we have been reviewing, and whose spirit within the church may be described in the language of one who reviewed, nearly at the end of the century, some of the later phases of its influ

ence.

"The rules delivered may be observed to vary according to the temperament of the teacher. But the system chiefly in request. with those who seem the most in earnest in this strain of preaching, is the strict, but impracticable, unsocial, sullen moral of the Stoics. Thus, under the influence of these two pernicious maxims, it often happens that we lose sight of that which is our proper office, to publish the Word of Reconciliation, to propound the terms of peace and pardon to the penitent; and we make no other use of the high commission we bear than to come abroad one day of the seven, dressed in solemn looks and in the external garb of ho

The church of that day, as has been truly observed by a recent writer, became practically if not openly Unitarian; because, in the religion then taught under the name of Christianity, there was no proper need for a Trinity; because the belief in the Trinity, dissociated from the related doctrines of the guilt of sin, atonement by the blood of Christ, "A just abhorrence," says Bishop Hors- and regeneration by the Holy Ghost, necesley," of those virulent animosities which in sarily lost its importance, and hung round all ages since external persecution ceased have the faith of the age as an encumbrance and a prevailed among Christians, especially since superfluity. To such a state we may exthe reformation, among Protestants of the pect to see the Church of England again redifferent denominations, upon the pretence, at least, of certain differences of opinion induced, if she consent to listen again to the points of nice and doubtful disputation, hath voice of the charmer, to be allured again by introduced and given general currency to a the promise of peace and unity, and to abanmaxim which seemed to promise peace and don the reaction, which the present century unity by dismissing the cause, or rather the has happily witnessed, towards the Catholic pretence, of dissension; namely, that the teaching of her earlier and better days. The laity, the more illiterate especially, have little concern with the mysteries of revealed religion, provided they be attentive to its duties. Whence it hath seemed a safe and certain conclusion, that it is more the office of a

*"Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese of St. David's, 1790," pp. 5-8.

See Dr. Fairbairn's Appendix to the English Translation of "Dorner on the Person of Christ," p. 405.

history of the last century, the least Catholic | erently and obediently to the teaching of period of English theology, lies before us for those who are laboring to re-establish among our example or our warning. If the philos- us the principles by which that century was ophy of that century is a model of elevated formed. But if the history of which we and comprehensive thought, if its theology is have attempted the preceding slight survey a model of pure and devout belief, if its prac- teaches us an opposite lesson, it behoves us tical religion is a model of all that is excel- to remember that like effects may be expected lent in Christian life, then let us listen rev- to follow from like causes.

In one of the reviews in our last number, there | Dr. Cureton is said to have been quite out of his was an incidental mention of Canon Cureton as element. He was specifically the greatest Syriac one of the small group of Europe's greatest Oriental scholar in Britain. scholars. Ere the article appeared, Dr. Cureton was dead. He died on the morning of Friday, the 17th, at his country-house of Westbury in Shropshire, at the age of fifty-six. Born in 1808, THE action of tobacco, when smoked, upon the and educated at Christ Church, Oxford, he was pulsations of the heart, is a subject which in this ordained priest in 1834, and was for a time sub- country has not received the attention it deserves; librarian of the Bodleian. In 1837, he became we are therefore glad, for the sake of science, to assistant-keeper of the MSS. in the British Mu- find it has been taken up in France. M. Deseum, which post he retained till 1849, when caisne contributes a valuable paper to the Comphe was appointed to a canonry of Westminster tes Rendus, and therein expresses his opinion on and to the attached rectorship of the parish of the matter. He examined no less than eightySt. Margaret's. Two years before that date he eight incorrigible smokers, and found among the had been appointed chaplain-in-ordinary to the number twenty-one cases of intermittent pulse, queen. Recently he received the high honor of which did not arise from any affection of the being appointed to a special or royal trusteeship heart. Of these, nine were attacked by dyspepof the British Museum. He was also a Fellow of sia. Five or six had themselves perceived the the Royal Society, an honorary D. D of Halle, cor- peculiarity of their circulation, without, however, responding member of the Institute of France, attaching any importance to it. It was remarkaand member of the Asiatic Society of Paris, the ble that, as soon as the habit of smoking was Oriental Society of Germany, and many other given up, the digestion improved, and the pulsacontinental societies. These honors he owed to tions became more regular. The average age his great reputation as an Orientalist, and eswas thirty-four years. If we consider (1) that pecially as a Syriac scholar. It is more than none of the individuals suffered from organic distwenty years since this reputation was formed by ease of the heart; (2) that most of them enjoyed publications of his while he was an official in the a state of health very unfavorable to the producBritish Museum. His "Corpus Ignatianum," an tion of intermittent pulsation; and (3) that, by edition of an ancient Syriac version of the Epis- forsaking the habit of smoking, there were nearly tles of St. Ignatius, with commentaries thereon, half the number restored to health, the following was published in 1845, and gave rise to an inter-conclusion will not appear unjustifiable: The esting controversy. Among his subsequent works abuse of tobacco-smoking may produce in certain were an edition of a palimpsest of parts of Homer constitutions a species of cardiac narcotism, which found in an Eastern convent, and his "Spicile- is indicated by the irregularity of the pulsations, as reckoned at the wrist; and it is only necessary gium Syriacum," published in 1855. He was understood to be engaged on some work connected to relinquish the habit in order to obtain a healthy with St. Matthew's Gospel at the time of his action of the heart. death. About a year ago Dr. Cureton sustained a severe nervous shock from a railway accident near Streatham (for which he obtained £3,170 in compensation), and his health had suffered ever LARGE rewards have been offered by the Papal since. Among his greatest admirers were the Government to stimulate the growth of cotton. late Prince Consort and Baron Bunsen, to the Central and Southern Italy have years ago supfirst of whom, it is understood, he owed his pre-plied very considerable quantities of cotton, the ferment in the church. As a parish clergyman, large culture of which is now confidently expected.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

MR. MAT COMMITS SACRILEGE AND FELONY.

verton, and coincided with that of the banker till after he had crossed the Sill by the

MR. FALCONER, senior, did not go to Chew-bridge at the town-foot, and traversed most ton on the Sunday, as he had purposed. He was prevented from doing so, and went on the next day, that same Monday on which Mr. Mat was absent all day from the Chase, and on which" Kate and Walter "held their second session on the Lindisfarn Stone.

Mr. Mat had said nothing to anybody respecting his errand; but the fact was, that he also had determined on going over himself to Chewton; not with much hope of being able to effect any good, where wiser heads had failed, but still anxious, as he said, to see, if he could, what those Mallorys were up to.

of the enclosed country intervening between the river and the borders of the moor. After that, Mr. Mat, being on horseback, pursued the same route which Dr. Blakistry had taken on a former occasion; whereas the banker in his carriage followed the lower road, by which Dr. Lindisfarn and Mr. Sligo had travelled.

Mr. Mat and the banker might therefore have fallen in with one another, had it not been that the former started on his journey at the earlier hour, and had already passed through Silverton when the banker was still finishing his breakfast.

Mr. Mat had known Charles Mellish, the Mr. Mat took his ride leisurely, being late curate, well, in days gone by; and to much longer about it than Dr. Blakistry had tell the truth, they had, more often than was been,-not because he was the inferior horsequite desirable,-at all events, for the rever-man of the two-quite the contrary; Mr. end gentleman, heard the chimes at mid- Mat was in those days one of the best riders night together, both in Silverton and out at in Sillshire, and could have, without diffithe curate's residence at Chewton. Music culty, found his way across and over obstawas the chief tie between them. Poor Char- cles that would have puzzled the M. D. But ley Mellish, for he had been one of those he rode leisurely over the moor because he men to whom that epithet is always applied, so much enjoyed his ride. It so happened, and who are always called by the familiar form of their Christian names,-poor Charley Mellish had possessed a grand baritone voice, which made very pleasant music when joined with Mr. Mat's tenor.

that he had never been at Chewton since his old crony Charles Mellish's death. And every mile of the way waked up whole hosts of long sleeping memories in Mr. Mat's recollection.

Mr. Mat had often stayed for two or three The ten years that run from forty-five to days together out at Chewton, in those pleas- fifty-five in a man's life are a terrible decade, ant but naughty old bygone times, and knew leaving cruelly deep marks in their passage, all Mellish's ways and habits, his carelessness often accomplishing the whole job of turning and his irregularity, but knew, also, as Mr. a young man into an old one. And these Mat was thoroughly persuaded, and loudly were about the years that had passed over declared, that poor Charley was utterly inca- Mr. Mat's head since he had last ridden pable of permitting or conniving at any fraud, that well-known road from Silverton to Cheweither in the matter of the registers intrust-ton.

ed to his keeping, or in any other. Mr. Not that these years could be said to have Mat had a very strong idea that the reg-turned Mr. Mat into an old man, either. He ister, which would prove whether the propounded extract from it were truly and honestly made or not, must still be in existence, and might be found, if looked for with sufficient patience and perseverance.

was of the sort who make a good and successful fight against the old tyrant with the scythe and hour-glass. His coal-black, spikey, scrubbing-brush of a head of hair, was as thickly set and as black as ever. His perIt thus came to pass that Mr. Falconer, fect set of regular white teeth were as complete senior, and Mr. Matthew Lindisfarn were and as brilliant in their whiteness as ever. His journeying toward the remote little moor- shrewd and twinkling deep-set black eye was land village on the same day. But they as full of fire and as bright as it had been were not travelling by the same road, nor when last he rode that way. And his copexactly at the same hour. per-colored, deeply-seamed, and pock-marked Mr. Mat's way lay, indeed, through Sil-face was not more unsightly than it had ever

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