has won for Hooker and Taylor, for Barrow and South, a foremost place in the history of our literature, they were distinguished for all other qualities, which are to be looked for in great thinkers and illustrious divines. Their Apologetics may be less valuable than those of succeeding theologians; their Exegesis may be inferior to that of those who possess the larger experience and more varied helps of later days; but their dogmatic, controversial, and practical writings, must always retain a primary place in our estimation, and vindicate their superiority to opposing schools of religious thought.

Contemporaneous with the Puritan development of British Protestantism, was the Jansenist development of Continental, and especially of French, Romanism. The Augustinian element, which, in the Middle Ages, had characterized all who sought the religious good of the community, whether, like Anselm, Bernard, and A Kempis, they merely endeavoured to make the most and the best of the existing Church system, or, like Tauler, Janow, and John Wessel, they laboured for a less or greater measure of ecclesiastical reform, was not all absorbed by Protestantism, was not all extinguished by the Council of Trent. Even in that Council voices were raised in behalf of more evangelical views than the assembled fathers sanctioned in their decrees. One of these friends of scriptural truth was Michael Baius, Professor of Theology at Louvain, who afterwards incurred the enmity of the Franciscans, and, through their influence, seventynine propositions, extracted from his writings, were condemned by a bull of Pius V. in 1567. Augustinian views had been extensively propagated in the Netherlands by the Brethren of the Common Life, as Ullmann, Schmidt, and others, have shown; and in the same university where Baius taught, Cornelius Jansen was first a student, and afterwards a theological professor, before he was elevated to the bishopric of Ypres.

Jansen, and his fellow-student de Hauranne, Abbè of St Cyran, undertook the cause of Church Reform, the former devoting himself to doctrine, the latter to worship and practice. The chief work of the former was his "Augustinus," from which five propositions were formally condemned, by a "Constitution" of Innocent X. in 1653, as "heretical," and some of them "blasphemous and accursed." Jansenism has for the last two centuries been a recognised party in the Romish Church. It has given birth to every effort after reform in that Church; it has produced the struggles of Febronius and his supporters for a National German Catholic Church; the reforming exertions of Ricci and the Synod of Pistoia; and the evangelical labours of Sailer, Bishop of Ratisbon, Martin Boos, Lindl, and others, in the latter end of the last and the beginning of the present century. It was in France that Jansenism attained its highest distinction, and produced its most distinguished men. Of French Jansenism, Port-Royal was the intellectual centre. If Jansenism produced no great pulpit orator-if it left to Jesuits and Oratorians the high places of ecclesiastical rhetoric, in almost every other department of religious literature it gave birth to men of the highest distinction. If the Benedictines of St Maur were the more learned, the Port-Royalists were

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the more immediately and generally intellectually influential. community, where Tillemont was the church historian, Antoine Arnauld the indefatigable controversialist, Nicole the writer on practical religion, De Sacy the translator of the New Testament, Rollin the instructor of youth, and Racine the poet both for the world and the Church, was a centre of the most powerful influence over intellect. Its zenith of fame was reached when in Pascal it produced a leader of thought, a master of style, worthy as the third great prose writer of France to rival in sway, but to counteract in tendency, the sensual Rabelais and the sceptical Montaigne.

M. Cousin has remarked-"The French women of the seventeenth century were not less remarkable than the men; there were then, even in the austere retreats of religion, women great alike in mind and in heart, who, doubtless, had not the literary ability of authors by profession, but who have written much, because it was the practice of the time, and who could not write in a mediocre manner, with the thoughts and the feelings which were their characteristics."

The Arnaulds occupy a prominent place in the religious and literary history of France during the seventeenth century. That member of the family, whose correspondence is under review, Agnes, Abbess of Port-Royal, has been considerably thrown into the shade hitherto by her elder and more energetic sister, Marie Angelique, previously abbess of the same convent. In general church histories, Protestant or Romanist, Angelique is mentioned, to the exclusion of her sister.' The same omission is found in Hallam and in Biographical Dictionaries. This may be partly accounted for by the fact, that the Letters of the elder sister were published upwards of a century ago, while those of Agnes, with the exception of about thirty, have hitherto remained in manuscript. La Mère Agnes wrote, besides the contents of these volumes, several Treatises on Practical Religion, which, in manuscript, passed under the notice of Racine, while engaged upon his History of Port-Royal. He has characterised her as "distinguished by the elevation and the solidity of her mind."

Some years ago, M. Faugere distinguished himself by giving to the world the first thoroughly accurate edition of the "Thoughts" of Pascal, which Vinet, elaborately criticising it, termed "a work considerable in every sense of the term." This was followed by a volume on Pascal's sisters, Jacqueline and Madame Perier. The work before us is a continuation of the same meritorious researches on "The Sanctuary of Jansenism," as Voltaire called Port-Royal.

M. Faugere has prefixed an interesting introduction, and has further given a number of annotations on the volumes. These notes, however, are by no means sufficiently numerous to make the work thoroughly intelligible to the reader. He ought to have given references to the passages of Scripture quoted, especially as these are sometimes inexact, as given from memory; and a reader, even if well acquainted with the Romish Bible, whether the Vulgate or the

'Gieseler makes only one sister of Dr Arnauld Abbess of Port-Royal. Reuchlin, in his article on the Arnaulds in Herzog's Cyclopedia, calls Agnes merely a nun.

French version, may be at a loss to know what part of Holy Writ is referred to.

The reader will, of course, not expect to find in this Correspondence, which embraces a period of forty-five years, from 1626 to 1671, the year of the writer's death, the variety or the secular interest of the nearly contemporary Letters of Madame de Sevignè. The sphere of Agnes Arnauld was far more limited, and her mind was at once less powerful and less cultivated than that of the literary marquise, of whom Sainte-Beuve has said that, "without wishing or suspecting it, she has raised herself by her Letters to a foremost place among French writers."

In these two volumes are contained 637 letters with date, and 114 undated. Many of them however, are very brief notes comprised in a few lines. The various members of the Arnauld family, as might have been expected, occupy a very large place among those, to whom the letters are addressed. A large number, also, are written to various members of the community of Port-Royal, and some to ladies, purposing to join themselves to that institution. In these she shows herself careful to give accurate pictures of what the conventual life really was, that they might enter upon it fully prepared. In the letters to nuns, all excessive austerity in treatment of the body is discouraged, and the attention is directed to the state of the soul's health.

Of the external transactions of the period comprised in these letters we have scarcely a glimpse. The wars in which France was involved in are referred to in passing, when danger threatens a relative of her correspondents. The troubles of the Fronde are alluded to, when they involve the partial dispersion of the inmates of PortRoyal. Though contemporary with the commencement of the most brilliant era in French literature, there is no allusion to works of a secular character. Though contemporary with at once the most distinguished writings of the French Calvinists, and the most atrocious series of restrictive and oppressive measures against them, there is scarcely a reference to the existence of a Protestant Church in France.

The chief merit in these volumes is in the natural way in which they bring before us, during the changes of nearly half a century, the life of the religious women of Port-Royal. They give us a full and striking portraiture of the life of that community, first in its undisturbed tranquillity, and afterwards when the clouds began to thicken, and the storm of royal fury fell upon the unoffending sisters.

Agnes Arnauld died at the age of seventy-eight. She did not live to see the last bulwark against the persecution of Port-Royal struck down, by the death of the Duchess de Longueville, or to behold the exile of her illustrious brother Antoine to the Spanish Netherlands. Her last letter, dated 10th February 1671, only nine days before her death, though then so feeble that she was obliged to dictate it, and could not sign it, betrays no marks of mental feebleness. It is addressed to Pavillon, Bishop of Alet, one of the four Jansenist prelates who refused to subscribe the formula of condemnation of the five propositions enjoined by Alexander VII.

The work of Dr Tregelles is somewhat enlarged from the article

which appeared in the "Journal of Sacred Literature," from his pen. It contains a compressed, but accurate and interesting account of Jansenism and Port-Royal, and in the absence of a more elaborate work, may be thoroughly recommended to the general reader. We are surprised to find in this and the volume immediately to be noticed, no reference to Sainte-Beuve's elaborate work on Port-Royal. The little book of Dr Tregelles is concluded by an account of a visit paid in 1850 to the Jansenist archbishop of Utrecht; and is agreeably illustrated by portraits of Jansenius, St Cyran, and Angelique Arnauld, and a view of Port-Royal, taken from old prints.

Mr Neale's book is of a much more ambitious character. It contains a history of Jansenism, an account of the Brethren of the Common Life, and an extended notice of the Archbishopric of Utrecht, from its foundation. The Jansenist Church of Holland occupies about one-half of the volume.

Mr Neale's Tractarian views are well known, and the reader of his volume will not be surprised to meet with strong expressions of AntiProtestant opinion. Thus he gladly anticipates, that at the commencement of next century, Holland will be a Romanist country; he terms the brutalities of Alva less shocking than the partisan excesses of some obscure patriot chiefs; and he speaks of a Dutch prelate having escaped, by a natural death, the crown of martyrdom, during the Stadholdership of William the Silent! It is amusing to find the complacency with which he dismisses the authorship of "the Imitation of Christ," as a "settled point among ecclesiastical scholars,” that it must be adjudged from A Kempis! To whom he wisely does not add! We read in Mr Neale's volume of Philip II. being king of Germany; of Margaret of Pavia being ruler of the Low Countries! Desirious to have a hard hit at French Calvinism, he tells us that Aubertin and Blondel were silenced by the work of Arnauld and Nicole on the Eucharist, which first appeared in 1664. But Death had silenced Aubertin in 1652 and Blondel in 1655!

The style of Mr Neale is at times very ambitious, at times very slovenly. We read in his volume of a "village which the French would call a pays riant;" of "the age and infirmities of eighty-two;" of" one of the most prononcé" (more than once); of" words in the same sentiment;" of "a crowd of works deluging Holland;" of (rather an equivocal expression)" excellent priests being turned out from that institution;" of "a Church so tremendous in its Cistertian and Transitorial sternness!" If any advanced class in the National School at East Grimstead be taught composition, a clever boy or girl may soon write better English than the "Warden of Sackville College!"

It is fantastic inaccuracy in Mr Neale to quote the Psalms used by dying Jansenists from the Prayer-Book version, of which, doubtless, these worthy Dutchmen had never heard. The quotations ought, in all historical accuracy, to have been from the Vulgate.

Mr Neale, however, has given to the world a volume, which, in spite of its un-Protestant tone and questionable English, is worth reading. He has obviously composed some parts in a great hurry, or he would have given a correct statement of the number of Baius' propositions

Hagenbach's Encyclopædia of Theology.

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condemned by the Roman See-not 76 but 79. But his sketch of Van Espen, his account of the Council of Utrecht in 1763, and his narrative of the opposition of the Dutch Jansenists to the Immaculate Conception are very interesting. In support of some startling assertions which he makes, he adduces no authorities, and beyond Tractarian circles, Mr Neale's word will not convince men of the contrary, to In parting with this what they have hitherto accepted as true. gentleman, we would advise him to study German, of which he is obviously ignorant, and to endeavour to acquire an unpretentious, forcible, and uninvolved style.

Encyclopädie und Methodologie der Theologischen Wissenschaften. Von Dr H. R. HAGENBACH. 5th Edition: Leipzig.

We have much pleasure in directing the attention of our readers to a new edition of Dr Hagenbach's admirable work, and in indicating the scope of it to all engaged in the scientific study of theology.

The author does not profess to furnish a complete knowledge of all that is important in the domain of Theology. Such a work would be too large to be available for students. He rather aims at mapping out the domain, that the student may find in his work both a guide and excitement to study. The problems which he seeks to solve are two:-first, and more generally, to distinguish the province of theological science, and mark out its relation to other sciences; second, to define particularly the mutual relations of the different departments of theology. In the German Universities, a course of lectures upon these two questions is the ordinary introduction to the study of theology, and is well-fitted to impart definiteness of aim to the student. In the first or general division of the work, Dr Hagenbach vindicates the claim of theology to rank as a science; and defines its sphere and objects, insisting especially on the necessity of intimate acquaintance with the past history of the Christian Church, if we would either understand what her present theology is, or seek to determine what it ought to be. The relations of theology to classical education, to art, and to philosophy, are next treated of,-the last at considerable length, and with special reference to the various phases of philosophiOur author insists that every system cal speculation in Germany. must be rejected by the Christian theologian which does not leave intact the facts of the distinct yet mutually connected existence of the "A god withCreator and His creatures, and of spirit and matter. out a world, or wholly dissociated from it, is not the God of the Bible: a spirit which has no flesh to subdue is not the spirit of the living Christian: a freedom which knows nothing of the feeling of dependence is not the liberty of the children of God" (p. 65). In treating of the various tendencies which theological inquiry has manifested towards Rationalism, Mysticism, and Supra-naturalism, and the position to be assumed by the student with respect to these, Hagenbach advocates a system of conciliation and eclecticism, by which all that