25. Faith is a mere matter of intellect, and has no connexion with the state of the heart.

This list might be enlarged. It will be seen that the items are not altogether independent of each other, nor will bear being tested by the laws of logical division. Such as they are, they spring from a single source, and are scattered over all parts of the volume, of which we shall say no more than that we do not remember ever having seen a book with so small an amount of truth mixed up with its errors. A false philosophy has generally some resemblance to truth, but that cannot be said of the philosophy of the 'Essays on Church Policy.'

Before closing this article, we may observe that we anticipate great advantages to accrue to the cause of truth and religion from the publication of this volume. The whole tone of it is so preposterously arrogant, silly, and offensive, that it can scarcely fail to suggest to any religious mind the thought, how religion and morality are likely to fare in the hands of such teachers. The contrast between the two principles now at work in the Church of England-the principle of deference to authority and that of choosing for oneself-cannot fail to present itself to every reader. Many will be led to think of the respective issues of these two principles, and will make their choice accordingly. The principle of submission to authority is that under which in one form or other, all people are brought up, both those without as well as those within the pale of the Church, and we are quite content to say that wherever a person may find himself, his allegiance is due, in the first instance, to the school in which he has been educated. It is unfortunately true that many, who under a true system might have developed into a higher life than that which they are leading under the false theories in which they have been brought up, will not find their own way easily out of darkness into light. The more earnest-minded, however, will be found to do this. For the most part those who have been brought up in a wrong or defective faith will remain in it, but the better sort will probably find something wanting to their higher aspirations. Such persons may have to face the question: What is the real claim on their allegiance of the authority to which they have hitherto submitted? And the more earnest and religious the mind, the more painful will be the process of investigation. Such persons have to use their reason as best they may; aided by such other appliances of feeling, affection, circumstance, as they may find themselves actuated by in finding a religion for themselves. In the process it is probable that very many will find their way to Rome, as presenting an authoritative front which is less apparent in the Church of England, divided as she is into parties. It is no doubt easier for those people, whose faith in the system.

of their education has been shaken, to find their way to Romanism than to Anglicanism. Yet no other body makes any claim as of Divine right to our allegiance, and the English Church has at least this advantage still, that it is the Church of the nation; the Church a change into whose communion would seem less violent than if a sudden plunge were made into all the modern developments of the Roman system. The prejudice of any candid inquirer among Dissenting bodies would certainly be in favour of the English rather than the Roman Communion, though to many an intellectual Dissenter the appearance of unity pervading the Roman Church, and its fearless dogmatism, will be more attractive than the open questions and manifest divisions in the Church of England. Such persons, too, are in general brought more in contact with Anglicans than Romanists, and the national feeling will be likely to have more weight than the cosmopolitan idea.

The principle of deference to the Bible alone has held together much longer than could reasonably have been expected; it has been shivered to atoms by Dr. Colenso and his friends; and it is certain that no new Bible such as that which seems contemplated by the new school, will ever have much weight, except with its compilers. People must believe something, and some of them will be led to enquire why they believe it, and on whose authority. And assuredly the answer that most will give themselves will not be because they find the doctrines reasonable. The time for a reasonable religion died out with Locke and Tillotson; and though many people are so unfortunately placed, owing to the various schemes that exist, that they have to depend more or less on reason for their choice, they will never be content that the doctrines of their religion should accommodate themselves exclusively to their reasoning faculty. Reason is warned to keep her proper place by the most elementary doctrine of natural religion, namely, the co-existence of evil with the perfections of Almighty God; and assuredly the warning is repeated at every onward step which faith takes. It is of no use for Protestant divines to make the distinction of what is above reason and what is contrary to reason for the sake of defending the doctrine of the Trinity and impugning that of transubstantiation. If the matter is beyond her sphere, reason must be unable to pronounce upon the case. Within her sphere she can decide what involves a contradiction in terms; beyond it she cannot be appealed to in the last resort to determine whether what in words may seem to be contradictory must necessarily involve a contradiction in idea. A religion of mysteries cannot be a religion of mere reason, though her province as a subordinate agent may extend into the most recondite mysteries of the faith.

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ART. VII.—1. Minutes of the Conference, 1868. Wesleyan Conference Office.

2. The Methodist Recorder. August.

THE position of the Church of England towards the various dissenting bodies in this country, is naturally at the present epoch a subject of very special interest. We rejoice at this interest, cropping up as it does in so many sections of our Church, for many reasons; for it argues a real consciousness of the highly unsatisfactory condition under which we have long been content to live, as though our 'unhappy divisions' were a mere empty expression; and from this a growing perception of the great practical hindrance to all national improvement or social reforms which our religious disunion produces: it argues also, in some quarters, a truly Christian disposition or instinct to be gathering together from all parties those who hold the faith of Christ, and who in evil days will be ready to fight His battle against some great impending danger, under whatever form that danger may be conceived or pictured. But in looking at this question, it is needful to remember that the practical duties incumbent upon us as Churchmen, and the looming dangers ahead of us, may not be so special or peculiar to our own times as to warrant or require the great and sudden departure from the Church general laws of action, which some eager enthusiasts or party leaders seem to imagine is necessary. There are very few minds, however warmly we may have been devoted to them, however long we may have watched their moral energy and perseverance in the work allotted to them by Providence, however strong and powerful they may have been in carrying out that work, which yet do not at some time or other show a certain narrowness of compass, a certain failure of judgment, when out of their special vocation, which is rather disappointing to those who have anticipated, in the guidance of such minds, a grasp and a comprehensiveness equal to any emergencies. The special vocation of Dr. Pusey-for we would come to our point has ever been rather connected with the more home and domestic line of personal religion in faith or practice, than with the open field of politics, as regards the externals or secularities of the Church. That line, in its very nature,-derived, as it has been, from the study of the early Fathers as to doctrine, and from the ascetic school of Church writers as to life and morals,-has been a narrow one, almost in a sense sectarian; for it has aimed,

and rightly so, at influencing a select body of men bound together by peculiarly strict ideas-men and women full, indeed, of love and charity towards all men, but yet by profession taking a very stern view of the world, with its relapses both moral and dogmatic, and essentially occupying the position of an isolated few. With regard to the inner Christian life, this line is more or less necessary to all; and they who take the lead in the direction of personal holiness are peculiarly in such a position as we picture; but there are other, more public and wider vocations, though not more holy, in the range of Church politics, which require their due meed of attention. The divine who, as a guide of life, and in his personal relationships with many generations, it may almost now be said, both of penitents and of saints, has triumphed over all ill-will, and become a name ever to be revered, is yet not only unstrengthened on secular topics by his true and natural vocation, but the disposition of mind encouraged by it directly militates against the power of dealing with large and general questions of the political world, even when the Church, its doctrines and its morals, are the subject of discussion. Many years ago we remember a country clergyman, who had lived much in the atmosphere of Methodism, remarking that Dr. Pusey was a High Church Methodist; and from the beginning there has been much sympathy, under the guise even of contested points, between the views of personal religion adopted by these two opposite schools-sympathy which has been the secret of the influence of both; especially on the point of a certain habit of exclusiveness, which is so apt to be carried to self-righteousness, and is at the foundation of all new teaching that involves peculiarly strict views on religious life, and a high profession of asceticism.

Wesleyan Methodists are essentially a small body of professors, viewing the world as reprobate, and considering it their vocation to call souls out of perdition into themselves. This, it This, it may be said, is exactly the description of Christ's Church as the Divine Word brings it before us; but herein consists the spirit of sectarianism, the assumption for a small body of the complete functions and position of the universal Church of Christ in its largest sense. We cordially join in all the praise so universally bestowed on the mission of John Wesley, and there is no occasion here to recapitulate the abuses of the Church which seemed to drive him to very unwilling separation. Nor would we exaggerate the facts of that separation, or underrate the partial adherence to the Church which Methodists up to recent times still adopted. There is even now, through the complete ignoring of the Church of England which has grown up of late over the whole Methodist body, a consciousness of something from which they separate (a Church with whose easier life and more worldly manners their own

forms a humble but severe contrast), which implies in itself the existence of that Church as an established order of things. Methodism in many ways has but repeated the work of our mediæval friars, whose contempt of the secular clergy was equal to any abuse heaped upon the parsons by modern Methodists. Differing organizations, carried even to very lively warfare, have yet in all ages been comprehended within what cannot but be called, in a liberal sense, the pale of the Church. The organization of the Wesleyans is, indeed, now so complete, so selfcontained, that its members seem carried away by it into more open schism than their feelings would always justify. This is probably what Mr. Jackson refers to when he says that union between the Church and Wesleyans is illegal.' The Wesleyans dare not act otherwise than as their system marks out for fear of any encroachment on its perfections, for there cannot but be many slumbering alarms that the system once touched, once exposed to any rough handling, would collapse. The itinerant character of its ministry is felt to be a great burden, entailing personal hardship, for which there is not the same cause now as in the origin of Methodism.

This and other causes, derived from the simpler ages of its history, keeps down the intellectual progress of Methodism as compared with other sects, specially the Independents; and among the younger Methodists, not unsupported by the older generation of all who remember religious ecstasies in former days bursting out (as one of them touchingly recalls in a letter to the Methodist Recorder) in the words of the Te Deum, there are many desires for a more fixed ritual, for more ornate arrangements of service than are at present enjoyed. The obstructives seem to be those who themselves have perfected the present system, and who fear that it should be touched. This, however, is not the true spirit of Methodism; it is of the essence of that very weakness against which Methodism at first so vigorously protested, for it arose in the beginning as a rough informal supplement to make up for the deficiencies of a too rigid, too cold, too sleepy an Establishment. Yet now, to judge from the popular praises everywhere sung during the time of the late Conference, it is approaching the stage of existence at which its forms and rules and ordinances are its merit, rather than a certain erratic but spirit-stirring force.

The phraseology of Methodism, specially on the subject of conversion, is plainly becoming antiquated and in opposition to both the language and ideas of religious minds in the present day, no doubt, among themselves as among other sects. The long string of obituaries in the records of the last Conference have thus a great sameness from the necessity of relating the