sentiments of Scripture. Its philosophy is careful, elaborate, and appear stopossess a scriptural kind of depth and completeness. In morals it inculcates the vanity of all things earthly, and the duty of universal benevolence, and proceeds to hold up as the highest object of human existence a life of continued religious meditation, fed by the most rigorous and unflinching asceticism. Its saints are of this deeply mortified class, and the anecdotes which record their virtues, their ascetic feats, and their supernatural powers, are at once strangely noble, touching, and absurd. Similarly, the rules into which their morality developes itself, display alternately a piercing depth and force, a careful and purpose-like exactitude, and a mere trifling particularity. Their ceremonial is conducted in magnificent temples crowded with images the objects of worship more or less gross, according as the worshippers are more or less refined in their ideas of Deity. Their dignitaries wear the dress of a Roman Catholic Bishop, and their worship is conducted in a foreign language, and in a solemn melody chanted by alternate choirs of priests. The imaginations of the people are fed, and their devotion kept alive, by a multitude of the wildest legends, by processions, pilgrimages, and by daily recurring miracles, which the authorities appear sometimes to disclaim, sometimes to sanction, and everywhere to tolerate.

Yet, with all this similarity in the results and apparatus of religion, it is really doubtful whether the existence of a Deity is part of the Budhist creed. It has appropriated and developed with wonderful vigour the captivating circumstances of religion. It is also studded with those corruptions which result from the determination to make religion all things to all mencoarse and melo-dramatic to the gross-minded populace-subtle and ingenious to the keen philosopher-rigorous and uncompromising to the enthusiast. But its deficiency is nothing less than the idea which is the first and fundamental idea of all religion that of an everlasting and ever-present Deity, knowing all things, caring for all things, and always watchfully interfering for the good of his creatures.

We leave to historians the task of tracing the origin of this phenomenon-its connexion, if any, with Judaism or early Christianity with the Pythagoreans or the Manichees-with the Nestorian Tartars, or Franciscan Missionaries. The most obvious moral which suggests itself to ourselves is the deceptiveness of those magnificent adjuncts which are to be found connected with such puerile superstitions, and clothing so rotten a trunk.

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ART. II.-America and the American Church. By the Rev. HENRY CASWALL, M.A. &c. Second Edition. London: Mozleys. 1851.

'OUT of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.' This divinely-recorded maxim of human ethics may equally be applied to the language of the pen, as to its more exact signification. In literature, generally, we like to find traces of some fitness in the author for the task undertaken, or we set him down as an adventurer, who would occupy our time for his own honour and glory, or for his own profit, more than for our instruction or amusement. In an age when so many are disposed to turn authors, it behoves the public to be on their guard against impostures of this kind; nor, on the whole, do we think modern criticism to be wanting in the acuteness necessary to discriminate the presence or absence of some kind of heart from which the pen speaketh. But here, as elsewhere, the heart is an ambiguous term. It may either signify that kind of reality which involves the whole character, which is founded on habits, and is the result of labour, which represents an individual life; or it may signify the partial and inconsistent reality of mental excitement, or represent but the enthusiasm of the moment. The reading world sternly requires one of these; it likes not to swallow mere wind; but it is not always very particular in exacting the more severe interpretation which we have given to the dictation of the heart. There is, however, a great degree of satisfaction, where the subjects under notice are important, in welcoming a book as the testimony of a real practical man, who writes what he has seen and digested, and brings it to bear on questions of the day. It is a common and natural feeling, that theories are easily written, but are of little service unless facts or valuable evidence are to be obtained in support of them.

Examined on these principles, there is a singular appropriateness in Mr. Caswall's book now placed before us; for we cannot call it a second edition of an old work, as the enlargements are so great and so important that we may examine it altogether as a book of the present day, and accept it as a valuable witness on some principal points of our Church struggles which happen just now to be under discussion. The appropriateness of this book consists, partly in the fact that its author appears at the critical moment of his own Church's history, when she wants largeness and liberality in her practical system and her government, and gives us fourteen years' personal experience and research in another Communion, where these same questions have been

working themselves out, with the additional test of being in another soil; and partly that it is not only a book of history or of observations, but a record of exactly that kind of intercommunion between two Churches which is likely to help on any fair mutual inquiries that may be beneficial to both sides. But what is the specific object of such mutual inquiries, and how do we hope to make them beneficial in the case of England and America at the present time? When two kindred institutions exist under different circumstances, it is always useful to compare results. By that means certain weak points in the one derive strength from the discovery that in the other case no such weakness exists, while it, in turn, imparts strength where the other needs it. For instance, the English Church has the prestige of years, and the dignity of long political power, but she wants freedom and versatility; whereas the American Church has the latter, but wants the former. In these points, therefore, they are a mutual strength to each other. This kind of comparison is beneficial, even where the respective institutions claim no particular unity of being, but are only for objects generally similar; as for example, the hospitals and asylums, or civic corporations of America, might be compared with our own with mutual advantage, in order to discover the best way of carrying out the abstract duties of charity and of self-government. Yet, however nearly the management of one approached to that of the other in consequence of such comparison, there would not be any corporate unity between them; they would be isolated institutions; the only bond of connexion being in man's conscience or his instinct. But if we suppose a common bond of external unity, a common origin, support, and government, essentially and radically shared by both, it of course follows that intercommunications, as tending to develop it, even if its existence should be doubted, will be tenfold desirable. Much of the difference of opinion on religious subjects which now agitates the world, may be traced to this source; viz. whether men look on the Christian religion in one or the other of the two suppositions we have described: whether the Christian religion is an abstract mental principle called Christianity, which, like the principle of benevolence or of self-preservation, may work itself out to the surface of society in any way it likes; or whether it is essentially connected with any absolute laws of visible existence, as the practice of loyalty in any particular country is absolutely dependent on recognising the government of that country in its visible constitution.

To those who, like ourselves, hold the theory of the Church, as a catholic and visible unity, there is no small evidence, on their side, to be derived from the present phenomena of the

American Church; and there is much that tells with great effect against the latitudinarian efforts of English politics. America, as being a new world, has been taken by the old one as a nursery-garden wherein to sow wild seed, for the chance of improved varieties of the original stock. The ground was open and free, the soil fresh, the seed most various and promiscuous, the perils and hardships, if not less, yet of a different sort; and the result must surely be a fair test of such innate qualities as, in the nature of things, are inseparable from their kind.

This is true in the religion of America perhaps more than in any other particular. Nothing can be wilder or more varied than the importations of the Christian religion which originally spread over that continent; and in the United States the noninterference of the civil power has given full room for the sorting together of these promiscuous elements, and for the development of each according to its permanent value. If, therefore, we see that the same visible constitution which Churchmen have associated with the Christian religion at home, stands the test in America, nay, flourishes more and more with the increase of social order and intellectual advancement, we may hence gather that it is an offshoot of the very same tree, that One Vine whose suckers penetrate to all lands, and of whose secret intercommunication across the wild and stormy oceans of nature and of nations we may find an outward type in the mysterious galvanic wire, as now used, to bind shore with shore. It is not too much to say, that America affords proof of the Church system being the congenial and natural helpmate of civilization; the requirements and propensities of each seem to fit in together, in proportion as the universal disorder pertaining to a new country gradually subsides. On two points especially does the history of the American Church illustrate this assertion: the one is Episcopacy, as being the ordained form of Church government, and the other is the necessity of Synodical action to the true energy of the Church. These two subjects Mr. Caswall has, we should imagine, kept always steadily in view throughout his experience, with a true conviction how aptly the testimony which he is enabled to arrange in the form of his present work may be made to bear on his Church's posi

tion at home.

Nor only let us accept the facts of the American Church as barren evidence, or as inducements to self-complacency, but let us approach this consideration with a free and reforming spirit. Let us respect her suggestions of some adaptation in ecclesiastical affairs to modern times, and be willing to engraft some popular elements, which seem consistently to arise from certain changes in society and in the Church herself, that we already

acknowledge, and to which we are irretrievably committed, even if we wished to transfer ourselves back to an earlier stage of the world's growth.

The early history of the American Church presents one long continued struggle, amid perils that carry us back to primitive ages, for certain conditions of existence without which she felt herself unable to fulfil her mission or to show what she really was. For more than a century she was refused a native Episcopate to her constant petition addressed to a British government. Must not those have been dark ages of Church feeling, when such a thing was possible? The notion of a Bishop was so entirely absorbed in the baronial dignity of our own sees, that it seemed intolerable to grant that title to mere overlookers of the Church on the other side of the Atlantic. The Erastian principle was deeply laid in our constitution after 1688, by an intense jealousy of allowing any privileges of religion to proceed from our own Church except with precisely the same civil appendages that pertained to them in England. The Protestant cry aided this result; for it first ignored all foreign bishops in the eyes of an English government, and then made our rulers fancy that the very name of Bishop, as an English word, had no other meaning than as implying a certain rank in our constitution. As American peerages, therefore, were not granted, it seemed inconsistent to grant bishoprics. All political parties seemed to arrive at the same conclusion on this subject. The Whigs were the Church's more natural foes, but the Tories practically were not much better; the former tied down the Church on principle, and the latter did so too, though on the idea that they were supporting her dignity by not making her functions too common. The absolute and essential distinctness of the Episcopal office from any appendages which an individual government may attach to it, was not seen by the Walpoles, and is but dimly seen by the Russells, though the impossibility of any valid legislation against the late papal aggression, such as could be made consistent with our general liberal policy, must have opened the eyes of many to discover the logical flaw involved in that confusion of mind which holds any more limited view of the Episcopate.

But let us trace the early course of Christ's holy religion in the new world of England's colonial empire in North America. A strangely diverse crew seem to have crossed over from Europe, bearing the name of Christians, yet the first stone of all, laid by these wanderers, was propitious:

On the 26th day of April, 1607, two years before the settlement of Canada by the French, seven years before the founding of New York by the Dutch, and thirteen years before the landing of the Puritans in New England, à