would hang the cat on Monday for killing a mouse on Sunday' would never be content until they had forced everybody to do the same; and against this intolerance Laud entered a practical protest.

It was the same with regard to Prynne's Histrio-Mastix. Prynne and those who agreed with him might set their faces against plays and play-actors, but they must not insult those who did not; they must not drive plays and play-actors off the face of creation. And the Histrio-Mastix took a far wider range than this—interludes, music, dancing; hunting, public festivals, Christmas-keeping, bonfires, May-poles: all these levities' were the object of Prynne's vituperation. 'Merrie England' was to be merry no longer if Prynne had his way; but Laud determined that he should not, and took sharp (too sharp) measures to put a stop to such narrowness.

So, again, with regard to Calvinism, which was the narrowest and most intolerant of all religious systems. The Calvinist might still hold his gloomy creed, but Laud would not have it foisted upon all as the true creed of the Church. He was not, indeed, above the spirit of his age, which led men of all parties to conceive it their duty to force everybody to think as they did; but the religion he desired to enforce was certainly a less narrow system than that of the Romanists, on the one hand, or of any of the sectaries on the other.'

The keen eye of Professor E. A. Freeman, who can hardly be called a Laudian,' detected this phase in his character. The whole letter, which appears in the Dean of Winchester's Life and Letters of E. A. Freeman (published since the passage in the text was written), is worth quoting :

To the Rev. Dr. Allon.

'Somerleaze, Jan. 22, 1880. 'Whether one admires or condemns him [Laud], Macaulay's mere contempt is certainly out of place. Remember, in his main ritual point he succeeded. For 200 years every English church has been arranged as he would have it, no party objecting, and that though the rubric still allows the other arrangement. Also, as you say, there was a liberal side to him. I suspect that he was much less strait-laced about pure dogma than either his supporters or his enemies. His notion of Church and State suits no side now; it seems to have been the Byzantine notion of making the Sovereign the chief power within the Church, not without it. But there must have been some special twist in him. People hated the man himself, beyond anything that he said or did. He seems to have had an unpleasant way of doing everything, which offended people more than the things which were done. For instance, how he bothered everybody to give to St. Paul's! Set on the other hand a patronage of learning the most ready and enlightened going at the time. Depend upon it, he is a complex study, with many sides to him—not to be daubed off in a hurry by either friend or foe. You know Mozley's

2. Laud was essentially an apostle of culture and learning and the fine arts generally. Hence his deep and life-long interest in Oxford, his noble benefactions to that university, his care for the minutest details of university and college life; hence his encouragement of the fine arts, of painting, of architecture, especially as applied to ecclesiastical buildings; hence his interest in men of marked intellectual eminence like Pococke, Hales, Chillingworth, Ussher; hence his anxiety to enlist in the service of the Church men of such gifts as George Herbert; hence his delight in the cultured retreat which he found established at Little Gidding. He had not the leisure to produce any magnum opus himself in the field of literature; but he was one of the staunchest patrons of learning in others that England ever saw.

3. Considering Laud's comparatively humble origin and rapid rise, it is wonderful how little he was affected by social considerations. His intimacy with Charles and Buckingham may seem to be a contradiction, but is really a proof, of this. It was he who affected them, far more than they who affected him; and there was certainly no sycophancy, no cringing, in his relationship with either of them. Again, we have become so accustomed to regard the Royalist as the 'gentlemanly side' in the Civil War that we are apt to forget that it was not altogether so at the outset, and still less so in the days which immediately preceded the war, the days of Laud's power. It was the gentry who were Laud's bitterest enemies; against the vices of the gentry that he directed his fiercest attacks, in the High Commission Court and elsewhere. The Parliaments with which he was constantly. brought into collision were composed mainly of the upper and upper middle classes. It was one of their grievances against Laud that he was a parvenu; but, so far from acting like many parvenus, and courting those who were above him by birth, he rather erred on the other side. Without any undue subserviency, he might with advantage have been less rough, less peremptory, more conciliatory.

4. Beneath this rough exterior, however. there beat a very warm heart. Hard, dry, unsympathetic as Laud appeared to many, there was a tender side to his character. His poor neighbours at Lambeth loved him, and were generously helped by him. He was very considerate of the wants of the poorer clergy; the deaths of favourite servants, to whom he was a kind and good master, affected him deeply, as his Essay on him . . . strongly, of course, on Laud's side, but bringing out many points very forcibly.' (Vol. ii. p. 194.)

Diary plainly shows; and so, at the other end of the social scale, did the death of King James and of Buckingham. There are no more pathetic stories in history than the stories of Laud's tender and loving care for the son of Nicholas Ferrar, and of the last parting with Strafford; there are no more heart-felt compositions in the English language than Laud's many prayers, which are the expressions, not only of a religious, but of a very soft heart.

To sum up: Laud was very far indeed from being a perfect character; but he did a great work, and his very imperfections helped him to do that work. He was very warm-tempered, and thus rushed in where milder and more delicate-minded men would have shrunk from interfering. We can well understand his being objected to as prying and meddlesome, but the exigences of the day required some one who could be prying and meddlesome. He produced nothing less than a revolution in the Church of England, and revolutions are proverbially not made with rose-water. Loyal English Churchmen, who value the English Church as it is, and know how narrowly it escaped degenerating into a Puritan sect, should be slow indeed to blame the defects of the man who, above all others, prevented the catastrophe.

ART. II. THE MOSAIC LAW AND THE

-

HIGHER CRITICISM.

Lex Mosaica; or, the Law of Moses and the Higher Criticism. With an Introduction by the late Right Rev. Lord ARTHUR HERVEY, D.D., Bishop of Bath and Wells. Edited by RICHARD VALPY FRENCH, D.C.L., LL.D., F.S.A. (London, 1894.)

THE book at the head of this article is well calculated to allay the anxiety which has been widely felt ever since men, beloved and trusted as leaders of an influential school of thought in our Church, seemed inclined to surrender principles hitherto regarded as an integral part of the deposit of the faith. We have more than once expressed our opinion that such suggestions of surrender were premature, and would ultimately be found to be unnecessary. The position undoubtedly seemed serious when most of our leading Hebraists in both universities had either committed themselves to the theories of Jewish history maintained by

Wellhausen and Kuenen, or had at least been disposed to treat them as reasonable and probable. It was felt, and not unnaturally felt, that for men who were not themselves experts to reject unconditionally, on a priori grounds, the conclusions of trained scientific investigators would have been to assume a very grave responsibility. There existed, moreover, a reason why a non possumus attitude on the part of theologians in general towards the new theories might be regarded as especially undesirable at the present moment. For many centuries the love and reverence felt in this country for the Bible had been verging on Bibliolatry. Instead of promulgating a Faith, the Christian Church had been frequently represented as circulating a Book as the groundwork of her teaching, and by degrees it had come to be believed that every single portion of that Book stood upon precisely the same footing, and must equally be received and believed by every Christian who hoped for salvation. Thus the Book, instead of being regarded as an official exposition, by inspired men, of the principles of Divine Revelation for the special needs of those who were, or might hereafter become, members of the Christian Church, had gradually usurped the place of the deposit of faith committed to the Christian society; and a belief in the impossibility that any error, even on the most minute point, could be found in its pages had been substituted for acceptance of the Catholic Faith. Those who were dissatisfied with the extent to which the Book had occupied the place of the Spirit of Christ dwelling in the Christian society, and leading it by degrees into all the truth, were naturally not indisposed to listen to those who insisted strongly that there was a very considerable human element in the Bible. And in days like these, when everything is questioned, it was felt, reasonably enough, that we had no right to exempt the historical documents of the Jews from the searching inquiry to which all other literature has been subjected.

There were, therefore, sound reasons for an attitude of reserve, and even to a certain extent of friendly reserve, towards the new criticism. The only mistake was that some eminent Churchmen were too ready to believe all that modern critics told them. They jumped to the conclusionundoubtedly, to some extent, in consequence of the attitude of infallibility adopted by certain scholars-that criticism had said its last word, and that the critics had succeeded in establishing a series of propositions extremely difficult to prove concerning the mode of composition of the books of

the Old Testament and the general accuracy of the history they contained. Had they been more fully acquainted with the history of German criticism, they would not have been so hasty. Readers of the recent Life of Dr. Pusey will see that that eminent Hebrew scholar had all the theories before him, in their main features, which we have before us, and that he deliberately and decidedly rejected them. The separation of the Pentateuch into Priestly Code, Elohist, and Jehovist was as perfectly well known to him as it is to us. But later German scholars have found it necessary to introduce a good many modifications of this theory, in order to meet objections, and our modern scholars of the traditional school have scarcely yet had sufficient time to point out the weak points in the armour of their antagonists. It is, moreover, unfortunate that as knowledge increases there is a tendency among scholars to become almost exclusively specialists. This is especially unfortunate in Biblical criticism; for the criticism of the Bible cannot properly be carried on by specialists. To criticize the Old Testament aright a man must be at once a thinker, a theologian, a historian, a trained judge of the force of evidence, a Hebraist, an Orientalist, and a man of deep and earnest religious sympathies. Such a man was Dr. Pusey. Of such men we have, alas! but few among us now. Consequently, a narrow, one-sided, exclusively academic manner of regarding these great questions has superseded that which never forgot the relative proportions of the details with which it was called upon to deal, nor the place of the Jewish history in the history of the world.2

The names were different, but even as far back as the end of the last century the main features of modern German criticism had already displayed themselves.

If any should think that we are too severe on the methods of criticism now in favour among us, essentially German as they are in their character, the following expression of opinion, from one whose lightest word is deservedly held in honour among us, may serve to dissipate the impression : Mr. Matthew Arnold, alluding to an eccentric work of rationalizing tendencies, written by an English scholar, and using Renan as his mouthpiece, expresses the opinion that "an extravagance of this sort could never have come from Germany, where there is a great force of critical opinion controlling a learned man's vagaries and keeping him straight." I confess that my experiences of the critical literature of Germany have not been so fortunate. It would be difficult, I think, to find among English scholars any parallel to the mass of absurdities which several intelligent and very learned German critics have combined to heap upon two simple names in the Philippian Epistle, Euodia and Syntyche. Baur, he goes on to say, regards Clement in that passage as a semi-mythical person, embodying in himself the reconciliation of the opposing Pauline and Petrine tendencies in the Church. Schwegler