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our existing Establishments. Equally strong is our conviction, that were this system wholly abolished, were this earthly theory of Church and State consigned to the tomb of all the Capulets, a new era of the Church would be inaugurated. One plunge into the broad, bracing element of popular election would free the Church of those clerical larvæ, ritualistic and rationalistic, who now cling to her simply in virtue of her emoluments, in spite of all the exertions and protests of the Christian people. Better surely-whatever changes might come over the constitution and form of the Anglican Church-infinitely better that her ecclesiastical wealth should be entrusted to the disposal of a free church, than that it should be swept away by an act of rash and aimless confiscation. Our religious Establishments, such as they now are, may be overthrown, and it is now almost universally admitted that the State may lawfully resume the revenues which the State has conferred; but it appears little better than mere folly to propose that the Church's rightful patrimony, bequeathed by the piety of her ancestors for the propagation of Christ's glorious gospel, should be scattered. broadcast over the field of secular expenditure, and that, like Alnaschar in the wellknown story, we should spurn away the substantial good that lies at our feet, under the idea of acting out a fanciful theory, which glitters in the distance, but which we may never be able to realise.

In connection with our subject we may add a word or two on the union of the churches themselves. To talk of a free and independent church being united with a crown-patronised and state-privileged church, is simply preposterous. In this case, the State has thrown up a wall of separation, which, like a certain great gulf" elsewhere mentioned, is on either side impassable. Were the link, however, which unifies Church and State to be dissolved, the union of evangelical churches would, in Scotland, speedily, and, throughout the rest of the empire, eventually be accomplished. We do not here speak of Roman Catholics, who, from the very nature of their pretensions, are insoluble either with Church or State. The spiritual independence asserted by Popery and High Church Prelacy is founded on a claim of superiority to the State, and is utterly alien from that which justly belongs to the true kingdom of Christ. But the recent union between the Old and New Schools of Presbyterians in America shews how easily the churches of the Reformation may be brought to see eye to eye, and sing together with the voice, even after the sounds of a bitter warfare had scarcely died away, just because there the disintegrating element of State union does not exist. How desirable is such a union among ourselves! As it is, no

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church can prosper by our divisions, save that of Rome, the policy of which is to divide and conquer, and which can only succeed, like other despotic powers, by persuading men that there can be no union or peace unless the government be centralised in the person of one man. On the other hand, by the union of the friends of truth, on the broad principles of the gospel of peace, under the Lord Christ, the sole King and Head of his church, what an amount of good would be secured both for Church and State. The hands of a liberal and generous government would be freed from those perplexing questions which now paralyse its efforts to co-operate with the church in promoting the moral and social improvement of the community; and the church might then bring all her energies, now expended on religious contention, to bear with undivided force on the great ends of her spiritual mission.

For ourselves, we frankly confess that, so far as Scotland is concerned, we cannot contemplate with satisfaction any union short of what our American brethren call Pan-Presbyterian. The Disruption of 1843 rent the Old Kirk in twain from the top to the bottom, leaving an unsightly scar, which time has hardened but not healed. If Government cannot recognise the spiritual independence of the Church while in union with the State, then in Heaven's name, say we, let that unhallowed marriage be dissolved. The reversal of a principle which produced disruption may surely be expected to issue in re-union. Only let the tackling by which the church is bound to the earth be loosed, and the vessel will rush into the arms of her native element, and speedily settle down and adjust herself to her new position. She will become in a much truer sense than she is now, a national institution. In spite of all that has happened, and in spite of all anti-national speculations, we feel assured that, dismissing the recent past as a painful dream, and reverting to the days of our common ancestors, who sleep in the quiet churchyards of our rural parishes, or in the moors and mosses where they fell as martyrs, the heart of every leal Scotchman, whether at home or far away, would leap with joy at the prospect of a free, united, reconstituted National Kirk.

ART. VIII.-Female Catholic Life in France.

IN Ν France, women have always played a more distinguished part than in this country. Some of our readers may have seen (none who have seen can forget) a picture in the Hotel de

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Ville gallery at Rouen, the Martyrdom of Joan of Arc, where besides the centre figure on the burning pile, the chief interest is thrown by the painter on two contrasted females,-the one a Burgundian lady in full medieval finery of pyramidal hat and peaked boots; the other a sympathising French peasant girl, as you may, in north-west France, see them still in the Romish churches, bare-handed and bare-headed. The applauding Burgundian lady, and the mourning Norman girl, are representative women of that age, when, after Joan's death, it was Agnes Sorel, far more than Charles VII., that concentrated in one person the patriotism that drove the English out.

Victor Cousin, in one of the later literary efforts of his long and laborious life, gave to the world a series of monographs on Jacqueline Pascal and other female celebrities of the Port Royal period. The letters of Madame de Sevigné retain their European celebrity of two centuries. In the frightful moral laxity of the "Parc aux Cerfs" age, the Memoir of Madame d'Haussez and the Letters of Madame du Deffant throw a clear if lurid light on the state of manners and morals that prepared for, and to some extent accounted for, the atrocities of the first French Revolution.

In the age of temporary reaction which manifested itself under the Restoration monarchy, the Memoirs of the Countess de Genlis, wearisome in lengthiness as they are, give a vivid representation of the influence of the Chateaubriand revival of Romanism in connection with monarchy and semi-feudal aristocratic minds. Madame de Genlis was a woman of great literary activity, and unbounded literary vanity. She seems to have considered herself a sort of providentially raised-up female counterpoise to the Revolution and Napoleon I., though she does not, like others, vulgarly deny the merits of " the Child and Champion of the Revolution," as Canning called him. The religion, of which the Countess was, in her time a chief literary exponent, was superficial enough, but it was Gallican and Anti-Curialist in tone. The Revolution of July, in its consequences, gave a thoroughly Ultramontane tone to the generality of the French Romanist clergy. Ravignan and Lacordaire, Gerbet and Dupanloup might differ in many points, but with the Gallicanism of the old liberties, and the famous Four Articles of 1682, they utterly broke.

The Memoirs of Madame de Genlis, published in 1825, give a very fair sample of the Romanism current during the Restoration period of French history. The Countess was a most prolific writer, and a woman of enormous literary vanity. The notices of her quarrels with this literary man and that literary woman are amusing or painful, according to the feeling of the reader. With her, an apt pupil in the half-political, half-sentimental

school of Chateaubriand, the Romish altar-a Gallican one, not an Ultramontane one-is the needful support of the throne. Protestantism, even though then represented by such writers as Madame de Stael, and Guizot in his earlier works, is to her a species of Sans-Culottism. It is the religion of a fashionable blue stocking, to whom masses and sermons are an alternative to operas and balls. The earlier letters of Lamennais, in the collection edited by E. D. Forgues, also throw much light on the aristocratic and conservative character of the prevailing Romanism of his time. The life of Royer Collard, by De Barante, shews the calm and unproselytising temper of the "liberal" Romanists of the era of Louis XVIII. With the last Bourbon of the elder branch, Charles X., Romanism assumed a different type. Charles was a devotee of the fashion of Louis XIV. after Blenheim, and under the sway of his unavowed wife, Madame de Maintenon. Promotion came in the wake of affected devoutness according to Jesuit principles. Unadvised prosecutions, such as that of the poet Beranger for some rather sarcastic verses of his, tended to alienate the people from the church; and when the crash of July 1830 took place, the Romish clergy largely shared in the hatred incurred by the expelled Bourbons.

Soon after the accession of Louis Philippe, there arose the party of the "Avenir," headed by Lamennais, Montalembert, and Lacordaire, whose object it was to assert the independence of the Church upon the State. Pope Gregory XVI. having condemned the newspaper in question, and required its cessation, Lamennais broke altogether with Rome. His two colleagues became, however, only more devoted to Ultramontane views; and these are now in the ascendant among the French clergy and devout laity.

The three works before us* comprise the lives of three very remarkable Roman Catholic women. There is nothing so memorable, perhaps, as in the life of Catherine of Sienna, the only female that Papal "infallibility" has licensed to preach, the counsellor of several occupants of the pontifical chair; and of Teresa of Jesus, the reformer in discipline of Spanish Catholicism, and one who, in rare union, combined gifts of eloquence in speaking and writing with gifts of management and rule. But Madame Swetchine was far more than the Hannah More or the Mary Marsh of the Romish Church in France. Born in the Greek communion, she early in life became dissatisfied with the laxity of life and ignorance, alike of theology and literature, which

* "Vie de Mad. Swetchine." Par De Falloux. Correspondence. Journel de Conversion.

"Recit d'une Sœur." Par Mad. A. Craven.

Eugenie de Guerin." Par G. S. Trebutien. 1868.

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she found prevailing in the church of Russia. She found her way, with comparatively little aid from human converse, as she has in the journal of her "Conversion" most intelligently and graphically stated. Residing, except for one brief return to St Petersburg, for the last thirty years of her life in Paris, she there founded a salon, not literary like that of the Duchess de Duras, or fashionable like that of Madame Recamier, but theological and religious, to which the flower of the Parisian aristocracy of either sex were willingly accustomed to repair.

She was a woman of untiring benevolence, as the portrait prefixed to the first volume of the life shews. Like all others of such a type of character, she had many claims, and sometimes, amid the multiplicity of Romish claims on her time, had scarcely "leisure as much as to eat." She seems to have, like many other Romanists, known Protestantism only in its rationalist type, as seen in France and Germany. Had such women as the Countess de Gasparin or Madame Pressensé come across her path, her estimate of the reformed religion, in its evangelical form, would have been different. Her acquaintance with Roman Catholic theology and literature, especially French, was very wide, and she could, in writing or in converse, make good use of her acquirements. A bathing-woman at Vichy said of her, after her decease, "She was a saint indeed: she cared more for a poor woman than for a princess." IIer correspondence with Father Lacordaire, which is published separately, contains her estimate of the events in Church and State for a quarter of a century, and ends in 1857, shortly before her death. The second volume of the Memoir contains her fragmentary reviews, collected by the Count de Falloux, her biographer, and is full of Pascal or Vauvenargues-like seeds of thought. She seems to have been in many ways the most remarkable Catholic Frenchwoman-for she was French assuredly by the adoption and residence of so many years-of her time.

The "Recit d'une Soeur" is a book of a totally different type. It contains, besides the life of the Countess Albert de la Ferronays, whose thoughtful and decided, though noways beautiful portrait, is prefixed to the earlier of the two volumes, an account of the history of various near relatives and connections. The Countess was eminently a lady of the gay world before what she deemed her conversion took place. After that, she was indeed "a stranger here." She set an example in the way of limitedness of expense in dress, which few even of the most thoroughly Christian women in this country do. Towards the end of her life, Mrs Craven relates that she had only two black gowns, and hardly linen to correspond. The twelve years which elapsed between the Count's death and her own, she spent as a "widow indeed." "widow indeed." On one occasion she