fondness did not do them much harm. It is of no use for Mr. Mayor to say, as he does, "Those who like may believe this." "Liking" has nothing to do with the matter. The question is, is it true? There are the portraits of the men, there are the books, there are the manuscripts. It is not my fault if they tell me what they do. The business of a writer is simply to report what he finds. One business of a critic is to expose the writer when he is wrong, and neither to reject nor to receive evidence simply according to his likes or his dislikes. (5.) I am next taunted-following the accusations in the order in which they are made with not mentioning the names of Clarkson, Wilberforce, etc., in connection with the Anti-Slavery agitation circ. A.D. 1837. What was Mr. Mayor thinking about when he wrote the sentence in which this taunt is conveyed? He has confounded the Anti-Slave Trade with the Anti-Slavery agitation. Clarkson was dead long before this, and Wilberforce took little part-how could he?-in the latter struggle. If Mr. Mayor will glance at the Bishop of Winchester's "Life of William Wilberforce," he will see the extent of his blunder. If, in addition, he had referred to my "History" under the year 1788 (p. 484), he would have found Clarkson's name in the proper place.

(6.) Hallam is quoted against me in reference to my statement that during the whole of the period from Henry VIII. to James II. not one bishop or clergyman had lifted up his voice against the inhumanity of the persecution which was then practised. Hallam says that "the first famous plea in this country for tolerance in religion was the 'Liberty of Prophesying,' by Jeremy Taylor.” This is one of the instances in which Hallam is wrong. Mr. Mayor, before quoting him, should have read Jeremy Taylor's works. I find this to be Jeremy Taylor's opinion. Writing of Toleration, he says:

"As to the thing itself, the truth is it is better in contemplation than practice for reckon all that is got by it, when you come to handle it, and it can never satisfy for the infinite disorder happening in the Government, the scandal to religion, the secret dangers to public societies, the growth of heresy, the nursing up of parties to a grandeur so considerable as to be able in their own time to change the laws and the Government. So that if the question be, whether these opinions are to be persecuted, it is certainly true they ought not. But if it be considered how by opinions men rifle the affairs of kingdoms, it is also certain they ought not to be made public and permitted."

It can easily be understood, after this, why I did not quote Jeremy Taylor as being in favour of real toleration. His "Liberty of Prophesying" meant, practically, no liberty at all, excepting to such as the State might choose to license. I should not wish to cast the smallest reflection upon the memory of such a man as Jeremy

Taylor. As an aid to religious meditation, and for the wonderful richness of his devotional thought, no writer has ever, in my judgment, surpassed him; but I decline to accept him as a remarkably liberal or advanced thinker in the matter of toleration or "prophesying."

(7.) I have said that the Church established at the Reformation was a new Church, and am told that, when I say so, I am "following the Romanists." If Mr. Mayor had looked at a note at the bottom of the page in which this remark is made, he would have seen that I was following a living bishop of the Established Church. "The existence," says Bishop Short of St. Asaph, "of the Church of England as a distinct body, and her final separation from Rome, may be dated from the period of the divorce." If the Established Church was not a new Church, did the Romanists who refused to join it belong to a new or to an old Church?

(8.) My critic says, "I defy any one to get a clear idea of the numerical progress of Dissent from this book." In page 22 (1570) the first Noncomformist Church is mentioned; in page 91 (1688) the contemporary growth of Dissent is given; in page 280 (1715) the actual number of the Churches is stated in counties and parties; in page 623 (1851) there is another precise statistical account.

(9.) "One is rather surprised," says Mr. Mayor, "that the author 'should condescend to complaints' at the exclusion of Dissenters 'from aristocratic circles."" There is no shadow of such a complaint throughout the work.

(10.) "It is not a history of the Free Churches." I can only reply that it gives the origin, organization, doctrine, and progress of all the principal denominations.

(11.) "It is an appeal to Nonconformists to forget main differences and combine for a last attack upon their common enemy, the Established Church." There is no such appeal; but if, happily, the work should serve the purpose, as I imagine all history does, of convincing men of the error and inutility of all forms of State Churchism, it will, in my judgment, aid in accomplishing a higher service to the Church and the nation than I had dreamed it could perform.

(12.) The readers of the Contemporary are, in other pages of this criticism, treated to several selected extracts from the "History." I humbly, but very firmly protest, as a literary man, against the temper which has apparently guided the writer in the selection of those extracts. In the space which this "Vindication" must occupy, it would be impossible for me to quote, from my own work, other extracts to show that Mr. Mayor has not honestly represented either the spirit or the tone of the work. What he has quoted I adhere to,

but he should have quoted the other side. In writing the very sentences which he parades, I exercised, as I considered, much selfrestraint. All that is said was, I should have thought, familiar to every historical student. Whitgift, and men like him, gloried in what they did. The disposition of the Church is still to be found in our ecclesiastical and canon law. The religious state of the people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be traced by any one who cares to trace it. I have not said, upon this subject, the half of what Churchmen themselves have recently said.

I wish that I had space to say a few words more—to say all that it is in my heart to say upon the present relations of Church and Dissent. I think that history teaches us that the past relations have been wrong. We are gradually attaining to a higher order of Christian and Church life. If I may be allowed to say so here, some Essays that have appeared in this Review from the pen of Dean Alford, have given me more hope of the ultimate realization of an ideal National Church and Christian nation, than anything else that I have ever read. This ideal, however, can only begin to be realized, as Dean Alford has said, "with the fact of disestablishment." We shall, however, not attain to it either by ignoring, or justifying, the past. It is best that the whole truth should be proclaimed. When the worst is known we can-on both sides, forgive

-forgive, but not forget. Forgetting is an utter mistake, and altogether inconsistent with forgiveness. We cannot wipe out the past, and any attempt, such as Mr. Mayor's, to do so, is not only an utter impossibility, but a mistake. The Almighty Father never forgets, and who would wish Him to do so? What we can do, remembering the Past, is to make a new Present and a new Future. HERBERT S. SKEATS.

1

I. THEOLOGICAL.

A Charge delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of St. David's, at his Tenth Visita-
tion, October and November, 1869, by CONNOP THIRLWALL, D.D., Bishop
of St. David's. With an Appendix, containing an Answer to the Question,
Published at the request of the Clergy.
What is Transubstantiation?
London: Rivingtons. 1869.

HE utterances of the Bishop of St. David's are, in these times of new words
and things, matters of deep interest. With a mind which grasps the real
-a subtle power of
sources and practical issues of present currents of thought,-
words which, with the calmest and sometimes hardly perceptible irony, pierces
through and through idle fallacies and veiled disloyalties, and at the same
respect from
time with a spirit far above all the littlenesses and intrigues of party, Bishop
Thirlwall commands, it is not too much to say, more hearing and
thinking men than any other member of the English bench.

And of all his remarkable charges, this last one is, it seems to us, the most remarkable. Not even when he published respecting the mistaken and futile Pan-Anglican conference those quiet words of warning which time has more than justified, were his pages more pregnant with far-seeing wisdom than are those now before us.

The opening is one befitting the seriousness of the present state of things in the Church:

"If it had been customary to prefix a text of Scripture to a Visitation Charge, that which would most readily have occurred to me, as appropriate to the circumstances in which we now meet, would have been the words of the Psalmist: If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous (the righteous man) do?' Not, thank God, that the period in which we are living is one of revolutionary convulsion, in which the institutions on which social order reposes have been violently upturned. But it may be said, without exaggeration, that it is one in which change follows change with unexampled rapidity, each apparently fraught with more and more momentous consequences, reaching down to fundamental principles of thought, belief, and action, laying them bare to the most searching investigation, and threatening whatever they are found too weak to sustain, however hallowed and endeared by traditional associations, with collapse or overthrow. It is therefore a time for the question, 'If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous man do?' or, what ought he to do? What is the frame of mind and the course of action which befits one who desires to live as in the Divine presence, and to shape his conduct by the rule of duty toward God and his neighbour?"

Hence the bishop advances to lay down the relative position of Church and State in our Christian regards: to remind his clergy that the "Denisonian " view of Church and State is a remnant of old Manichæan error, and that "it was of a pagan and persecuting state that the apostle declared, the powers that be are ordained of God.'" It was no less needful to remind them of the imperfection and ambiguity of a language commonly used with regard to both: that as the clergy are not the Church, so neither are the ruling powers the State. In order to meet the difficult questions regarding Church and State, it is necessary to endeavour to stay our minds on clear notions and solid principles, which this ambiguity hinders us from doing.

These remarks were easy to be understood in their intended bearing on the consideration of the great question of the Irish Church. The opening of the bishop's remarks on this subject is worthy of a permanent place in literature:

"Here, as usual, it is only by the light of the past that we can hope to gain any clear view of the present, or any true insight into the future. The retrospect is indeed one of the most saddening to be found in the annals of history; but we may not shrink from pondering its lessons and its warnings. It presents a land abounding in the sources of national wealth, in all that can stimulate and reward industry, and by its natural features exercising a peculiar charm on the affections of its inhabitants; a people richly gifted with many noble qualities of mind and heart; singularly deficient indeed in the faculty and the spirit of political and ecclesiastical organization, neither comprehending its conditions, nor appreciating its advantages, but naturally disposed to yield to the guidance of a friendly and beneficent authority, and for many centuries closely connected with a more powerful nation, endowed in an eminent degree with the qualities which the weaker most lacked. Here, then, it might have been thought, were the elements of prosperity and happiness for both. And yet in the whole course of Irish history there is not one bright spot; not a single period on which memory can dwell without finding matter chiefly for shame, sorrow, and regret. I cannot even except that to which many look back as to a golden age, the time when Ireland won the name of the Isle of Saints. That description does not prove it to have been a land of holiness. The seventh century, an age in,which the Church was sunk in the grossest darkness and corruption, was called the Age of Saints; and we cannot doubt that, while the Irish monasteries were seats of piety and learning, and sent forth many illustrious missionaries to spread the Gospel in foreign lands, their own country was in the same state of anarchy and barbarism in which we find it as soon as we become acquainted with its internal condition."

The bishop then reviews some of the more prominent epochs in the history of Ireland, that which first yoked both countries under a common rule, accompanied by the English policy of physical force, upheld by Papal support of its tyranny,-that, when there fell on England, at the time when she received the greatest of all blessings, that to which she owes her place among the nations," the inability to impart this blessing to the people whom she had treated as something less than human, to be killed with impunity as the beasts of the field. In their minds the Reformed faith was associated with violence and oppression, and the breach was widened by that which should have healed it. Nor did the influence of a purer creed tend to inspire the dominant nation with milder sentiments towards its subjects. Penal legislation may have been excusable in the heat of a great crisis: but no such plea can avail for the maintenance of " that atrocious code" when it served no purpose but that of nourishing the evil passions of those who regarded the affliction and degradation of their countrymen as the only sound basis of Protestant ascendancy.

The stirring of better thoughts in the minds of English statesmen was the result, the bishop shews, not of a sense of the wickedness of the system, but to experiences of its folly. As long as the introduction of the Reformation had a political significance, it was favoured: but "when it appeared that the only benefit to be derived from it was the spiritual benefit of the Roman Catholic population, it ceased to occupy the thoughts either of statesmen or of Churchmen."

The bishop does not scruple to use very decided language in characterizing the union of the two countries.

"It was," he says, "notoriously brought about against the will of the great majority of the Irish people, by means morally indefensible, and alike discreditable to both parties, the bribers and the bribed."