thousand years the Church has consisted, merely of a deposed Pope (who is of course no Pope at all) and of a large number of deposed clerics; all laymen having ceased to be her members by anathematization. If he takes the former alternative, he holds that for more than a thousand years there has been no Catholic Church anywhere; but in her place a vast number of anathematized clerics and laymen. Yet he calls Rome at this moment "the executive of the Church."* In other words a deposed Pope, who is therefore no Pope at all, is the executive of a society, which probably does not exist; but from which, anyhow, all laymen are excluded. And he tells the world (p. 46) that he "frequents regularly and prizes exceedingly" the sacraments administered by deposed priests to anathematized laymen :-sacraments which, if he understood ever so distantly what he has himself been saying, he could not approach without mortal sin.

There have doubtless been other non-Catholics who have less respect for authority than Mr. Ffoulkes; and there may possibly (though we doubt the fact) have been Catholic writers equally puzzle-headed: but the former of these classes has been saved by its common sense, and the latter by its loyalty to the Church, from such a mass of confused bewilderment. Who is there, who has there ever been, uniting, as Mr. Ffoulkes unites them, the total absence of ability with the total absence of self-mistrust?

Mr. Ffoulkes is somewhat fond of autobiography: of exhibiting to his readers the candour, the love of research, the largeness of sympathy, which he considers himself to possess. We shall not therefore be travelling out of the record, if we make some comment on his various exhibitions of personal character. With several of these we have much sympathy. We enumerated in our last number (p. 257) his singular and most honourable freedom from all bitterness and all imputation of unworthy motives. His whole career has displayed unselfish zeal and public spirit, though in the pursuit of most anti-Catholic ends; and it is really touching to find a writer who so heartily admires and respects piety, as far as his narrow spiritual vision enables him to apprehend it. We have never indeed been even tempted to one harsh or unkind thought of him. As to his intellectual defects, we are the last to think that any amount of these should diminish

* Christendom "is only disunited de facto, because" certain laws "are infringed, and the executive of the Church is indifferent, or else a party to their infringement. If Rome is really the executive of the Church, &c." (p. 66).

one's feeling of respect towards any human being; and his very unconsciousness of them may rank merely as one intellectual defect the more. But we must maintain that there is one very unhappy side to his character, and we will briefly explain our meaning.

Every rational human being is possessed, consciously or unconsciously, by a certain theoretical rule of life; by a certain assemblage of principles, as to what he should believe and what he should do. Now though indubitably a man has power, without any instruction, of arriving at a clear and certain knowledge of various elementary verities, he cannot so arrive at a whole substantially true doctrinal and moral code; while even as to the verities which are within his reach, it is immeasurably more probable that he will attain them by help of instruction than without that help. God, by His providential dispensation of things, has taken care that this shall be impressed on the mind of all; for He has placed all men under the necessity of first learning their rule of life from parents or other teachers. In the normal state of things, from an early period the voice of parents is greatly superseded or supplemented by the Church's infallible teaching, and so a healthy growth ensues. On the other hand those who unhappily have been trained outside the Church, in proportion as they emerge from the shelter of parental training, are ever looking out (if they are well advised) for some authority higher and better than themselves, from which they may derive fresh and increasing light. Even Mr. Carlyle can see that "true guidance, in return for loving obedience, is the prime want of man." While by way of contrast, if you would have an instance of one whose prospects of acquiring truth are almost hopeless, contemplate the man, who makes himself the one centre and standard of his own views; who summons all other men and things before the tribunal of his own private judgment; who does not aim earnestly and energetically at enlarging and elevating his moral perception, but, on the contrary, only values that of others so far as it agrees with his own.

Such a man, emphatically, is Mr. Ffoulkes. We do not presume to conjecture how far he is responsible for his present moral malformation; but we cannot doubt that this malformation lies at the root of his errors. What would he say to a child of ten years old, who should set himself to estimate candidly the character of his parents, to balance their excellences and defects, and to judge on the respective merits of his father and his mother? Yet such a child would be a model of humility in comparison with Mr. Ffoulkes. He has never

rightly been a Catholic at all. He joined the Church's visible communion, not because he acknowledged her claim to be his one trustworthy and his infallible guide to sanctification and salvation, but (p. 3) in order that he might "judge of her system fairly and adequately." He did not come to learn, but to judge. He" studied her worship in town and country (ib.), not for the sake of obtaining a clearer and fuller apprehension of the truths committed to her keeping, but that he might "compare that worship with what he had abandoned for it at home." "All this has been my constant employment," he says, "for the last dozen years or more." "I have been engaged constantly, ever since I joined the Roman communion, in instituting comparisons between members of the Church of England and members of the Church of Rome. . . or between Christianity in England and Christianity on the Continent" (p. 47). Poor man! we do not doubt it at all. The blindness to all high and heroic piety, to everything which can be called saintliness, so conspicuous in all he writes,-here receives its full explanation. He has never subjected his intellect to authority, and you may see the result. He sees no spiritual superiority in the Church of Christ over the Anglican denomination,* as the blind man sees no difference of illumination between midday and midnight. He declares by his motto that there is a "beam" in the eye of the Roman Church, and a "mote" in that of other religious societies: it is his own spiritual vision alone, to which he trusts as clear and undimmed.

We do not know if he will be disposed to accept advice at our hands, in the spirit in which it is offered. But we would entreat him to put aside his theological speculations for a given period, say two years; and meanwhile to occupy himself from time to time in spiritual exercises, under the guidance of some experienced and sagacious director, who will know what particular verities to press on his attention. We should be much surprised if, on emerging from such a course of discipline, he regarded his present self with any other feelings, than those of bitter repentance, indignation, and contempt.

His argument, by the way, from p. 45 to 52 (as has been excellently pointed out in "Catholic Opinion"), either proves that Presbyterians, Wesleyans, &c., have a true Eucharist, or that they have no true piety.

Since the above note was in type, this particular point-and also the difference almost of kind between Catholic and non-Catholic piety-have been admirably treated in the March issue of the "Month."

ART. II.-F. NEWMAN'S OXFORD PAROCHIAL

SERMONS.

Parochial and Plain Sermons. By JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, B.D., formerly Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford. In 8 vols., new edition. Rivingtons : London, Oxford, and Cambridge. 1868.

TH HIS publication is, we believe, wholly without precedent. Protestant sermons as such are about the most ephemeral of printed books. We do not mean to class them with "light literature," as in most cases they have small claims to either part of the title. Yet few, very few out of the acres of sermons printed year by year, have established a name anything like as lasting even as that of a successful novelist. South, Barrow, Tillotson, and Jeremy Taylor, so far as we remember, are the only English writers whose sermons in numerous volumes have attained something of a permanent sale. And we much doubt whether any woman now living has read two sermons of Tillotson's. Among the last men who read one of them, we take to have been the elegant and amiable Reginald Heber, who sums up their characteristics, as "dull good sense. South we suppose is more read, although less than he deserves. But it is as a wit rather than a preacher. Barrow has left under the title of sermons, learned essays more quoted than read. Even where a single volume has survived the "age of man," it has chiefly been such as Butler's, for which the illustrious author apologizes as unfit either to be preached or "published under the title of sermons." These are exceptional cases. We very much doubt whether there is any one instance of an English Protestant preacher, whose bona fide sermons, after having had a large sale when published in separate volumes, have been so much called for thirty years later as to reappear in eight volumes. Yet even this, we need hardly say, is not the real peculiarity of the present publication. What is wholly without example is, that such a demand should exist among English Protestants for the sermons preached in a Protestant pulpit, by one whom the present generation has known only as a Catholic priest. This single fact, every man must admit, marks a change in the public feeling, whether he believes it to be for good or for evil, such as would have been deemed utterly impossible when these sermons were first published.

Very few, we imagine, of the purchasers of the new edition were to be found among those who in those days hung upon the lips of the Vicar of S. Mary's; for of those who still survive, most have copies of the original editions, endeared to them, not merely by their intrinsic value, but by many recollections of youthful days. Perhaps to most readers a few words about the time and place and circumstances of the original delivery of these sermons, may do more to assist them in realizing what they were, than any portrait of an author at the beginning of his works.

"Time speeds its restless course," and surely it is not merely the deception of nearness that makes us feel that serious changes were never more rapid than they have been in the last forty years. If an intelligent Oxford man had fallen asleep in, say 1828, and could awake now, the surprise of the seven sleepers could hardly have been greater than his. It was in February, 1828, that the Rev. J. H. Newman was presented by his college to the Vicarage of S. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, vacant by the election of the late Vicar to the Provostship of Oriel College, which he still holds. All men have noticed how strangely details, small in themselves, sometimes impress themselves upon the most treacherous memory, which suffers words and events of real moment to glide through it and sink into the ground. Such is the freshness with which the writer of these lines remembers the scene in that church, when the new Vicar, just seven-and-twenty years of age," read in," as the ceremony is called, by which the law requires that every newly appointed incumbent should declare his adherence to the Established Church. How little did any then present anticipate the events which were, so to say, to cluster around his tenure of that office, momentous not only to himself or the parishioners committed to his care, but to thousands to whom, at the time, his very name was unknown. As yet, indeed, he was as little known beyond the immediate circle of his own college as any man of his age, and who had attained that position, could well be. It was the moment of sunrise, and only very close observers could yet forecast what sort of day was coming. Speaking of the time from 1823 to 1826, he has said :

To no one at Oxford at this time did I open my heart fully and familiarly. But things changed in 1826. At that time I became one of the tutors of my College, and this gave me position; besides, I had written one or two essays which had been well received. I began to be known. I preached my first University sermon. Next year I was one of the Public Examiners for the B.A. degree. In 1828 I became Vicar of St. Mary's. It was to me like the feeling of spring weather after winter; and, if I may so speak, I came out of my shell; I remained out of it till 1841.*

"History of my Religious Opinions," p. 16.