important points on which we do not hold all the opinions of the authors. Having given our readers fair notice of what they will occasionally find in this volume which we do not agree with, we have no hesitation in recommending it as well fitted to accomplish the avowed and manifest intention of the accomplished and amiable writer.

We congratulate our readers on the rich accessions which we have brought before them to the valuable helps hitherto engaged for the most sacred, delightful, and profitable of human studies. We cannot but rejoice in the fact that there is such an accumulation of Biblical treasures. It is itself an indication of an improved healthy tone in the religious mind both of Germany and of Great Britain. We hail it as the prelude of a serene and bright future. Happily, there is a middle path between cold intelligence and ignorant fervour in religion, between powerless rationalism and craven superstition, between the licentiousness mistaken for freedom and the blindness mistaken for reverence. Many forms of evil in the Church have melted before the advance of knowledge. Many more, little suspected in many quarters, await only the unity produced,-not by laws, and creeds, and forms, nor yet by the abandonment of personal convictions, but by the right understanding of the Scriptures, and a common feeling of warm attachment to them, awakened by a common perception of their meaning and their grandeurto vanish before an enlightened and earnest Church as the palace of ice in the Eastern fable disappeared before the splendid fire of the noontide sun. We will not dwell upon the miserable lack of intelligence among Christians on Biblical matters, nor on the rarity of instructions which would give them broader views and more exact information. We are not ignorant of the prejudices which include large departments of human opinions on Scripture doctrines among things sacred, while it would look on the means of making the Bible a book attractive to all sorts of persons as belonging to the week-day and the Bible-class; but by no means to intrude on the Sabbath and the Pulpit. These Bible-classes, if wisely conducted, will set all that right in time; at present, there is a practical confession, on the part of great numbers of ministers in all churches, that the old economy of pulpit performances has passed away, in a great measure, from the approbation of the people. Hence, we have lectures instead of sermons, events instead of texts, histories instead of doctrines, themes which are popular with the many instead of the narrow range of topics cherished by the few.

The people go to hear this novel manner of teaching wherever it is found, and it is in course of being found everywhere. We cannot say that this is the best state of things, though it is, beyond

all doubt, greatly better than other states of things which we have witnessed. When we have a ministry thoroughly furnished' pervading the land, we hope to see something better still. Men will learn from books, and from lectures in other places, enough of those matters which at present gain so much attention in not a few pulpits, and a more wholesome tone of intellect will be produced by a more luminous, masculine, and masterful dealing with all the questions that concern the Scriptures. We shall look upon such a consummation as one of the most blessed revolutions in the history of the Church-the natural outcome of the grand forces which have been struggling, with more or less success, against wearing-out superstitions during the last three centuries of European life. It will be the reign of good sense in sacred as well as secular things. It will, to a large extent, substitute common agreement, based on knowledge, for controversies generated by incertitude. It will repress extravagance by dignified wisdom. It will guide nascent spirits away from the paths which lead to heresy. It will remove all but the moral causes of infidelity. It will supplant the skeletons of orthodoxy by the living forms of breathing, speaking, and working truth. We should be greatly misunderstood by any one who could imagine that we look for such a consummation to merely verbal studies in relation to the Scriptures. These are valuable as directions to the devout, and as furnishing materials for what we may represent as the higher departments of theological teaching. Without lively religious emotion, and without profound and comprehensive religious thoughtfulness, there will be little taste of the right kind for free Biblical teaching on a large scale. One fruit of such teaching, we are confident, will be a more real practical reliance on those ineffable illuminations from on high which come not through human ministrations; and not less confident are we that another fruit will be the loving self-sacrifice without which the Church cannot be one, and cannot, therefore, bear a full and unanswerable testimony for the Saviour to the world. We are looking for the time when the noblest examples we have had of Christian excellence will be transcended by the ordinary style of Christians, as the stars that owe their solitary brilliance to the surrounding darkness are absorbed in the light that fills the whole field of vision.

105

ART. VII.-Voluntaryism in England and Wales; or, the Census of 1851. Published by the Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control. 1854. pp. 112. 8vo. PARLIAMENT has met, and our friends in the House must soon be maturing their plans for the session. Dissenters now occupy an advanced position, bringing with it duties and modes of action to which they have hitherto been strangers. We are a party in the House. What was once reproached as political dissent is now acknowledged as dissenting politics. We wish, with a view to this new position, to make some general observations of a practical kind, which may help in maturing our policy. A policy of some kind it is clear we must have. To show this we need only address ourselves to such of our readers as may be inclined to think enough has been done for the present, and to counsel the advisableness of 'letting well alone.' We are assured of their cordial concurrence in asserting that they are not prepared to go back. They will not give up anything. They are as desirous as any to maintain a position in the House and before the country, which shall be sufficient to stop any countermovement against the voluntary principle as it now stands recognised. Having for the first time, at the last general election, placed a body of members in the House of Commons, the bulk of those members are not to be turned out again at the next. Being intended to remain there, they are to be upholden in the position and the weight they have won for themselves. Assuming that they are not, during this session, or the next, or the next after, to make a single movement in advance, they are to be ready, and they are to be understood to be ready, at all times to hold their own.

A

Now we wish for more; but we frankly avow that, if while the war lasts we can accomplish so much as is here indicated, and really hold our own, we shall certainly not feel dissatisfied. We are, at all events, clear that if the advantages which all of us desire to contend for at the proper time are to be really won, all that we are now anxious about must be attended to on the mere principle of self-defence. We cannot lay down our arms. session in the House of Commons can no more pass without the constant need of protecting our position than without the army and navy estimates. The prestige of the last session rests with us, but our attacks and our successes have all been made and won in self-defence. In a former article on this subject we limited ourselves to showing that the Cabinet were

* The Coalition Government and the Dissenters. May, 1851.

not our friends. Add to this the consideration of the numerous interests all intent on pushing their claims in the teeth of our very principle, and it will be seen how inevitably, and on all sides, we are exposed to active hostility. The Oxford bill, for instance, as at first brought on, ignored our existence. A hundred members memorialized Lord John Russell, and were told they must act for themselves. The Dissenters then took action. Their first step was to ask the House to recognise their interest in Oxford, by the appointment of a select committee; and upon this also being refused, they then undoubtedly girded up their loins, and took bodily possession. Every one now acknowledges that, if the bill had become law in the shape in which it was first introduced (how extraordinary it now seems that such a proposal should, in sober faith, have been made to us!), dissent would have received a positive injury. The bill was an attack on dissent, and would, by a side wind, and without a blow struck, have deprived us of all the advantages gained at so much cost in 1835.

Take again the case of church-rates. Practically speaking, church-rates are abolished in the north, and are being abolished in the south. The only course now open is to abolish them altogether, and if any substitute is necessary, it must be derived from an improved management of church property. On both points we were assailed. Lord Blandford insisted, in spite of urgent remonstrances, in retaining in his Episcopal and Capitular Estates Bill a clause-wholly unnecessary to its professed object-precluding the proposed application of the improved revenues. Mr. Packe's Church-rate Extension and Perpetuation Bill was slurred over at the time, but it is now reproduced with worse features, and, as is understood, under high sanction, in the Edinburgh Review.' Church-rates are to be henceforth exacted all over the kingdom; Dissenters are to be ticketed and turned out of vestry; the old common-law rights of the vestry itself are to be abolished, and the whole power lodged with a church surveyor and a county magistracy. Is it not time to bestir ourselves? Sir W. Clay's bill was lost last session by an unwonted combination of faint-heartedness and treachery. For the sake of one clause only let it not be so lost again;-'From and after the date of the passing of this act, no church-rate shall be made or levied in any parish in England or Wales.'

Such questions, again, as Maynooth, the Irish Regium Donum and Belfast Professorships, Church Removal and Burial Board Bills, Ecclesiastical Commissions, Church Building Acts, Australian Constitutions, and as many more twice counted, are not merely in their principle, but in their form of presentment, a perpetual guerilla war. They never come in a shape in which

we can stand neutral. We must in every case either assert or abandon our principles; under penalty, if we are once caught napping, of establishing a 'precedent, to which the House is never more willing to allow the appeal than when Voluntaries have established it against themselves. The Maynooth grant, for instance, is defended as a compact: settled, we are told, by act of parliament. If it be, it is settled all one way, for last session it was only Mr. Spooner's vigilance that defeated an additional estimate. The Irish Regium Donum again is not, like the defunct English grant, a fixed sum of a few hundreds it has begged itself up from £1200 to £38,000, and is still asking for more. The vote of the House is taken every year upon this question of increase. We must either accede to or refuse it: and unless we refuse it, we are ourselves active parties to carrying the principle of the grant farther than it has yet been pushed. And this is not all. The estimate has long been suspected. It is now known to be tainted with fraud. At least £5000 a-year of the £38,000 is obtained without even the pretence of fulfilling the conditions. To the extent of £14,000 a-year, the fulfilment alleged would be set down by common-sense people as sheer evasion. There is no evidence to satisfy men of business that the conditions are in any case fulfilled, except for the single year in which the grant is first made to a new congregation-the congregation itself perhaps being only formed for the sake of obtaining it. Can Voluntaries without impeachment acquiesce in a grant at which honest men must feel their ears tingle?

And so of the rest. We might exceed our limits on this point alone. There is enough to do, even if we do not look to advancing a step. There needs all through the session, from the first day to the last, an unfailing watch on the part of all our dissenting members merely to hold our own.

We are happy to know that this watch is maintained. believe there is now no offensive movement which can avoid an encounter with a perfectly well-informed opposition. Our friends in the House are united, vigilant, and active; and in addition to their own numbers, they have begun to command the support of a still larger body not belonging to their ranks. Last May, we reckoned them at from 80 to 100. They now form altogether a party numbering not less ordinarily than a third of the House, and in pitched battles they have counted more.

Now, how is this position to be made secure? On this point we confess to no small surprise at the currency of notions which we should have supposed impossible, even among the most uninquiring. We have heard the events of the late session attributed by intelligent men simply to the progress of liberal opinion, and have seen the facts regarded as so clearly speaking