vices are everywhere giving way to more lively and more hearty forms of worship, no less are the drab-coloured, pseudo-classical, high-pewed churches yielding place to buildings in which some attempt at least has been made to interest the mind and raise the thoughts by beauty of form and colour. Art is no longer supposed to be the foe of religion; aspirations crave for satisfaction which the last century seems scarcely to have felt; men wish to associate the noblest works of the architect, the sculptor, and the painter with the service of the sanctuary, as well as the poet and the musician. To all who are interested in religious art we commend Mr. R. St. John Tyrwhitt's thoughtful and very interesting essay on The Religious Use of Taste.' There is, no doubt, as Mr. St. John Tyrwhitt has said, an honest dread of art in the minds of many good Protestants; for they regard the æsthetic developments of modern churches and ritual simply as baits to lure their young men and maidens Romeward. If this be so, there is, no doubt, good ground for saying hard things of art. But is this so? Does Rome indeed use art for a lure, or meretricious decoration to which the most charitable critic can hardly apply the term 'art'? The productions of such men as Cornelius and Overbeck are to real artistic works what prize poems are to poetry; correct, careful, sometimes even beautiful, but totally wanting in force and spontaneity, As to the attempts of modern Italians and their allies in this country to excite feelings of devotion by means of plaster and paint, crowns of stars, dead-golden hair, crimson hangings, and wood-gilt glories, these are not likely to succeed with English Protestants; that cotton velvet and pink cherubs may have had an effect upon contadinas and lazzaroni is not unlikely, but the effect is probably much the same that would be produced by similar appliances in a theatre; these things are not art, nor are they compatible with the genius of the Church of England, which is at least silent on things unspeakable.' But look back through time: see the early Christians, in days of persecution, picturing the Good Shepherd on the walls of their catacombs, with no thought of worshipping the work of men's hands, but only of bringing the Master more vividly before their eyes. See, again, in the Middle Ages, the earnest devotion expressed in the saints of Angelico and Giotto and Francia: saints not set up to be worshipped, but represented as praying to their Lord, or going about their Master's business. Look on these

things, and say whether we ought to resign the hope of a truly religious art, because in later times some of the greatest colourists painted saints like Venuses to display their own power, or because meretriciously-decorated saints are set up to be adored. Wesley was unwilling that Satan should have all the best tunes; we are equally unwilling that Satan should have all the best pictures. The artist wields a power for good as great as that of the poet or the orator; and the more artists remember that they are moral agents, spiritual beings, and not mere skilful machines, the better it will be for religion, and the better it will be for art. In Mr. Tyrwhitt's words, it is better for our sacred artist, whoever he is, to die following [the great religious artists of old] than to live doing genre for drawing-rooms; as much better for him, as Christian teaching is better than sentimental play of fancy. And how far better may it be for the rich patron to spend his abundance on a fresco, which may bring out a noble workman in the doing, and itself, when done, appeal to Christian thought for centuries-teaching other workmen all the time-than to buy small pictures for his private gallery or his wife's boudoir? How far better? None of us will know until we see the harvest of men's deeds gathered in in the end. "Then shall every man have praise of God."

Church services and church decorations are changing in accordance with the needs and aspirations of the time; a truly mis sionary work is going on in the midst of us. And meanwhile, that which we more commonly call missionary work, the task of carrying the Gospel to the heathen in foreign lands, does not slacken. The work which began under the auspices of Tenison and Compton, at the beginning of the teacup times of Addison and Steele,' still goes on; and if the American colonies, which first called for the foundation of the 'Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,' have become a great Republic, itself a centre of missionary activity; we have still in our vast Indian empire, to say nothing of other dependencies, an ample field for the energies of the English Church in its missionary capacity. To the history of the present religious condition of India we have a most important contribution in the essay of Sir Bartle Frere on Indian Missions.' So able and candid an observer, with such admirable opportunities of information, has, we think, never before given the public an account of what he has actually seen and knows with regard to this matter. The essay is unique; and we hope we shall not be thought to undervalue the abundant information which

we have received from missionaries, if we say that it is worth many reports of societies. It is so, because it is the work of a man who can look at the work of missions in a way that a missionary cannot. Sir Bartle Frere traces in vigorous outline the progress of missionary exertion in India, from the days when the old trading East India Company paid some cautious homage to the value of religious teaching,' always with a 'latent misgiving that too much thought of the things of another world was incompatible with due attention to the affairs of this,' to our own days, when so many different agencies are actively engaged in spreading the Gospel. It is especially to be observed that Sir Bartle Frere, who contemplates the matter from the statesman's point of view, and who is no blind adherent of any religious party, presses most strongly the desirableness of the English Government in India frankly recognizing Christianity as its religion. A godless state,' he tells us, a state which, in its corporate capacity, acknowledges no religion as its own, which deals with men as with the herds of lower animals, is, to the native of India generally, a fearful and unintelligible phenomenon.' 'No portion of the great Proclamation of 1858 struck the natives of India so much, or found so ready a response in their own feelings and ideas, as the passages in which the Queen expressed her attachment to her own religion, and her determination to secure perfect toleration in religious matters for all her subjects. The gracious words to which her Majesty then gave utterance have since become proverbial in India, and are habitually quoted by the natives as embodying the great fundamental principle of our rule.' Hence Sir Bartle Frere holds that the abolition of all State connexion with Christianity in India would be most detrimental, while it would be hardly less detrimental if the Government were to participate actively in Missionary work; it should proclaim frankly its own religion, but abstain from even the appearance of forcing it upon its subjects. In its proper sphere, it is evident that he takes the keenest interest in missionary enterprise; and no one who cares for the progress of the Gospel can fail to be interested in his sketch of the relation of the Hindoos and Mohammedans, of the new Brahmoism of Bengal, and of the vast communities-some forty millions in all-whose hereditary superstitions are neither Hindoo nor Mohammedan, to Christianity. His description of the general effect of a Padre's' teaching upon an ordinary village community has the force

always found in the words of one who tells simply what he knows thoroughly.

What Sir B. Frere tells us of these ancient village communities' in India, the life of which we Europeans find so hard to realize, is highly important, both in a religious and a political point of view. He points out that these communities, with their well defired code of laws and usages, possess a vitality unknown in any other form of society; it is in consequence of their indestructible vitality that civilization and order survive in India all shocks of political revolution, war, pestilence, and famine. And this village system, not of set purpose, but as one of the results of our organization, is being gradually but surely disintegrated by British rule. The constant presence of British authority, and that not in one, but often in many shapes, undermines the authority of the village Headman, and tends to loosen all the old bonds which have for centuries. kept rural society together; and the preaching of Christianity, by removing the religious sanction on which many of the old laws rested, accelerates the process. The essayist regards the change as inevitable; it depends upon forces which the Government cannot wholly control; all that we can hope for is that a new and better bond of union may be brought in, instead of those bonds which we displace.

*

'Principles at Stake,' pp. 203 ƒƒ.

Mr.

Happy should we be if, in our survey of the movements at present existing in the Church of England, we had but to notice the higher standard of the parish Priest, the efforts made for the education of the people, the greater variety and earnestness of services, the constant extension of missionary work, the effort to make art really subservient to the highest ends; but there is a less favourable side. The works before us bear the impress not only of the activity, but also of the divisions of the age. The old Church parties, parties found in some shape or other in almost every age of the Church, still remain, and have taken of late years peculiar forms.* In particular, we have lately had a remarkable development among us of the school which calls itself "Catholic,' but is called by its opponents 'Ritualistic;' a school which would set aside our old divines as having gone too far for truth and not far enough for logic, and wishes to undo the Reformation as a mistake that halted untenably between two positions, and which, in point of fact, ought doctrinally to be effaced.'t This last school has awakened the keenest animosity in the minds of the Evangelical and Anglican members of the Church of England; its earnestness, both in devotion and in working, is not denied; but it is felt that its characteristic tenets and practice have no support in Scripture or in the authorized formularies of the English Church, while they undoubt edly tend to alienate the great mass of lay Englishmen, upon whose support the very existence of the establishment must ultimately depend. There can be no doubt, that to many of our most earnest churchmen, the so-called Ritualists present the appearance of Romish partisans in the midst

An admirable description of the present condition of Church Parties, with their excellencies and their faults, may be found in Dean Howson's essay on 'Parties and Party-Spirit,' in Principles at Stake.'

Mr. Haddan, in The Church and the Age,

p. 237.

And

of the Church and some of the most prominent tenets of the Catholic' party. this appearance of unfaithfulness to engagements is so abhorred by Englishmen, that we cannot wonder at the opposition which has arisen against Ritualism, not only among vestry-orators, but among men of learning, candour, and ability; when such men as Dean Howson, Professors Payne Smith and Salmon, Mr. Humphry, Mr. Bernard, Mr. G. H. Sumner, Mr. Haddan, Mr. Sadler, and Mr. Benjamin Shaw, join in condemning the doctrinal and ritualistic excesses of this small but active party, we may be sure that the mind of the English Church is deeply stirred, and stirred not without good reason. The crisis at which we have now arrived is indeed a strange one. Forty years ago, or even more recently than that, there was probably not one single member of the Church of England who would have affirmed that the consecration of the elements in the Holy Eucharist was the means of bringing before us, on the altar, an object of worship; now, this dogma is the very corner-stone of the Ritualistic edifice in doctrine and practice. This dogma our essayists, though regarding the subject from very different points of view, agree in repudiating; it is not to be found in Scripture, in ancient liturgies, in the liturgy of the English Church, or in the works of the Anglican fathers. A generation back, no one would have doubted for an instant that a man who held the doctrine that the presence of Christ in the elements was such as to be adored, must at once leave the Church of England and join that of Rome. We have changed all that, whether for the better may perhaps be doubted; what is unhappily certain is, that the Church is injured by the distrust and annoyance which the presence of this party among us occasions.

On another doctrine, which has been brought into prominence by recent developments, there is less unanimity. The doctrine that an actual sacrifice takes place in the Eucharist, is absent from the pages of the greatest among our English divines, whether of the reforming or the Caroline age; it is elaborately defended by John Johnson, in his confused and unsatisfactory treatise on the Unbloody Sacrifice,' and less prominently by others of some note; but, on the whole, it has never taken root among us.

We have been content to regard the Eucharist simply as the memorial of the Death of Christ, and the means of receiving the benefits of His Passion. Of late years, however, this doctrine of Sacrifice has laid hold of the minds of many who are neither unlearned nor light-minded. Mr. Haddan seems to accept it; Mr. Sadler devotes to it a considerable portion of his learned and interesting essay on 'Liturgies and Ritual.'* Mr. Sadler's words are always of weight, yet here he seems to fall below his usual clearness and cogency. He admits that in the New Testament no directly sacrificial language is applied to the Eucharist; he admits that, in the sense in which the word sacrifice is used in the Old Testament-we may add, in Gentile writers-there is no actual sacrifice whatsoever in the Eucharist. He says, truly and forcibly, 'celebrate the Eucharist as we will, we cannot make it in the remotest degree to resemble any of the things which ordinary Englishmen, taught by their Bibles, call sacrifices.' The inference seems irresistible. If the word 'sacrifice' is never applied to the Eucharist in the New Testament; if, when applied to the Eucharist in modern times, it inevitably jars on the feelings of ordinary Englishmen-that is, of ninety-nine hundredths of the people most concerned in the matterwe ought most carefully to avoid such an application of the term. Every essential doctrine can be taught without it, for the New Testament is, in point of fact, without it; then why use it gratuitously, to the confusion of the unlearned? This seems to have been the view of those who drew up the present service, for they have most carefully avoided applying the word 'sacrifice,' or any equivalent term, to the Sacrament of

*In The Church and the Age,' pp. 263314.

We cannot help expressing our surprise that so able a biblical scholar as Mr. Sadler should refer the altar' (Ovciacтýptov) of Heb. xiii 10 to the Lord's Table, against the opinion of such men as Thomas Aquinas and Estius, to say nothing of almost the whole body of Protestant commentators. See Canon Bernard's note (Principles, p. 186), and Dean Howson's (ib., p. 373).

And we are even more surprised, when

he takes, as a matter admitting no question, the 'tables of devils' to be altars. Surely there can be no more groundless supposition. The word karakɛ μevov, in Cor viii. 10, leaves scarcely a doubt that a sacrificial feast was celebrated in the ordinary manner at an ordinary table. Again, he says (p. 276): Ignatius speaks several times of the Lord's Table as an altar'; we think that if he will consult Professor Light foot's Comment on the Epistle to the Philip; pians (p. 263, n. 2, second edition), he will be led to doubt this, as well as his inter retation of

Heb. xiii. 10.

6

6

the Lord's Supper, and with equal care obliterated every trace of an oblation following Consecration. No one who has read Mr. Humphry's careful paper on 'The Revisions of the Liturgy, in Principles at Stake,' can, we think, doubt this. Equally significant is the absence of any sacrificial doctrine from the Catechism and the Articles. But Mr. Sadler approaches the subject from a different point of view; he finds sacrificial terms constantly applied in ancient liturgies to the Eucharist, and therefore he casts about for some sense of the word 'sacrifice,' in which it may be used innocently; and to this end he defines the word sacrifice' as equivalent to 'a memorial before God.' Now, granting that the Eucharist is such a memorial, it by no means follows that it should be called a sacrifice.' A sacrifice may have been in some cases a memorial, but it is by no means true that every memorial is a sacrifice; the shew-bread was such a memorial (Lev. xxiv. 7, 8, LXX.), yet the setting forth of the loaves is never called a sacrifice, nor the table of shew-bread an altar. Even if we admit-what most Protestants would deny that the consecrated elements are set forth before the Lord in the same sense as the shew-bread, there is still no reason for using the ambiguous, and, to many persons, highly offensive term 'sacrifice.' We by no means contend that English clergymen are not at liberty to regard the Eucharist as a sacrificial act; but if they do so, they must be prepared to have their teaching constantly misunderstood, and to be reproached with introducing a conception foreign to the English Communion Office. It is impossible to thrust the sacrificial conception into a service deliberately intended to embody commemoration and communion, not sacri

fice.

Mr. Sadler's account of the characteristics of various ancient liturgies is done with much care and discrimination, and what he says of the properly Ritualistic aspect of the Eucharistic question-the lights, incense, and vestments-is thoroughly sound and sensible. But one of the ablest contributions to the discussion of this subject which we have met with is Canon Bernard's admirable essay on 'Scripture and Ritual' in 'Principles at Stake.' Every one who is acquainted with the ordinary books of the Neo-Catholies on ritual, must have been struck with their strange use of the Old Testament and of the Apocalypse. On these points Canon Bernard meets them fairly, and lays down, it seems to us, the true principles on which the development of Christian worship, in its various forms, must rest. There is no ritual