They were sincere, no doubt, in their way; but he has great doubts about their vital Christianity.

The most narrow and exclusive Laudian, who having signed the Articles on the ground that they must be right, because such men as Andrews and Cosin and Bramhall have signed them before him, betakes himself to a medieval book with massive clasps, and fancies, as he chants Gregorians out of it, that every Christian of orthodox repute before the unhappy Council of Trent was exactly of the same opinion as himself, may be further from the truth than the modern copy of the Puritan, and yet can reach it by an easier and more open road. His world of thought is small and artificial, distorted in its facts and maimed in its proportions, a feeble copy of God's world; still it is a world, a cosmos; a thing of order and degree, of variety, of multiplicity, of law; full of spirits, angels, powers, authorities, hierarchies, not a thin line of connexion between the soul and God. If, as his knowledge enlarges and his feelings deepen, he escapes in an early stage of transition the superficial fascinations of Rome, he may grow naturally and almost insensibly into broader and deeper views of truth. He will still love the Church, though he has ceased to see an essential connexion between the Church and any one form of Church-government; he will respect, and wish others to respect, the sacraments, while not regarding them as charms; while admiring the types of holiness which were received in former days, he will not despise the peculiar shape which goodness may assume in his own day; he will feel that living and breathing men are as sacred as those whose bones are encased in shrines and reliquaries, and that righteousness and peace have not changed their nature in escaping into the world from the cloister. He will love the chant, the psalm, the solemn rite, the old seat of religion, the home of medieval learning, as truly as of old, and more wisely; without any taint of superstition, he can keep in its niche the image which the Puritan would break, and view without horror an apocryphal saint in a painted window; but still, as he pays the due tribute of respect to Jerusalem and even to Gerizim, he will not fear to trust himself to that spirit of Truth which is also the Spirit of God.

But the keen observer of events of the day will need no precedents from the seventeenth century to prove that those who in the nineteenth century seek for enlightened tolerance in the Church of England must look for it rather High than Low; and an analysis of the process which has of late led many, and will yet lead more, from dull, dry, unsympathetic orthodoxy to the loving freedom of truth, has no necessary connexion with Falkland, or Chillingworth, or Hales. Let us return briefly to

our old subject before finally quitting it, and see the spirit of intolerance sitting by the side of the death-bed, not only torturing the victim, but also hardening the tormentor, by leading him to forget alike the extent of human ignorance and the scale of divine operations, and to strive with feeble yet obstinate hands to bring together those great events which God has put far asunder-the hour of death, and the day of judgment.

Chillingworth had, at least for a time, several scruples respecting the formularies of the Church of England; and one of these shall be stated in his own words. "The damning sentences in St. Athanasius' Creed, as we are made to subscribe it," thus he writes to his friend Sheldon,-"are most false, and also in a high degree presumptuous and schismatical. And therefore I neither can subscribe that these things are 'agreeable to the Word of God,' seeing I believe they are certainly repugnant to it; nor that the whole 'Common Prayer is lawful to be used,' seeing I believe these parts of it certainly unlawful; nor promise that I myself will use it,' seeing I never intend either to read these things, which I have now excepted against, nor to say 'Amen' to them." Unhappily the answer of the future archbishop to the remarkable letter from which this passage is an extract is not extant. It is probable, however, that he succeeded in palliating, if he could not wholly remove, Chillingworth's scruples; for the discussion between the two friends extended to other subjects connected with the Articles, on which it would not have been worth while to enter while this great issue remained unsettled; and Chillingworth, within three years of the date of his letter, did, on his admission to the chancellorship of Salisbury Cathedral, "willingly and heartily subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, and give his consent thereto."

On

He

His case was, to all appearance, a very common one. inquiry, he found that he could assent to the formularies of the Church of England with an explanation; and he assented accordingly, wishing all the time that their sound meaning was more obvious, and that they did not need to be explained. Their letter, he saw, was fatal; but he knew that an apostle had said as much of the letter of holy Scripture itself. could himself employ upon occasion (and an apostle could do so too) the damnatory language of ecclesiastical dogma; but it was foreign to the ordinary tone of his mind, and conflicted unpleasantly with his matured convictions. He was much more inclined to abstain from judging, that he might not be judged, than to condemn others in the hope that he might be saved himself.

On this man, always of a tolerant and charitable disposition,

and especially now, when he felt that he was dying, longing to be at peace with all men, Cheynell, on finding him one day a little more hearty than usual, made an onslaught with a terrible question-Did he conceive that a man living and dying a Turk, Papist, or Socinian could be saved? Chillingworth wished to decline the controversy, but in vain; Cheynell persisted in tormenting him, though he gained for his pains only this answer from Chillingworth respecting Turk, Papist, and Socinian, that he did not absolve them, and would not condemn them.

Half of the answer Cheynell dismissed with a sneer. It was frivolous for Chillingworth to talk of absolution; priest though he was, he could not absolve them if he tried. With the other half he professed himself gravely dissatisfied. If he could only have extracted an anathema from the lips of the dying man, he would have had some hope of his salvation. And one passage in Chillingworth's works had encouraged him to think that he might be successful in the attempt. In replying to one of his most formidable assailants, Chillingworth had written as follows: "You charge me with a great number of false and impious doctrines, which I will not name in particular, because I will not assist you so far in the spreading of my own undeserved defamation; but whosoever teaches or holds them, let him be anathema!" On these latter words the eye and the memory of Cheynell fixed themselves, as on something sound, wholesome, and satisfactory, occurring in the midst of a hotchpotch of Arminianism, Socinianism, and Popery. And when the dying man declined to repeat the formula, Cheynell expresses his fear lest "Mr. Chillingworth grew worse and worse, and would not anathematise a gross Socinian." Poor Cheynell! incapable of perceiving that if there be a time for cursing, there is also a time for abstaining from curses; that a dying man has something better to do than to condemn the gravest errors of his neighbour, and that the heartiest anathema directed against a heretic is a miserable substitute for the faintest faith in a Saviour.

Within two months after the death of Chillingworth, the trial of Laud began. But had the archbishop been able to leave the Tower, and to visit his dying friend and godson, we can imagine some of the incidents of the visit. He would have come, Prayer-Book in hand, and would have turned to the Visitation of the Sick. As he used it, he would very probably have indulged in sundry gestures and bowings, and have longed in his heart for the oil of unction. Still he would have been faithful to its words; and when he came in its course to inquire whether the sick man believed as a Christian man would or no, he would simply have rehearsed the Apostles' Creed, and have asked Chillingworth if he believed it. The sick person having

answered, "All this I steadfastly believe," the archbishop, or any other minister, must go on to other matter. The clergy of the Church of England have no reason or excuse for forcing on the sick and dying the language of scholastic distinctions and ecclesiastical censures. The Apostles' Creed must suffice them when they admit the babe into the Church at baptism, or strive to strengthen those who are ready to die. The Athanasian Creed is an occasional incident in morning prayer; it never touches font or altar, or blends itself with even the skirts of a sacrament. Falkland and Hales and Chillingworth, we cannot doubt, would gladly have dispensed with it. Laud might have comforted himself on its removal, with the reflection that the Councils both of Ephesus and Chalcedon had forbidden any addition to the Nicene Creed; an archbishop of Canterbury, not long after Laud, wished the Church well rid of it. It has become offensive in the course of two hundred years, even to the more judicious successors of Cheynell. Its days in the Church of England are surely numbered; and though it is too much to expect that churchmen of strong conservative instincts will be pleased at its final disappearance, yet their children of the next generation will take up a prayer-book which contains neither the State Services nor the Athanasian Creed, and rejoice that their good fathers had not their own way in all things.

ART. II.-PROFESSOR CONINGTON'S HORACE.

The Odes and Carmen Sæculare of Horace translated into English Verse. By John Conington, M.A., Corpus Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford. London: Bell and Daldy.

The Odes of Horace translated into English Verse. With a Life and Notes by Theodore Martin. London: Parker, Son, and Bourn.

HORACE occupies a peculiar position not only in Roman poetry, but in the history of Europe. As a poet he stood on the boundary-line between the objective poetry of the earlier Romans, and the more subjective poetry of the Empire. More than any other man he may be called the art-poet of Rome. More than any other man, without sacrificing the objective form of the antique, he embodied that reflex play of conflicting feelings which accompanies every culminating civilisation, and which is essentially subjective. Horace first, as a poet, began to

muse over his own feelings, and to play with his own experience. When Montaigne sat in his arm-chair spinning his own soul for future generations, he merely did in uncouth gothic style what Horace had taught him to do in the perfection, but also in the trammels, of ancient beauty. It is true that, when compared with later Europeans,-with Shakespeare or Schiller, with Shelley or with Goethe,-Horace's writings seem strangely shallow and meagre, as no doubt to him theirs must, could he have read them, have seemed the ravings of madmen or sick girls. But all proportion kept, if we compare Horace with other ancient authors, Latin and Greek, it is impossible, we think, not to feel that he is, by comparison with them, essentially subjective, and already, though with a youthful hand, unconsciously busy interpreting the self-inspection and self-dissection of his time. The key-note of his character in this respect (oddly enough, for it cannot have been by design) appears in his dedication to Mæcenas. The "sunt quos juvat"words which, somehow or other, have served to stamp the feeling of the difference of human tastes ever since, and which ticket the ode in the schoolboy's mind-describe the very essence of his character. Let Lucretius describe the mysteries of creation uncreated, and Virgil her outward beauties; let Plautus set the manners of his countrymen in action; Horace is absorbed in his own feelings and those of the men around him, whom he personally knows. His classical conventional imagery is mere conventional drapery, a pure make-believe that he is sailing in the clouds. No man really hugs the ground closer, or is more intent upon the actual living throng about him. The real secret of Horace's hold upon later European thought arises precisely out of the living reality of his experience, coupled with the translucency of ancient forms, which made them readily intelligible. And it would be difficult to point to any set of feelings in modern society, the germs of which are not to be found in Horace, invested with that peculiar freshness which belongs to every first crop. His position as a freedman, belonging to the mercantile class, gave him an insight into the whole tract of sentiment arising out of the jealousy between the political aristocracy and the plutocracy of his day. All that he writes is written with a living personal feeling which is unmistakable. Every phase of this multiplex social conflict was minutely_and vividly familiar to him. He was born tolerably well off. Like many a young man, he took the noble and loyal, but losing side. He tasted comparative poverty. He was by whatever train of circumstances reconciled to his victors. He became partly dependent upon their good offices. He adopted their politics. He preached poems to their adversaries, his former friends. He