character of the agitation. Minds which can see nothing else in it must be curiously constituted.

In illustration of the elasticity of the voluntary principle when left free, the Duke of Somerset said :

'He had presented a petition from Boston, where no church-rate had been levied for twenty years. No difficulty had been felt in meeting the expenses of the church, which were cheerfully raised by subscription; whereas during the time when church-rates were levied for extraordinary repairs of the fabric of the church, though greatly needed, church-rates could not be obtained; but since they had ceased, not only had the sum of 12,000l. been raised for extraordinary repairs, but two new churches had also been constructed on the voluntary principle.'

By retaining so much of the rate as is not resisted upon principle, we shall retain nearly the whole of the funds already applicable to the repair of country churches, and the mode of dividing it is the chief problem to be solved.

In the debate on Sir John Trelawney's Bill, both Sir George Grey and Sir George C. Lewis, after viewing the subject in all its bearings, expressed a decided opinion in favour of the schemes which exempt every rated or rateable inhabitant who should declare himself not a member of the Establishment. Dissenters, however, object to being registered or, as they say, ticketed, on the ground that they may thereby undergo a certain degree of humiliation or be even marked out for persecution. Churchmen apprehend that the wavering disciple may thus be forced into a premature declaration of dissent, or that a truant and repentant brother may be fixed in his alienation from the fold. Others object to drawing a line of social demarcation of any kind. But surely this is done already by the census we have quoted. Quietly to claim an exemption as not belonging to the Establishment, is a less hostile and offensive act than agitating or voting against a rate, or even than going about complaining of its injustice. The bare notion of increased liability to persecution is an absurdity, and we never heard of a genuine nonconformist who regarded the designation as a disgrace. As to new converts, or gentlemen of unformed. opinions, they are not in the habit of hiding their light under a bushel, or of slipping about in the dark or the twilight from one faith, creed, or tabernacle to another. They commonly make a parade of their spiritual trials or strivings, and find gratification in notoriety. The less weight is due to these objections, inasmuch as they were waived in favour of Sir George Grey's amendments, in 1856. If ticketing' be a degra

dation or an insult now, it must equally have been so then, when the representatives of the dissenting interest assented to it.

But means may be found of indulging every sort of scruple; for it is not necessary to require the formal profession of not belonging to the Establishment. The exemption might accrue upon the simple assertion that the claimant was contributing to some other place of worship; which might be a district church not vet reached by Lord Blandford's Bill, a chapel of ease, a Roman Catholic chapel, or a meeting-house. In fact, the bare claim of exemption in this form would literally commit the recusants to nothing; and as to its apprehended abuse from motives of cupidity, the rate in rural parishes does not average more than twopence in the pound, and generally falls far short of the amount which they have to pay on the voluntary principle.

Lord Grey, as has been his wont for some time on most subjeets, took up peculiar ground. In the debate on the Duke of Somerset's Bill, he remarked:

'We have heard it said that this Bill is an injustice to the Church of England. That is not a proper way of describing it. I should describe it as a measure of injustice, a measure of robbery against the laborious poor of the land. The labouring poor of this country are entitled to have their churches maintained by the land of the country, and yet that legal obligation is now proposed to be swept away without any compensation or substitute being provided. What is this but undisguised spoliation of the poor by the rich! The poor do not pay these rates, but they profit by the result, and their highest interests are concerned in the maintenance of the churches of the land.'

If our suggestion is adopted, the poor will lose nothing; for the same amount will be levied for places of worship, and the labouring class have as much interest in maintaining the meetinghouse as the church.

In the Bishop of London's excellent charge to the clergy of his diocese, Lord Grey's argument is earnestly pressed, and especially addressed to the wealthy owners of town property and the manufacturers; but his Lordship appears to have assumed that a scheme for the removal of this grievance is actually under the consideration of the Government.

Unless, however, Lord Derby has been misreported, he recently stated, in answer to a deputation, that his government did not intend to introduce such a measure; and on referring to Hansard, it will be found that the Prime Minister explained away, the day after it was uttered (July 13. 1858), the pledge given or understood to have been given by Mr. Disraeli in the House of Commons.

It would be useless, and might prove mischievous, to permit the revival of church-rates in parishes where they have been avowedly discontinued and replaced by some adoption of the voluntary principle. It would be equally impolitic to give the signal for a fresh series of vestry battles. We should therefore adopt so much, and so much only, of Sir George Grey's first amendment as relates to parishes where no rate has been made for five years, or where a rate has been formally rejected, before the passing of the Act. The Mortmain Acts may safely be set aside to the extent of authorising permanent grants of property in lieu of rates for the maintenance of places of worship; and the proposal to raise money in aid by pew-rents should not be hastily rejected. The members of the Establishment will find their account in dealing frankly and cordially with the Nonconformists; and although these cannot complain of being excluded from dealing with a fund to which they decline to contribute, they should retain (with this exception) their right of attending vestries and every other parochial privilege unimpaired.

We are far from setting up the scheme thus broadly indicated as a complete or unimpeachable solution of the difficulty. We only say that, in the opinion of most enlightened and unprejudiced persons who have carefully studied the subject, it is the best.

'Si quid novisti rectius istis,

Candidus imperti; si non, his utere mecum.'

If the recusants on religious grounds are exempted, they will perforce cease to agitate, and the Church will lose nothing but what may be easily replaced by the zeal and opulence of her own members. If she rejects the compromise on the strength of Lord Derby's professions, pure and unqualified abolition will be the alternative. The bigots of the House of Lords who, like the French emigrants of the First Revolution, seem to have learned and forgotten nothing had far better have taken their final stand on their Anti-Israelite prejudices than on their orthodox horror of Dissenters. Cruelty ' and injustice,' said Peter Plymley, must of course exist; but 'why connect them with danger? Why torture a bulldog when 'you can get a frog or a rabbit?' Why trifle with Mr. Bright when you might have gone on teasing Baron Rothschild or Alderman Salomons with comparative impunity? The Episcopal Bench, too, who supported the Premier to a man in July last, will do well to reflect how far in their zeal for the material props and adjuncts, they may be rapidly undermining the moral buttresses, of the Establishment.

6

ART. IV. 1. Monumenti delle Arte Cristiane Primitive nella Metropoli del Cristianesimo disegnati ed illustrati per cura di G. MARCHI. Architettura della Roma sotterranea Cristiana. 4to. Roma: 1844.

2. Les Catacombes de Rome. Par LOUIS PERRET. 6 vols. folio. Paris: 1852-57.

3. The Church in the Catacombs ; a description of the primitive Church of Rome, illustrated by its Sepulchral Remains. By CHARLES MAITLAND, M.D. London: 1847.

4. The Roman Catacombs ; or, some account of the Burial-Places of the early Christians in Rome. By Rev. J. SPENCER NORTHCOTE, M.A. London: 1857.

5. Fabiola, or the Church of the Catacombs. London: 1857.

GREAT would be the excitement of the learned and the

curious throughout the world, if it were suddenly announced that the daring and ingenious explorers of Babylon, Nineveh, or Memphis had discovered, beneath the accumulated ruins of those great cities, an immense labyrinth of subterranean communications,-a maze of several hundred miles in extent, carefully wrought by human hands in strata of rock peculiarly adapted to the execution and preservation of so remarkable a work. This interest would be still further increased, if it were ascertained that these mysterious abodes had served in past ages as the asylum of a persecuted religion and the receptacle of innumerable confessors and martyrs; that inscriptions still exist in great numbers, amongst these rock tombs, denoting the names, the profession, and, above all, the faith, of those who were deposited in them; that these contemporary records are sometimes accompanied by the symbols of martyrdom, and even by instruments of torture used in inflicting death; that many of these monumental records tally with the historical annals of the time; and, lastly, that from these crypts buried in the recesses of the earth, a spirit and a power went forth which has survived the overthrow of its imperial persecutors and the destruction of their proudest trophies, till by its influence a new law, a new civilisation, a new religion, sent forth its apostles throughout the habitable earth.

If some such impression might be anticipated from discoveries made in the far East, amongst the remains of nations long past away, and belonging to the dawn of society and knowledge, the researches which have recently thrown a fresh

and striking light on the monuments of subterranean Rome, appear to us to have a more direct and intense claim on the attention of our readers. They exist not in the deserted plains of Mesopotamia or the upper regions of the Valley of the Nile, but in the heart of Italy, on a site which has never ceased to attract the eager interest of European society. They belong to an age, imperfectly known to us indeed, because it is concealed from our view by the mystery which was necessary to the existence of the first Christian communities, and by the ruin which subsequently befell the Roman Empire; but many of the memorials they contain are contemporary records of primitive Christianity; the very dust in those vaults is the dust of men who carried with them the faith of the New Testament to their graves, who witnessed the persecutions,-wlfo must have seen their kinsmen, their friends, their pastors, torn from them by a thousand cruel deaths, or who shared their fate, who received the lessons of Christianity from teachers who lived in or near to the Apostolic age- and who have left to us, even now, in the architecture and ornaments of the Catacombs, the type of the Christian Church and the germ of Christian Art.

No doubt for several centuries, and especially since the Reformation, the Christian monuments of subterranean Rome have been regarded with great suspicion by writers and antiquaries not belonging to the Romish Church. It was and is notorious, that from these Catacombs the Papal hierarchy had drawn the relics, the sacred oils, and the memorials of real or pretended saints, which gave a colour to some of its most superstitious practices, and a form to its legendary martyrology. Nothing could be more natural than that, in rejecting the whole tissue of fable which artifice or credulity had interposed between man and the true objects of worship and of faith, the source from which so many of these traditions had been drawn should be regarded as one contaminated by deceit. Accordingly, it was loosely asserted by Protestant writers of the last century, that the Catacombs of Rome were, after all, no more than the arenaria or sand-pits of antiquity, from which the materials for building the city had from time immemorial been extracted; that the pretended monuments and remains of the early Christians had been deposited there by the priests of a later age, to impose on the superstition of the faithful; and that no reliance whatever could be placed on the evidence of these works with reference to the state of the Christian world anterior to the accession of Constantine and the peace of the Church. A very slight acquaintance with the Catacombs themselves, their amazing extent, their internal arrange