members (being more than double that of the Lower House of Convocation, and nearly three times the proportion of that for the Canterbury Convocation).

2. That of this number 41 shall be chosen by the members of the Upper House.

3. That no communicant test (as at the Canterbury Convocation) shall be adopted.

And this scheme was left to be carried into execution before the next Convocation.

We are saved from the necessity of making any remarks on this extraordinary plan (of which the leading idea seems to have been to make it as unlike that of the Canterbury House as possible) by the fact that, after seven months, it was announced by the President that it would not be carried into effect; and our surprise that some of the Bishops, such as those of Durham, Chester, and Newcastle, can possibly have acquiesced in it, may be diminished by the scanty space of their deliberations. But the whole proceedings more than justify the contrast we have been obliged to draw between the two Convocations. The careful inquiries of the Canterbury Convocation, lasting over a year and a half the joint deliberations of the two Houses—the marked courtesy and consideration with which the leading suggestions of the Lower House were treated, and in the end adoptedto say nothing of the difference of the results—are, indeed, strangely unlike the two or three hours given to the subject at York, and the manner in which the Lower House is virtually set aside. It would be ridiculous to plead in excuse for this that the subject had been fully discussed at Canterbury, for the conclusions so summarily arrived at were the very opposite to those of the Canterbury Convocation; and with regard to the manner in which the Lower House was ignored, we can only say that there is no possible reason for its being denied the same share in the discussion and decision which it so fully received in London.

The subject of a Northern House of Laymen will, no doubt, be a matter of great difficulty, and we hope, when it again comes before the Northern Convocation, the following points will be attended to:-First, let the Lower House (and we trust we may add the Upper also) insist that the subject be discussed fully, and in the manner which was pursued at Canterbury. Secondly, let it be remembered that it will be a matter of extreme difficulty to create any able and influential House of Laymen to meet at York-on the lines, or anything like them, of the present York Convocation. With so many of

the leading northern laity in London-several of them being already in the Canterbury House of Laymen-who will habitually attend at York for the three days now devoted to Convocation? and is there any prospect, with the present scanty Houses, of regularly extending or increasing the number of meetings, or really supplying them with important work? Imagine, as things are now, a Convocation with the usual attendance, in the Lower House, of from fifty to sixty, and in the House of Laymen of a hundred, say, out of the proposed hundred and forty-four. Much indeed was said by the President' against undue clerical influence, and the way of guarding against this was by appointing forty-one episcopal nominees, who would obviously contain most of the important laymen in each diocese. It is plain that the forty-one will be as impossible as the hundred and forty-four who include them. A House of fifty or sixty northern laymen joining the hundred of the House of Laymen in London is a reasonable idea enough, but that a hundred and forty-four should be gathered together for some three days yearly, or twice a year, in the various York hotels, seems to us a hopeless, not to say an absurd, expectation, and one which, if carried out, would only exaggerate the evils of the present state of things.2

We have now nearly finished what we fear has been a tedious, as it has certainly been to ourselves an unpalatable, task, for it can have been no pleasure to describe the comparative failure, for some years at least, of an ancient and valuable Council of our Church. But on various grounds we have felt it right not to shrink from this; partly because the subject could be no longer avoided--partly again as a matter of simple justice—and partly on considerations of policy, which seem to us important to the whole Church. As a matter of justice, and even of historical truth, we have thought it right to indicate the main causes to which the failures of administration are due, and if in doing this we have also intimated our own opinion that the Lower House at York has substantially been engaged in the just maintenance of its own rights and position, we have felt it equally important to show that the differences to which we have referred have in no case involved or implied any difference between the two

1 Opening Address, 1886, p. 6.

The above was written before reading Mr. Spottiswoode's valuable letter to the Guardian of November 20, 1886, which has insisted on all the points above mentioned. It is plain that the adoption of this scheme would render-if it was not meant to render-any union with Canterbury impossible.

Houses, regarded as collective bodies. But from this subject we now gladly turn, trusting_that there may never be any future need to recur to it. The other point on which we would insist is one of infinitely more importance. For we are simply desirous to show, what these differences in themselves imply, that the time has obviously arrived when it is equally for the good of the Church, and of its two leading Councils themselves, that the Convocations of Canterbury and York should be combined into one great National Council of the English Church. We have already shown that the strong feeling in favour of this, which was expressed last year at York, existed in the very earliest days of the revived Convocation, which even in 1862 declared that the only satisfactory means of obtaining joint and harmonious action is by the union of the two Convocations of York and Canterbury into one body.' And if even then a Convocation at York was seen to be an anachronism, how much more must it be so now! It is indeed impossible, both by reason of the scanty members and the rare meetings at York, by the difficulties of any essential change in these respects, and by the extreme improbability that any satisfactory House of Laymen' will be formed to attend at York itself, that the Convocation of York should continue with any success to hold permanently a separate position. And, if so, is it not both an injury to the Church, and one that may even convey an appearance of disunion, that a much smaller and less influential Council should be unwilling to unite with the greater body of the Church for objects of universal Church interest?

We had written thus far when we read the following words of the Archbishop of Canterbury, spoken at the Mansion House Meeting of December II, for the erection of the 'Church House,' which seem to form the most appropriate ending to all that we have endeavoured to urge, and which must, in fact, make the union of the two Convocations merely a question of time.

'There is one reform,' says his Grace, which is more necessary than all others. Who would believe that in the nineteenth century the whole of England was divided by a zigzag line from east to west, and that all the deliberations of the Church had to be carried on partly on one side and partly on the other? Questions were really considered in duplicate, and a decision on one point might be arrived at by a narrow majority on one side of the line and an opposite decision arrived at by an equally narrow majority on the other side. This was not a desirable state of things, and conflicting decisions of this

character could not take place if a general meeting-place for the discussion of Church affairs existed. When in these days communication was so rapid and so easy, it was clear that circumstances and events would drive them to have, not two provincial synods, but one national synod.'

After a declaration so explicit from a speaker so exalted, the only danger can be that of unnecessary delay. The discussion on the Church House has indeed shown the reality of this, for any statement that it would become the Home and the means of a United Church Council would have been the best justification, and one that is now certainly needed, for proposing it. What the Archbishop of Canterbury calls the duplicate' discussion of every Church question is indeed the obvious waste of so much ability to the Church. No. one doubts that, in both Houses of the York Convocation, there are many men whose counsels would have an added value in a larger body, where they would soon learn to moderate the perfervidum ingenium which the heat of a narrow arena has perhaps occasionally stimulated. We hope we are not presumptuous in suggesting this thought to some of the leading members of both Houses at York. Let them at once take steps which shall show a determination to form, and not merely to talk about, a union, and the York disputes will quickly be forgotten, or be remembered only as having been, perhaps, an unavoidable step towards an important national object.

SHORT NOTICES.

Christus Consummator: Some Aspects of the Work and Person of Christ in relation to Modern Thought. By B. F. WESTCOTT, D.D. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886.)

ALL who are to any real extent acquainted with Dr. Westcott's writings must recognize in him an enthusiastic and energetic advocate of that view of life and of the universe which scientific materialism considers itself to have exploded. The probability of an anti-materialistic reaction is very differently estimated by persons who are of one mind in desiring it. Dr. Flint, in his Anti-Theistic Theories, appears to entertain the gloomiest anticipations. Archbishop Thomson, in the preface to his Word, Work, and Will, and Joseph Cook, in his Boston lectures on Certainties of Religion, are considerably more hopeful. But whatever reports watchmen' may bring us of the night,' no one can doubt that the Regius Professor of VOL. XXIII.--NO. XLVI.

ΙΙ

Divinity at Cambridge has been indefatigably labouring to promote this consummation. We are on the point,' he says in the present volume, 'of losing the sense of the spiritual, the eternal, as a present reality, as the only reality' (here is a Platonic touch), and so of falling under the tyranny of a onesided materialism'; whereas 'the unity of naturalism, which limits all knowledge to phenomena bound together by an inexorable sequence,' is in itself illusory, and 'can never bring peace;' 'it is when the physical order is held to be all, that life appears, and must appear, to be hopeless,' &c. He is not afraid of physical science; he deems it a disloyalty to ignore any ascertained facts, a duty to welcome the help which comes from every gain of human knowledge;' but he believes profoundly in the predominance of the spiritual over the material, and instead of resolving spirit into a mode of matter, he regards matter as translucent with spirit. He sees God's presence energizing through all life, working out a divine purpose, in all worlds and all ages, up to an appointed and all-satisfying consummation. Hence the title of these Westminster sermons, which points to Christ as 'the Fulfiller,' in whom all things are 'summed up' Those who listen to Dr. Westcott are lifted, for the time at least, into a higher atmosphere than that of sensuous experience; they learn something more of the powers of the world to come'; they gain a fresh conception of the transcendant aspects of life, of its mysteries, and far-reaching sequences, and immense issues, and spiritual 'awfulness' and 'wonderfulness,' as ordered for vast moral ends by the living and perfect Will of an eternal and archetypal Father. We could imagine a 'hardheaded' scientist putting aside Dr. Westcott's teaching as merely 'mystical.' We must not be afraid of terms; it is true, and all Christians will own it, that, as the late Professor Shairp says, 'those root-truths on which the foundation of our being rest are apprehended not logically at all, but mystically' (Culture and Religion, p. 81); or, in Dr. Mozley's words, the question of religious belief or unbelief depends largely on the existence or non-existence in the mind of certain 'primary religious assumptions' or starting-points (Lectures, p. 287): if a man has them not, the Christian argument will not touch him; as a sermon of Newman's expresses it, 'those who have not a vivid perception of the Divine Voice within them, and of the necessity of His existence from whom it issues, do not feel Christianity as a practical matter, and let it pass accordingly' (Paroch. Serm. ii. 22). But we must confess that, in a different and more special sense, the mystic or the idealist is, to our minds, somewhat too absolute in this accomplished and most earnest-hearted writer. There is too frequently a want of distinctness in his statements. We seem to walk under gorgeous clouds rather than in clear sunshine. The periods move on with a rhythmic solemnity, often with true beauty or stateliness of expression; but they need repeated reading before they yield up their full purport, and sometimes that purport is vaguer than is quite consistent with real helpfulness. In treatises, and even in sermons, a certain amount of allusiveness is stimulating; but we imagine that the audience in the Abbey must