in perfect harmony. We do not greatly desire a step which might lead to angry strife and to further loosening of the order and discipline of the Church of England, but we believe that the occasional occurrence of these interchanges of ministry, if they could be arranged with mutual satisfaction and without compromise of principle, would tend to promote Christian feeling and right thought everywhere. Hard angles, bitter innuendos, and gross caricatures would become less frequent, and there would be more mutual respect, and a deeper sense of the conscientiousness of the convictions in which we differ. The principles on which such intercommunion shall turn must not, however, be dishonouring to either party. Concession must not be all on one side; even the smallest compromise of conscience would be too great a price to pay for any secondary advantage that might flow from such intercommunion. We would not ask the Churchman to forego in our favour one jot of his conscientious belief in the Divine institution of his Church, or in the Providential order which invests the acts of a nation as such with a sacred and religious character; but we cannot, in order to enjoy this intercommunion, forego our protest against either position, or dismiss our deeply-cherished and positive conviction, that the authority and order of the Christian community should be in the hands of those who are the conscious subjects of the new and Heavenly Life, and who are personally loyal to the Lord Jesus Christ. Between the Free Churches themselves there is this mutual

recognition of conscientious conviction. When a Baptist minister preaches in the pulpit of a Presbyterian or Methodist, or any other similar interchange of Christian service takes place, the equality of conscience is recognised and no thought arises of its violation or compromise. The peculiar social distinction which is conferred in this country on the Episcopalian, and in Scotland on one form of Presbyterian Church government, together with the legal restrictions imposed upon every minister of the Church of England, is at present the perpetual preservative of the spirit of exclusiveness, and does, we imagine, contribute more to hide and resist the true unity of Christians

than all other causes combined.

Such interchanges of equal service, and such other opportunities for mutual recognition of our common Christianity, as circumstances suggest, will promote a healthier state of feeling. The 'patronage of the Dissenter will pass away as equally offensive to him that utters as to him that receives it. It will be generally known that the barriers which create and perpetuate sectional differences in the Church are too formidable to

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be lost sight of, but that union of spirit and the fellowship of Christ can overleap them, and undermine them, and interpenetrate them. Dividing oceans will be girdled and crossed by the friendly currents of electric sympathy. Christians will also learn the great truth for which the nineteenth century will be more remarkable than for any other, viz., that sectional differences in the Church are not its bane nor its curse, but one of its greatest blessings, whenever they can be coupled with Christian feeling, and freely developed in great nations. Should this high tone of Christian feeling be acquired, a sublimer result will be achieved than if the Pope at Rome reigned over a perfectly united Christendom. The dream of the Ultramontanist is retrogressive and ignoble, beside this dream of the true unity of Christendom.

Another course suggested by the Dean of Canterbury is the occasional united celebration of the Communion of the Lord's Supper, by those who profess and call themselves Christians, at which the words of institution only should be read, and the elements afterwards distributed in silence. We believe that in his proposal he is quite as eager to respect the scruples of Nonconformists as of Churchmen, and that his proposal takes this particular shape from the knowledge which he possesses of the former. We would not say a word which would discourage such a step as that which is here proposed, though we believe that, until much more of the fine spirit which the Dean himself has manifested has taken possession of those whose organizations for Christian fellowship and work have hitherto run in such varied and even hostile channels, it would partake of the hollowness of the platform demonstration.

Why should not this finer spirit prevail? With noble souls this service of reverential love to our invisible, but ever-present Lord, this symbol of consecration to His will, this profession of common loyalty to His kingdom, this acknowledgement of dependence upon the Bread of God which came down from heaven, this confession of oneness and community of need and danger, free from any theory of the relation between sacramental grace and episcopal order, would be no mere substitute for Christian charity. It seems to us that our episcopal friends would have the most to relinquish in conceding the simplicity of the demonstration which has been recommended or suggested as a possibility by the Dean of Canterbury. The Nonconformist would feel at home in the mere utterance of the wondrous words of the dying Lord; he would need no priestly consecration, and would not feel impelled towards postures of worship. He is trained to the exercise of this kind of charity. If, then, we can

meet on terms of common love to Christ, why should we not do so? The severest conflicts in the Church have raged over the meaning and method of a symbol. If the Church of this day shall learn the higher truth of the symbol, and its adaptation to divergent classes of mind, it will herald the coming of the day for which all other days were made.

The third suggestion made by the Dean is eminently practical, and if followed up, will ultimately lead to much more communion than the demonstrations of which he has sketched the outline. It is that efforts be made on both sides to promote mutual understanding and friendly intercourse. It will be dangerous to underrate the extent of the consequences and the intensity of the feeling which the national establishment of Episcopacy, and therefore the national sanction of religious inequality, has produced. One-half the professing Christians of the United Kingdom are at this moment supporting by voluntary and unaided effort the entire fabric of their Church organization; they are providing by the same means an amount of collegiate education for their ministers, which, if gathered together in some provincial cities, might assume the character of a great University. There are neither tithes, nor church rates, nor large endowments to help them do their work. They seldom even ask a court of law to decide any question affecting the large amount of property belonging to them; they have, with the exception of Roman Catholics, little rank or territorial wealth to ennoble them; they are compelled to work at a strain and at high pressure, often not in honourable competition with one another-which they well understand, and the laws of which they seldom transgress-but under direct antagonism from the wealth, and landed interest, and clerical influence of the favoured form of ecclesiastical government. In no other department of English politics and social life is the same phenomenon conspicuous. Conscientious convictions are generally respected. It is astonishing to observe the length to which men may go in their religious opinions, in their scientific heresies, in their political creed, and suffer, in consequence, nothing but a little 'chaff' or misapprehension. They may believe in republican institutions, or they may renounce all faith in God or man, and they suffer no social exclusion; they are not cast out of universities as evil; they are not regarded as necessarily and wilfully blinded, nor is their work ignored at all hazards; but let them once entertain a practical doubt as to the efficacy of Apostolical succession, and the Scriptural character or philosophic soundness of a State Church, and charity is at an end, and civil and social inequality begins! There are many dignitaries of the Church of England who

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repudiate the tone of public opinion and action on this subject; but whatever be its cause, it is a strange un-English fact, which has to be taken into account when fellowship and Christian communion between those who so strangely misunderstand each other, are broadly advocated. We shall not, on account of these remarks, be accused of unwillingness to promote a right understanding, a mutual recognition, a cordial Christian agreement on those great principles which we hold in common. We are satisfied that Nonconformists have much to learn in the school of Christian charity, though they have in our recollection made prodigious advances in a direction that would have been difficult for their forefathers to have conceived. It will be a happy day when Dissenters cease to 'rail' at 'the vantage-ground occupied by the State Church; but they will belie all their history if they do not continue to protest against all religious inequality in the administration of the laws of England. We believe that as an aid to transforming raillery into manly argument, evil suspicions into honest speaking, harsh misunderstandings into mutual respect and thankful co-operation, few things will be more serviceable than such sensible, gentle, courageous, and Christian utterances as those of the Dean of Canterbury. We accept them, moreover, as significant of the times, as indicative of the drawing nearer to each other of all high and Christ-like souls, as descriptive of that union to Christ on which the union of Christendom turns, as a conspicuous and notable illustration of the glorious fact that ' in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond 'nor free; but that all are one,' even as the Father and the Son are one, not in their visible manifestations, but in the Eternal Spirit.

ART. VIII.-(1.) Letter to the Right Hon. Chichester Fortescue, M.P., on the State of Ireland. By JOHN, EARL RUSSELL. Longmans. (2.) The Irish Church Question. A Letter to Lord Dufferin, K.P., etc. By the Rev. ALFRED T. LEE, LL.D. Rivingtons.

(3.) The Contemporary Review.' March, 1868. Strahan and Co. (4.) Speech of Edward Miall, Esq., M.P., in favour of the Impartial Disendowment of all Sects in Ireland, delivered in the House of Commons, May, 1856. Second Edition. Arthur Miall. (5). The Times' Newspaper. March, 1868.

Ir is a matter of congratulation that the Irish Church question should at last have passed out of the region of statistics. There is a time in all controversies when facts are of the first

importance, and it is the habit of the English mind to conduct the initiatory stages of public discussion with a sole and exclusive reference to such matters of detail. Indeed, it is almost impossible to reach the ordinary Anglo-Saxon intellect in any other way than through the medium of hard and palpable facts. Mr. Cobden probably understood this intellect better than any other modern agitator or statesman, and we find that in the earlier stages of the Free Trade movement he confined himself, in great measure, to the skilful exhibition of facts. He perfectly well knew that, to the eminently practical, and, perhaps, too practical English mind, a thing was of far more importance than a thought, and that there was no possibility of fixing in it a thought but by the repeated repetition of a thing. Of all nations in the world we have the least power of evolving anything out of our internal consciousness. We have never yet, in any of our dynastic revolutions, laid down an abstract principle of government. We have never yet passed a single law which has been avowedly based upon a principle. Burke once said that he hated abstract principles, and that they were of no use in the discussion of the practical politics of a nation, and this has been the belief of all the statesmen who preceded, and of all the statesmen who have succeeded him. There is something both to regret and to rejoice in this circumstance. More, probably, than anything besides, it has helped to give solidity to the progressive reforms of the English constitution. When, as in some other nations, laws have been based upon theories without reference to actual experiences, it has been universally found that they have no enduring character. The political philosophers of one age have always upset the political philosophers of the age preceding it. And so the governments of states, from the times of Greece and Rome, have travelled round a circle, generally ending just where they began. This should not be the history of a nation's growth, for it is not growth, but mere arbitrary experiment. The line that describes the political, social, and religious deve lopment of a people should be an ever-lengthening and an everbroadening line, never going back to the point from which it started; or, rather, the critical events in its history should resemble the upward steps of a wise and good man's life, whose experience has been derived from well-attested and often painfully-felt facts, who has drawn from those facts principles of higher and higher conduct, and who, at last, governs all his actions by a reference, not to what is merely expedient or profitable, but to what is just, righteous, and pure.

Something like this, we incline to believe, is the course to