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Some Gallicans Non-Intrusionists.

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there, than the handle of their having been expunged. We are not aware that since the Reforination and the Council of Trent, any Romanists have defended the doctrine of popular election or non-intrusion, or have allowed to the Christian people any higher place or standing in the appointment of their pastors than a right of stating objections, except some of the defenders of the Gallican Liberties. They generally condemned the Concordat between Francis I. and Leo X., by which even the form of canonical election was abolished, and the whole matter of the appointment of bishops was divided between the King and the Pope. They were accustomed to denounce this arrangement, as implying that both parties gave away what did not belong to them, and what they had no right to sacrifice,-the King giving up the rights of his kingdom in conceding the necessity of a papal bull of investiture or institution, and the Pope giving up the rights of the Church, the clergy and the people, in conceding to the King the sole right of appointing bishops. The discussion of this subject led them to investigate carefully the ancient doctrine and practice of the Church in regard to elections, and the result was that approximation to Protestant and Presbyterian principles to which we have referred.

Richer unequivocally and strenuously maintains the principle of non-intrusion in its only fair and honest sense, as distinguished from a mere right of stating objections of the validity of which another party is to judge, and as implying an absolute veto or negative upon the appointment. And he argues in favour of the necessity of the people's consent, thus understood, not only from the undoubted doctrine and practice of the primitive church, but from the nature of religion and Christianity, and the objects and ends of the Church and the ministry. We have not room to give quotations from Richer in support of this position. They will be found in his "Defensio Libelli de Ecclesiastica et Politica Potestate," lib. ii. c. vii., sect. 7 and 25; and in his Treatise "De Potestate Ecclesiæ in rebus Temporalibus," lib. iv. c. 1 and 2. We prefer giving two short extracts from another defender of the Gallican Liberties, which will also have the advantage of shewing that the same views have continued to prevail down to the present day. They are taken from a work containing a large amount of very interesting information upon the whole subject of this article, entitled "Essai Historique sur les Libertés de l'Eglise Gallicane, et des autres Eglises de Catholicité, par M. Grégoire, ancien Evêque de Blois." It was published at Paris in 1820; and the second edition, from which we quote, appeared in 1826. Grégoire was one of the bishops who accepted what was called the civil constitution of the clergy, adopted by the Constituent Assembly in 1790, and was deprived of his office by the extraordinary and most tyrannical exercise of

power that accompanied the re-construction of the French Church, in virtue of the Concordat between Bonaparte and the Pope in 1801. Besides the work above mentioned, he rendered another service to the Gallican Liberties, by answering De Maistre's ultramontane book upon the subject. Upon the point we are at present considering, he makes the following statements:-"The Gallican Liberties, being just the right which the Church of France has to govern itself according to the ancient discipline, the spirit of these liberties tends to produce continually a return to primitive usages. Among these usages figure, in the first rank, the election of pastors by the clergy and the people, and the institution and consecrations of bishops by the metropolitan with his suffragans. On these subjects we can produce in abundance declarations of councils and of fathers, and facts."

"What mischief has been occasioned both to Church and State by the domination of the Popes over the temporal powers, and over bishops; by that of bishops over presbyters; and, finally, by that of Popes, bishops, and princes over the people! The temporal powers have recovered most of their rights, but it is not so with the bishops, especially the metropolitans, who have scarcely saved any thing from the shipwreck. And as to the faithful in general, being deprived, as well as the clergy, of the power of choosing their bishops, they are thus condemned to a sort of spiritual disinheritance. Natural and Divine right, apostolic tradition, the universal discipline of the primitive Church, the canons of councils, the decisions of Popes, the maxims of the holy fathers, all proclaim as inalienable the right of the faithful to have for their guides in the way of salvation none but those men whom they have chosen, or at least the choice of whom they have invited and ratified by their suffrages."*-C. ii. pp. 43, 44.

We cannot dwell longer upon this subject, but enough, we think, has been said to shew, that the discussions which have taken place in connexion with the assertion and maintenance of the Liberties of the Gallican Church, form a very important department in the history of the investigation of the principles that ought to regulate the relation between the civil and the ecclesiastical authorities, and that they afford most interesting and valuable confirmations of the opinions upon this subject, as well as upon the internal constitution of the Church, which have been generally entertained by the Presbyterians of Scotland.

* The original of this last clause is, " à n'avoir pour guides dans la voie du salut que des hommes qu'ils ont élus, ou du moins, dont par leurs vœux ils ont provoqué et ratifié le choix ;" and the statement is almost identical with the well-known declaration of Calvin, " Est impia ecclesiæ spoliatio quoties alicui populo ingeritur Episcopus, quem non petierit vel saltem libera voce approbarit." Inst. Lib. iv. c. v. sect. 3. "It is an impious robbery of the Church whenever a bishop is imposed upon any people, whom they have not asked for, or at least approved of with a free voice,"

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ART. VI.-The Poetical Works of WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, D.C.L., Poet Laureate, &c. London, 1849.

ANOTHER great spirit has recently gone from the midst of us. It is now three months since the nation heard, with a deep though quiet sadness, that an aged man of venerable mien, who for fifty years had borne worthily the name of English poet, had at length disappeared from those scenes of lake and mountain, where, in stately care of his own worth, he had fixed his recluse abode, and passed forward, one star the more, into the still unfeatured future, whither all that lives is rolling, and whither, as he well knew and believed, the Shakespeares and Miltons, whom men count dead, had but as yesterday transferred their kindred radiance. When the news spread, it seemed as if our island were suddenly a man the poorer, as if some pillar or other notable object, long conspicuous on its broad surface, had suddenly fallen down. It is right, then, that we should detain our thoughts for a little in the vicinity of this event; that, the worldly course of such a man having now been ended, we should stand for a little around his grave, and think solemnly of what he was. Neither few nor unimportant, we may be sure, are the reflections that should suggest themselves over the grave of William Wordsworth.

Of the various mysteries that the human mind can contemplate none is more baffling, and at the same time more charming to the understanding, than the nature of that law that determines the differences of power and mental manifestation between age and age. That all history is an evolution, that each generation inherits all that had been accumulated by its predecessor, and bequeathes in turn all that itself contains to its successor, is an idea to which, in one form or another, science binds us down. But, native as this idea now is in all cultivated minds, with how many facts, and with what a large proportion of our daily speech, does it not still stand in apparent contradiction! Looking back upon the past career of our race, does not the eye single out, as by instinct, certain epochs that are epochs of virtue and glory, and others that are epochs of frivolity and shame? Do we not speak of the age of Pericles in Greece, of the Augustan age in Rome, of the outburst of chivalry in modern Europe, of the noble era of Elizabeth in England, and of the sad decrepitude that followed it? And is there not a certain justice of perception in this mode of speaking? Does it not seem as if all ages were not equally favoured from on high, gifts both moral and intellectual being vouchsafed to one that are all but withheld from another?

As with individual men so with nations and with humanity at large, may not the hour of highest spiritual elevation and sternest moral resolve be nearest the hour of most absolute obliviousness and most profound degradation? Has not humanity also its moods, now brutal and full-acorned, large in physical device, and pregnant with the wit of unconcern; again, touched to higher things, tearful for very goodness, turning an upward eye to the stars, and shivering to its smallest nerve with the power and the sense of beauty? In rude and superficial expression of which fact, have not our literary men coined the common-place that a critical and sceptical age always follows an age of heroism and creative genius? These, we say, are queries which, though they may not be answered to their depths, it is still useful to put and ponder. One remark only will we venture in connexion with them. According to one theory it is a sufficient explanation of these moral and intellectual changes in the spirit of nations, to suppose that they take place by a law of mere contagion or propagation from individual to individual. One man of powerful and original nature, or of unusually accurate perceptions, makes his appearance in some central, or, it may be, sequestered spot; he gains admirers or makes converts; disciples gather round him, or try to form an opinion of him from a distance; they, again, in their turn, affect others, till, at last, as the gloom of the largest church is slowly changed into brilliance by the successive lighting of all its lamps, so a whole country may, district by district, succumb to the peculiarity of a new influence. Now, this is perfectly true; and it would be indeed difficult to estimate the amazing efficacy of such a law of incessant diffusion from point to point over a surface; but we are convinced that this mode of representing the fact under notice does not convey the whole truth. Concerning even the silent pestilences we have been recently taught that they do not wholly depend on transmission from individual to individual, but are rather distinct derangements in the body of the earth itself, tremors among its electricities and imponderables, alterations of the sum-total of those material conditions wherewith human life has been associated. In like manner, as appears to us, must those streaming processes of sympathy and contagion, whereby a moral or intellectual change is diffused over a community, be regarded as but the superficial indications of a deep contemporaneous agitation pervading the whole frame of Nature. From the mineral core of this vast world, outwards to the last thoughts, impulses, and conclusions of us its human inhabitants, there runs, as science teaches, a mystic law of intercourse and affinity, pledging its parts to act in concert. The moral and intellectual revolutions of our world, its wars, its new philosophies, its outbursts of creative genius, its

Eras of English Poetry.

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profligate sinkings, and its noble recoveries, all must rest, under the decree of supreme wisdom, on a concurrent basis of physical undulations and vicissitudes. When, therefore, a man starts up in any locality, charged with a new spirit or a new desire, there, be sure, the ground around him is similarly affected. New intellectual dispositions are like atmospheres; they overhang whole countries at once. It is not necessarily by communication or plagiarism that the thought excogitated to-day in London breaks out to-morrow in Edinburgh, or that persons in Göttingen and Oxford are found speculating at the same time in the same direction. In our own island, for example, it is a fact capable of experimental verification, that whatever is being thought at any one time in any one spot, is, with a very small amount of difference, being independently thought at the same time in fifty other places at all distances from each other. And yet it is equally true that in every moral or spiritual revolution there is always a leader, a forerunner, a man of originality, in whose individual bosom the movement seems to have been rehearsed and epitomized; and that, in the beginning of every such revolution, the power of contagion from man to man, and the machinery of the clique, school, or phalanx, must come into play.

We do not think that these remarks are too remote or abstract for the present occasion. The nineteenth century, it appears to us, is a sufficiently large portion of historic time; England is a sufficiently large portion of the historic earth; and the poetical literature of England, or of any other nation, is a sufficiently important element in that nation's existence to justify our viewing that remarkable phenomenon, the revival of English poetry in the nineteenth century, in the light of the most extreme general conceptions that can be brought to bear upon it. Against the preceding observations, therefore, as against what seems an appropriate background, let us try to bring out the main features of the phenomenon itself, so far, at least, as these can be exhibited with reference to the life and writings of its most " representative man." And first, of Wordsworth regarded historically. From Dryden till about fifty years ago, say our authorities in literary history, was an era of poetical sterility in England. When Coleridge gave lectures in London on the English poets, he divided them into three lists or sections; the first including all the poets from Chaucer to Dryden; the second, all those from Dryden inclusive till the close of the eighteenth century; and the third, all those of his own generation. The view presented by him of the characters of these three periods relatively to each other, was essentially that conveyed in the strange theory of alternate ebb and flow, alternate immission and withdrawal of power, as regulating the progress of the universe. In other words,

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