fication or Righteousness, which many would make of it. During the preaching in the afternoon, as the storm grew more furious without and the church more gloomy within, and the deep tones of the preacher's voice, rising sometimes into startling loudness, mingled with the tremendous blasts of the wind, and with the sobs and groans of the poor miners, who sometimes threw up their arms wildly into the air in the ecstasy of their emotion, it was assuredly a strange and solemn scene. Mr. A., speaking of the church itself, called it the spiritual birthplace of many noble and distinguished persons; and he pointed out the very seats they had occupied when their hearts were touched. He appeared to me a kind of English Louis Harms, in his rugged individuality and imperious dogmatism, mingled as they were with deep, simple, primitive piety. He ruled his rocky vicarate at Land's End with a monarch's sway.

The generous hospitality of Mr. A. and his family to myself, a perfect stranger, was something which seemed to me beautiful, and which I can never forget. He is certainly a man whose earnestness and profound consecration to his Master's work cannot be doubted, if one cannot agree with him in all his views. He repudiates with scorn the idea of being considered to be the leader of a sect in the English Church, as there has been some attempt on the part of his admirers and disciples to make of him. But my good host was, I think, at fault in his confident estimate of the power of the High

Church movement. Tractarianism has spent its force. At one time, inspired by the genius of Newman, the learning of Pusey, and the sweet music of Keble's song, it was mighty, but it has already had its day, and now lives only in the puerilities of Ritualism. That which was true in it has been dragged down and overwhelmed by that which was false. It has failed to Orientalize the English Church, or to change England into a happy mediæval land, rejoicing in the sound of the convent bell. We would not say that it has done no good, but it has striven to set up the dead form of the Church, before the living Christ; it has denied the rights of individual conscience and reason, and it cannot thus hope to control and lead English mind. The reaction of this, in the main untrue, though in some respects learned and refined ecclesiasticism manifesting many traits of the noblest unselfishness, is rending anew the English Church, and armed powers, strong to contend against the truth, and the very life of the Christian faith, have sprung up from the sowing of the dragon's teeth. I believe, however, in the essential truth of Mr. A.'s idea of the visible unity of the Christian Church. The best minds in Christendom have always pleaded for unity; but it is not in the form in which Mr. A. puts it. It is not in uniformity of order, government, or worship, but in this, that the true Church is the true brotherhood of man, and all who love Christ, who hold to the Head, shall love one another, and shall know one another, not theoretically and invis

ibly, but visibly and openly; they shall not oppose and wound each other; they shall be as in the primitive times one in deed and truth, working together with gladness to recover the world to God. "There is one body and one Spirit." This great truth is superior to Protestantism, or Catholicism, or any other Churchism. There is an ideal unity, toward which all should ever tend and strive, but that this ideal unity will ever be perfectly and concretely realized on earth, we have more doubt about, and can hardly believe. After all we would be chary to condemn the earnest strivings and methods of any who sincerely profess to love and serve Christ on earth; and I must confess that the few "High Church" clergymen in whose society I have happened to be thrown, though I could not agree with them at all in their views, were personally by far the most scholar-like, refined, and interesting men of all the English clergymen whom I

met.

Having now reached the "Land's End" of England, both physical and spiritual, let us turn around and retrace our course northward, until in the neighborhood of Bristol we come upon our former steps, and thus will have completed the circuit of this little land, little in area, but vast in crowded interest and power.

CHAPTER XXIII.

NORTH DEVON AND WELLS.

FROM Exeter I crossed over to Barnstaple, on the North Devon coast, going from water to water, or from the river Exe to the Torridge, in about two hours. An old Cornish rebel once threatened to cut England through by a channel here, and to make South Devon and Cornwall an island; this would have been a "Dutch Gap" with a vengeance. But forty miles or less of canal, through a country presenting few difficulties, were no such great thing after all. The ride was through a thoroughly pastoral country, with great numbers of sheep and red Devon cattle feeding in the meadOWS. The first sight of the river, bridge, and tall tower of Barnstaple was pleasing; and I found it to be a lively little town, with the invariable one long street, and the two hotels of the "Golden Lion" and the "Fortescue Arms," side by side, in spirited but harmonious rivalry.

Bideford, eight miles and a half from Barnstaple, looked even now, as Kingsley has so vividly described it in his "Westward Ho!" and I really seemed myself to have seen it before, and to have strolled on its long quay. It is one of those old

gray sea-coast towns that do not essentially change, reminding one somewhat of Ayr in Scotland. The tide comes pouring in magnificently up the wide estuary of the Torridge River, and churning through the many-arched stone bridge, whose builders, according to the chronicler of Sir Amyas, gained from the good bishop Grandison of Exeter, "participation in all spiritual blessings forever." This famous bridge is an eighth of a mile long, with twenty-four arches, solid and without ornament. The town clusters in the form of an amphitheatre upon the steep hillside, from the summit of which is a wide river and sea-view; and one might easily fancy he saw in some ship melting into the bright sunset light, the good ship Rose, as she was setting forth on her long voyage to the golden regions of the Western Main. The river, the sea, the sun, "Westward Ho !

all here say

I rode to Clovelly, around through Yeovale, by "Northam Tower" and "Pebble Ridge," at which last place Ocean has done what Brunel could hardly have done under the same conditions, built a straight wall of rounded pebble-stones, regularly laid with a flat top, two miles long, which serves as an effectual bar to her encroachments, at the same time immovable and permeable," the labor of an age in piled stones." It is strange that this hint which Ocean has given of constructing sea-walls of round pebble or paving stones, simply heaped together in a compact form, has not been copied by man.