gious matters, in these times, as of individual tendencies towards such practices. And few will refuse to admit, that when the conscience whispers that such and such a practice is superstitious, we are too apt to quiet her warnings by the weak excuse, “an error on the right side;" "at least, I am more sure in overdoing than in falling short, either in faith or practice." We know that these times have been characterized as the times of scepticism and unbelief, and so, to a certain extent, they are; but yet who can read the diurnal accounts of frauds and impositions, especially among the poor in the country, and not acknowledge the prevalence of superstition among our people; and that, too, at times, when we should least expect it? The truth is, we do not dare to inquire into our hearts, and to ask each ourselves how superstitious we really are. Is it among the illiterate alone, that the sacramental elements, as well of baptism as of the eucharist, are regarded as infallible cures for certain physical diseases? We are afraid we should put this century sadly out of conceit of itself, were we to disclose a few facts gathered in many a wandering over England, and confined, not to the poor alone, or to the child that had not ceased to listen to its nurse's tales. Many a brave man, who has stood unblanched amid shot and shell, has feared to sleep in a haunted chamber, or to cross a churchyard to which the village gossips have attached a bad name. And when people boldly point to the inconsistencies in ghost-stories, and to the manifest falsehood of the evidence in the majority of the trials for sorcery; we too often catch at the objections with a joy that is based on the remembrance, that there is not an à priori reason against the Almighty permitting the Evil One to inspire mortals with a portion of his evil spirit, in order to perfect our trial on earth. Nine persons out of ten invert the order of superstition and false forms of religion: they talk of this or that religion introducing superstition, as if it was non-existent until that form of religion was created; on the contrary, superstition has been, and ever will be, the mother of false religion. Nothing can be more vain than to imagine that true religion will ever be promoted by superstition.

Let us not be misunderstood: it were nothing short of irreligion to deny Satan's empire; there may possibly be strange delusions which he exercises upon men's minds quite as powerful now as the charms of Egyptian magicians: if he could hinder St. Paul, we cannot, perhaps, over-estimate his power, certainly not his malice. Witchcraft and diabolic sacraments may not be altogether one vast system of negations; it is right to fear and to suspect these evils, and it is right also to meet their supposed existence with spiritual arms. Because Cotton Mather's views were not of the Church, he was permitted to believe in self-delusion, and to commit a tremendous sin : his error was not so much faith in witchcraft, as his attempts to exorcise without the Church's gifts.

Letters on National Religion. By the Rev. C. SMITH. Cambridge: Deighton. 1832.

The Rectory of Valehead. 1829. Smith, Elder and Co.

The Church of God. By the Rev. R. W. EVANS. Cambridge: Deighton. 1832.

Testimonies of W. Wordsworth and of S. T. Coleridge to Catholic Truth. Leeds Christian Miscellany.

The Kingdom of Christ; or, Hints to a Quaker respecting the Principles, Constitution, and Ordinances of the Catholic Church. By F. D. MAURICE, M.A. Chaplain of Guy's Hospital, and Professor, &c. Second Edition. 2 vols. London: Rivingtons.

1842..

Nor quite an hundred years ago, the poet Gray, anathematizing a dull book, described it as containing "whole pages of common-place stuff, that for stupidity might have been wrote by Dr. Waterland, or any other grave divine." Now Gray was neither an unbeliever, nor a flippant nor a shallow person; but he was a man of letters, and looked on Theology as nearly any other man of letters in that day would have done. How would it have astonished him, as well as many between his time and our own, could it have been foretold that a day would arrive, when, from no lack of literature, even the very lightest-a day in which Poets were to have greater honour than ever he saw conferred on them; a day teeming with attractive Fiction of all sorts; a day in which whatever other faculties might be in active exercise, the gift of humour most assuredly should-the prominent subject of conversation should be, the Theologians of the time, and their sayings and doings! And this not in one circle only, but in every cognizable one; in the West End of London, and, as we have lately been assured, in the back-settlements of America, chance talk will naturally end in discussing the merits, or demanding the latest intelligence, of Messrs. Newman and Pusey. The great Church movement which is so associated with those two names is, viewing it merely as a Phenomenon, one of the most conspicuous features of our times; all eyes, whatever be their faculty of measuring its dimensions, or of tracing its form, are constrained to gaze upon it; and whether the attendant emotions be those of Triumph, Joy, Uneasiness, Alarm, or Hatred, the subject is an uppermost one in all minds,

Of course, those to whom the whole matter is an annoyance, are ready enough with plausible explanations of this portent, such as that an excited age must always want variety in its excitement, and that Theology may take its turn as a fashionable stimulus, quite as well as anything else. Now this may perhaps explain too much of the interest taken by the upper classes in the outward and superficial

aspects of the Oxford school; but it will not explain the vast progress of that school itself in all educated ranks; and still less the increasing hold that the high doctrines of the Church and the Sacraments are taking of minds unconnected with, and not always very kindred to, the Oxford writers. Make what you like of the less respectable concomitants of the phenomenon, find as many degrading explanations as you can of its more superficial manifestations, resolve the change and the seeming enthusiasm of the frivolous and the vain, into their original frivolity and vanity, as much as you please; when you have done all these things, you still leave a great portent behind. There is still a great Church movement which you may hate, but which you cannot despise-the Catholic Church is a word which is surely fast tending to have some great meaning, for good or for ill. Mighty powers are in action; the fountains of the great deep are opened. Whither we are tending, none may venture exactly to tell; nor need those who feel that they are moving, and that they are moving under the guidance of a Heavenly Light, care exactly to know. For them the words, "Lo, I am with you always," are enough. But it may serve to strengthen the Faith of such, that they are obeying no deception, and in itself it must needs be a pious and profitable work, to trace, as far as we can, the various causes which have been made in our day, to concur towards one end. If we find that the confluence has been from most distant sources, that all the great tendencies of our age have borne upon this one object -the Catholic Church-then we see enough to answer the man who sneers at those who are earnestly occupied with that object; then too we see enough at once to solemnize and awe as well as encourage and gladden our hearts; and then too, if we feel sure that this Catholic Church be indeed the Kingdom of God, do we sce His manifold Wisdom and Might.

Before entering on this inquiry, there is a previous consideration which gives it additional solemnity. The time seems to have come for a further manifestation of the Catholic Church than we have seen for ages. Secular causes and considerations are bringing men together; geographical distance is losing more than half its power to keep them asunder: "Many are running to and fro, and knowledge is being increased." There is a secular gathering of men which, in order that it be blessed and sanctified, demands for them a spiritual Unity. The causes which were keeping them apart are being done away. This is an important consideration. It is undeniable that in the beginning of the Church, although we cannot ascribe her Unity to anything short of a spiritual principle, she was provided with a secular framework of society, which greatly aided her in its development. We do not mean to say that the Roman Empire was either the ideal of Human Society in earthly respects, or the best ally of the Church; our opinion being the very contrary. But almost commensurate with the Church, and combined, coherent, bringing men together from the most opposite regions as it was, it

became, as we have said, a great assistance to her in the development of her Unity, and, in virtue of the characteristics to which we have referred, would have thrown on Herself the whole blame of any stoppage of Communion, had such then arisen to any great extent, or in any serious permanence. After its fall, a new state of things began. The history of modern Europe is a history of the growth of nations out of the great mass of the Roman Empire. The confusion into which that was thrown, was not left unvisited by formative principles, which, gradually casting off on the one hand such Imperial traditions as continued to hold Europe secularly together, and on the other, gradually aggregating all such smaller tribes as tended by great natural affinities towards union, did by this process at once of contraction and enlargement, fix and shape the great countries of Europe in their present dimensions and aspects. How slow a process this has been, how comparatively recent are the completed formation and fixing of the Britain, the France, the Spain, the Austria of our own time, we need not say at present. It is a truth which every man may master by a little reflection, but which is seldom considered, remembered, or realized as it ought to be. Now this process, as far as it has been Divine, is to be reverenced; and the nations in which it has issued, are to be regarded as God's Ordinance, ordained for some high end. But, as in all history we observe God's Purpose and man's infirmity strangely mingled, so here, though we cannot doubt that the formation of nations each integrally independent was ordained for good, it is easy to see that of necessity it gave scope for whatever might be tending to division in the Church. And thus, other causes conspiring, did Christendom become miserably divided.

Now in such a state of affairs, although it must still have been every man's duty to be Catholic, and though the members of a really Catholic Church must have been furnished with all essential resources for being so to the salvation of their own souls, yet there cannot have been, taking the best people at their best, all the fruits of Catholicity as manifested in the whole range and tone of thought, and in all habitual sayings and doings. Men cannot have duties beyond their allotted range. And thus, miserable as is much of our English retrospect, we may console ourselves with believing that many of our fathers were better Catholics than they seem to us, or than we should be were our words and actions the same as theirs. They may not have been called on, and not very fit, to make definitions or statements of the Church or the Sacraments, and yet may have been ranging among the immunities and privileges of the one, and living on the Heavenly nourishment that flows through the other; and they may have had what we think a very narrow range and sympathy, may have spoken, and even felt about the Church as though it were limited to their own country, and been radically Catholic notwithstanding; our Catholic duties, as we have said, being determined by the precise amount of our practical knowledge

of men, and our range of feeling and action. He who really, and in a practical way, knows no more than three adjoining parishes, may be a good Catholic in his feeling and behaviour within them. He who has not a duty, nor even a practical thought or feeling beyond his country, may be a good Catholic within its boundaries. The day will come when the world itself shall be too little for the fellowship of the Church; when he would be a sectarian, were such a case possible, who should limit himself to our planet. If, therefore, even the elect spirits of the ages immediately preceding our own, who must of necessity have been radically Catholic, present us with many phenomena which would be unsuitable amid a generally diffused Catholicism, it is easy to see that in the absence of such, the majority must have been altogether un-Catholic. And it is equally easy to see that the state of affairs which, if it did not justify, at least in great measure accounted for, the divisions of Christendom, is passing away. The formation of Nations in Western Europe seems a completed work; our instinctive feeling is that each, be it Britain, France, or Spain, must through every vicissitude continue Britain, France, or Spain, for good or for ill. While, therefore, national development is a completed work, other processes are going on, which, drawing men together as they are doing, demand, as we have said, a Catholic Church, in order that their operation may be wholesome and blessed; and the duty of keeping this object before her is especially incumbent on England, as is indicated in a thousand ways, in the wide range of thought and feeling, in the facilities of movement, and consequent enlarged intercourse with mankind now opened to us, in our ever-increasing colonial empire, in the Missionary character which we are now bound, as we would avoid National Apostasy, to take up, and in others which cannot be dwelt on at present.

That we have good reason for believing that God is mysteriously training us for a more Catholic development than we have known for ages, and, consequently, for believing that He for His Part will not be wanting to us if we dutifully endeavour after such development, it will be the aim of the following remarks to show, by means of the argument which we announced at the outset—the confluence of People and tendencies amongst us-all bearing on this one point.

Recent disclosures would at first sight seem to assign to the great ecclesiastical movement at present in progress, the origin of a political emergency. This is the impression which is made at first, both by Mr. Perceval's and Mr. Palmer's pamphlets. On the latter, by far the most important piece of recent history which has appeared, we dwelt at length in a late number. Again, however, we must express our conviction that to ascribe the progress of Church principles to the emergency of 1833,-to represent the steady and clear proclamation of them which has ever since been made merely as a means of meeting that emergency, is not more