you, objects, not of hope and virtuous_emula- darkest ages would be a most happy event. It tion, but of hopeless, envious pining. Educate is not necessary that a man should be a Chrishim, if you wish him to feel his degradation. tian to wish for the propagation of Christianity Educate him, if you wish to stimulate his crav- in India. It is sufficient that he should be a ing for what he never must enjoy. Educate European not much below the ordinary Euro him, if you would imitate the barbarity of that pean level of good sense and humanity. Competty Celtic tyrant who fed his prisoners on pared with the importance of the interests at salted food till they called eagerly for drink, stake, all those Scotch and Irish questions and then let down an empty cup into the dun- which occupy so large a portion of Mr. Gladgeon, and left them to die of thirst." Is this to so- stone's book sink into insignificance. In no licit, to persuade, to submit religion to the free part of the world, since the days of Theodosius, choice of man? Would a fine of a thousand has so large a heathen population been subject pounds—would imprisonment in Newgate for to a Christian government. In no part of the six months, under circumstances not disgrace- world is heathenism more cruel, more licenful-give Mr. Gladstone the pain which he tious, more fruitful of absurd rites and perniwould feel, if he were to be told that he was to cious laws. Surely, if it be the duty of be dealt with in the way in which he would government to use its power and its revenue himself deal with more than one-half of his in order to bring seven millions of Irish Cacountrymen? tholics over to the Protestant Church, it is a We are not at all surprised to find such in- fortiori the duty of the government to use its consistency even in a man of Mr. Gladstone's power and its revenue in order to make setalents. The truth is, that every man is, to a venty millions of idolaters Christians. If it be great extent. the creature of the age. It is to a sin to suffer John Howard or William Penn no purpose that he resists the influence which to hold any office in England, because they are the vast mass, in which he is but an atom, not in communion with the Established Church, must exercise on him. He may try to be a surely it must be a crying sin indeed to admit man of the tenth century: but he cannot to high situations men who bow down, in temWhether he will or no, he must be a man of ples covered with emblems of vice, to the the nineteenth century. He shares in the mo-hideous images of sensual or malevolent gods tion of the moral as well as in that of the phy- But no. Orthodoxy, it seems, is more shocksical world. He can no more be as intoleranted by the priests of Rome than by the priests as he would have been in the days of the Tudors, than he can stand in the evening exactly where he stood in the morning. The globe goes round from west to east; and he must go round with it. When he says that he is where he was, he means only that he has moved at the same rate with all around him. When he says that he has gone a good way to the west-dered travellers; and for the car which grinds ward, he means only that he has not gone to its way through the bones of self-immolated the eastward quite so rapidly as his neigh pilgrims. "It would be," says Mr. Gladstone, bours. Mr. Gladstone's book is, in this re- "an absurd exaggeration to maintain it as the spect, a very gratifying performance. It is the part of such a government as that of the Brimeasure of what a man can do to be left be-tish in India to bring home to the door of every hind by the world. It is the strenuous effort subject at once the ministrations of a new and of a very vigorous mind to keep as far in the totally unknown religion." The government rear of the general progress as possible. And ought indeed to desire to propagate Chrisyet, with the most intense exertion, Mr. Glad-tianity. But the extent to which they must stone cannot help being, on some important do so must be "limited by the degree in which points, greatly in advance of Locke himself; the people are found willing to receive it." and with whatever admiration he may regard He proposes no such limitation in the case of Laud, it is well for him, we can tell him, that Ireland. He would give the Irish a Protestant he did not write in the days of that zealous pri- Church whether they like it or not. "We bemate, who would certainly have refuted the lieve," says he, "that that which we place expositions of Scripture which we have quoted before them is, whether they know it or not, by one of the keenest arguments that can be calculated to be beneficial to them; and that, addressed to human ears. if they know it not now, they will know it when it is presented to them fairly. Shall we, then, purchase their applause at the expense of their substantial, nay, their spiritual interests?"

This is not the only instance in which Mr. Gladstone has shrunk in a very remarkable manner from the consequences of his own theory. If there be in the whole world a state to which this theory is applicable, that state is the British Empire in India. Even we, who detest paternal governments in general, shall admit that the duties of the governments of India are, to a considerable extent, paternal. There the superiority of the governors to the governed in moral science is unquestionable. The conversion of the whole people to the worst form that Christianity ever wore in the

of Kalee. The plain red brick building Adullam's Cave, or Ebenezer Chapel-where uneducated men hear a half educated man talk of the Christian law of love, and the Christian hope of glory, is unworthy of the indulgence which is reserved for the shrine where the Thug suspends a portion of the spoils of mur

And why does Mr. Gladstone allow to the Hindoo a privilege which he denies to tne Irishman? Why does he reserve his greatest liberality for the most monstrous errors? Why does he pay most respect to the opinion of the least enlightened people? Why does he with hold the right to exercise paternal authority from that one government which is fitter to ex ercise paternal authority than any government

hat ever existed in the world? We will give | which his system would produce if tried in the reason in his own words.

India, but that he did not like to say so lest he
should lay himself open to the charge of sacri-
ficing principle to expediency, a word which is
held in the utmost abhorrence by all his school.
Accordingly he caught at the notion of a treaty
nated in some rhetorical expression which he
-a notion which must, we think, have origi
has imperfectly understood. There is one ex-
cellent way of avoiding the drawing of a false
conclusion from a false major, and that is by
And thus it is in the present case.
having a false minor. Inaccurate history is an
admirable corrective of unreasonable theory.
A bad ge-

"In British India," he says, "a small number of persons advanced to a higher grade of civilization, exercise the powers of government over an immensely greater number of less cultivated persons, not by coercion, but under free stipulation with the governed. Now, the rights of a government, in circumstances thus peculiar, obviously depend neither upon the unrestricted theory of paternal tious contract of indefinite powers, but upon principles, nor upon any primordial or fictian express and known treaty, matter of posi-neral rule is laid down and obstinately maintive agreement, not of natural ordinance."

tained, wherever the consequences are not too monstrous for human bigotry. But when they become so horrible that even Christchurch shrinks-that even Oriel stands aghast-the rule is evaded by means of a fictitious contract. One imaginary obligation is set up against another. Mr. Gladstone first preaches to governments the duty of undertaking an enterprise just as rational as the Crusades-and then dispenses them from it on the ground of a treaty which is just as authentic as the donation of Constantine to Pope Sylvester. His system resembles nothing so much as a forged bond with a forged release endorsed on the back of it.

Where Mr. Gladstone has seen this treaty we cannot guess; for, though he calls it a "known treaty," we will stake our credit that it is quite unknown both at Calcutta and Madras, both in Leadenhall Street and Cannon Row-that it is not to be found in any of the enormous folios of papers relating to India which fill the book-cases of members of Parliament-that it has utterly escaped the researches of all the historians of our Eastern empire-that, in the long and interesting debates of 1813 on the admission of missionaries to India, debates of which the most valuable part has been excellently preserved by the care of the speakers, no allusion to this im- With more show of reason he rests the portant instrument is to be found. The truth claims of the Scotch Church on a contract. is, that this treaty is a nonentity. It is by co- He considers that contract, however, as most ercion, it is by the sword, and not by free sti- unjustifiable, and speaks of the setting up of pulation with the governed, that England rules the Kirk as a disgraceful blot on the reign of India; nor is England bound by any contract William the Third. Surely it would be amuswhatever not to deal with Bengal as she deals ing, if it were not melancholy, to see a man with Ireland. She may set up a Bishop of of virtue and abilities unsatisfed with the caPatna and a Dean of Hoogley-she may grant lamities which one church, constituted on false away the public revenue for the maintenance principles, has brought upon the empire, and of prebendaries of Benares and canons of repining that Scotland is not in the same state Moorshedabad--she may divide the country with Ireland-that no Scottish agitator is raisinto parishes, and place a rector with a stipending rent and putting county members in and in every one of them, without infringing any positive agreement. If there be such a treaty, Mr. Gladstone can have no difficulty in making known its date, its terms, and, above all, the precise extent of the territory within which we have sinfully bound ourselves to be guilty of practical atheism. The last point is of great importance. For as the provinces of our Indian empire were acquired at different times, and in very different ways, no single treaty, indeed no ten treaties, will justify the system pursued by our government there.

The plain state of the case is this: No man in his senses would dream of applying Mr. Gladstone's theory to India, because, if so applied, it would inevitably destroy our empire, and, with our empire, the best chance of spreading Christianity among the natives. This Mr. Gladstone felt. In some way or other his theory was to be saved, and the monstrous consequences avoided. Of intentional misrepresentation we are quite sure that he is incapable. But we cannot acquit him of that unconscious disingenuousness from which the most upright man, when strongly attached to an opinion, is seldom wholly free. We believe that he recoiled from the ruinous consequences

out-that no Presbyterian association is divid ing supreme power with the government—that no meetings of precursors and repealers are covering the side of the Calton Hill-that twenty-five thousand troops are not required to maintain order on the north of the Tweed-that the anniversary of the battle of Bothwell Bridge is not regularly celebrated by insult, riot, and murder. We could hardly find a stronger argument against Mr. Gladstone's system than that which Scotland furnishes. The policy which has been followed in that country has been directly opposed to the policy which he recom mends. And the consequence is that Scotland, having been one of the rudest, one of the poor. est, one of the most turbulent countries in Europe, has become one of the most highly civil ized, one of the most flourishing, one of the most tranquil. The atrocities which were of common occurrence while an unpopular church was dominant are unknown. In spite of a mu tual aversion as bitter as ever separated one people from another, the two kingdoms which compose our island have been indissolubly joined together. Of the ancient national feel. ing there remains just enough to be ornamental and useful; just enough to inspire the poet and

The Protestant doctrine touching the right of private judgment-that doctrine, which is the common foundation of the Anglican, the Lutheran, and the Calvinistic Churches-that doctrine by which every sect of Dissenters vindicates its separation-we conceive not to be this, that opposite opinions may both be true; nor this, that truth and falsehood are both equally good; nor yet this, that all speculative error is necessarily innocent:-but this, that there is on the face of the earth no visible body to whose decrees men are bound to submit their private judgment on points of faith.

it does not follow that, however honest and laborious they may be, they will be of one mind on the Douglas case. So it is vain to hope that there may be a free constitution under which every representative will be unanimously elected, and every law unanimously passed; and it would be ridiculous for a statesman to stand wondering and bemoaning himself because people who agree in thinking that two and two make four cannot agree about the new poor law or the administration of Canada. There are two intelligible and consistent courses which may be followed with respect to the exercise of private judgment;-that of the Romanist, who interdicts it because of its inevitable inconveniences; and that of the Protestant, who permits it in spite of its inevitable inconveniences. Both are more reasonable than Mr. Gladstone, who would have free private judgments without its inevitable inconveniences. The Romanist produces repose by means of stupefaction. The Protestant en- "In England," says Mr. Gladstone, "the courages activity, though he knows that where case was widely different from that of the Con there is much activity, there will be some tinent. Her reformation did not destroy, but aberration. Mr. Gladstone wishes for the successfully maintained, the unity and succesunity of the fifteenth century with the active sion of the Church in her apostolical ministry. and searching spirit of the sixteenth. He We have, therefore, still among us the ordainmight as well wish to be in two places at ed hereditary witnesses of the truth, conveying it to us through an unbroken series from our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles. This is to us the ordinary voice of authority; of authority equally reasonable and equally true, whether we will hear, or whether we will forbear."

once.

When Mr. Gladstone says that we "actually require discrepancy of opinion-require and demand error, falsehood, blindness, and plume ourselves on such discrepancy as attesting a freedom which is only valuable when used for unity in the truth," he expresses himself with more energy than precision. Nobody loves discrepancy for the sake of discrepancy. But a person who conscientiously believes that free inquiry is, on the whole, beneficial to the interests of truth, and that, from the impef fection of the human faculties, wherever there is much free inquiry there will be some discrepancy, may, without impropriety, consider such discrepancy, though in itself an evil, as a sign of good. That there are fifty thousand thieves in London is a very melancholy fact. But, looked at in one point of view, it is a reason for exultation. For what other city could maintain fifty thousand thieves? What must be the mass of wealth where the fragments gleaned by lawless pilfering rise to so large an amount? St. Kilda would not support a single pickpocket. The quantity of theft is, to a certain extent, an index of the quantity of useful industry and judicious speculation. And just as we may, from the great number of rogues in a town, infer that much honest gain is made there; so may we often, from the quantity of error in a community, draw a cheering inference as to the degree in which the public mind is turned to those inquiries which alone can lead to rational convictions of truth.

Mr. Gladstone seems to imagine that most Protestants think it possible for the same doctrine to be at once true and false; or that they think it immaterial whether, on a religious question, a man comes to a true or false conclusion. If there be any Protestants who hold notions so absurd, we abandon them to his cen

sure.

Is there always such a visible body? Was there such a visible body in the year 1500? If not, why are we to believe that there is such a body in the year 1839? If there was such a body in 1500, what was it? Was it the Church of Rome? And how can the Church of Eng land be orthodox now if the Church of Rome was orthodox then?

Mr. Gladstone's reasoning is not so clear as might be desired. We have among us, he says, ordained hereditary witnesses of the truth, and their voice is to us the voice of au thority. Undoubtedly, if there are witnesses of the truth, their voice is the voice of autho rity. But this is little more than saying that the truth is the truth. Nor is truth more true because it comes in an unbroken series from the apostles. The Nicene faith is not more true in the mouth of the Archbishop of Canter bury, than in that of a Moderator of the Gene ral Assembly. If our respect for the authority of the Church is to be only consequent upon our conviction of the truth of her doctrines, we come at once to that monstrous abuse,-the Protestant exercise of private judgment. But if Mr. Gladstone means that we ought to be lieve that the Church of England speaks the truth, because she has the apostolical succes sion, we greatly doubt whether such a doctrine can be maintained. In the first place, what proof have we of the fact? We have, indeed, heard it said that Providence would certainly have interfered to preserve the apostolical suc cession of the true Church. But this is an ar gument fitted for understandings of a different kind from Mr. Gladstone's. He will hardly tell us that the Church of England is the true Church because she has the succession; and that she has the succession because she is the true Church.

What evidence, then, have we for the fact of the apostolical succession? And here we may easily defend the truth against Oxford with the same arguments with which, in old

umes, the truth was defended by Oxford against Rome. In this stage of our combat with Mr. Gladstone, we need few weapons except those which we find in the well-furnished and wellordered armoury of Chillingworth.

which, to ninety-nine Protestants out of a hun dred, would seem much more questionable than any of those doctrines. Nor is this all Extreme obscurity overhangs the history of the middle ages; and the facts which are discernible through that obscuri'v prove that the Church was exceedingly il regulated. We read of sees of the highest dignity openly sold-transferred backwards and forwards by popular tumult-bestowed sometimes by a profligate woman on her paramour-sometimes by a warlike baron on a kinsman, still a stripling. We read of bishops of ten years old-of bishops of five years old-of many popes who were mere boys, and who rivalled the frantic dissoluteness of Caligula-nay, of a female pope. And though this last story, once believed throughout all Europe, has been disproved by the strict researches of modern criticism, the most discerning of those who reject it have admitted that it is not intrinsi cally improbable. In our own island, it was the complaint of Alfred that not a single priest, south of the Thames, and very few on the

this illiterate clergy exercised their ministry amidst a rude and half heathen population, in which Danish pirates, unchristened, or christened by the hundred on a field of battle, were mingled with a Saxon peasantry scarcely better instructed in religion. The state of Ireland was still worse. "Tota illa per universam Hiberniam dissolutio ecclesiasticæ disciplinæ,

The transmission of orders from the apostles to an English clergyman of the present day, must have been through a very great number of intermediate persons. Now it is probable that no clergyman in the Church of England can trace up his spiritual genealogy from bishop to bishop, even so far back as the time of the Reformation. There remains fifteen or sixteen hundred years during which the history of the transmission of his orders is buried in utter darkness. And whether he be a priest by succession from the apostles, depends on the question, whether, during that long period, some thousands of events took place, any one of which may, without any gross improbability, be supposed not to have taken place. We have not a tittle of evidence to any one of these events. We do not even know the names or countries of the men to whom it was taken for granted that these events hap-north, could read either Latin or English. And pened. We do not know whether the spiritual ancestors of any one of our contemporaries were Spanish or Armenian, Arian or Orthodox. In the utter absence of all particular evidence, we are surely entitled to require that there should be very strong evidence indeed, that the strictest regularity was observed in every generation; and that episcopal functions were exercised by none who were not bishops by succession from the apostles. But we have no such evidence. In the first place, we have not full and accurate information touching the polity of the Church during the century that followed the persecution of Nero. That, during this period, the overseers of all the little Christian societies scattered through the Roman empire held their spiritual autho. rity by virtue of holy orders derived from the apostles, cannot be proved by contemporary testimony, or by any testimony which can be regarded as decisive. The question, whether the primitive ecclesiastical constitution bore a greater resemblance to the Anglican or to the Calvinistic model has been fiercely disputed. It is a question on which men of eminent parts, learning, and piety have differed, and do to this day differ very widely. It is a question on which at least a full half of the ability and erudition of Protestant Europe has, ever since the Reformation, been opposed to the Anglican pretensions. Mr. Gladstone himself, we are persuaded, would have the candour to allow that, if no evidence were admitted but that which is furnished by the genuine Christian literature of the first two centuries, judgment would not go in favour of prelacy. And if he looked at the subject as calmly as he would look a: a controversy respecting the Roman Comitia or the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemote, he would probably think that the absence of contemporary evidence during so long a period was a defect which later attestations, however numerous, could but very imperfectly supply. It is surely impolitic to rest the doctrines of the English Church on an historical theory, VOL. III.-50

illa ubique pro consuetudine Christiana sæva subintroducta barbaries"-are the expressions of St. Bernard. We are, therefore, at a loss to conceive how any clergyman can feel confident that his orders have come down correctly. Whether he be really a successor of the apostles depends on an immense number of such contingencies as these,-whether under King Ethelwolf, a stupid priest might not, while baptizing several scores of Danish prisoners who had just made their option between the font and the gallows, inadvertently omit to perform the rite on one of these graceless proselytes ?-whether, in the seventh cen tury, an impostor, who had never received consecration, might not have passed himself off as a bishop on a rude tribe of Scots?— whether a lad of twelve did really, by a ceremony huddled over when he was too drunk to know what he was about, convey the episcopa. character to a lad of ten?

Since the first century, not less, in all proba bility, than a hundred thousand persons have exercised the functions of bishops. That many of these have not been bishops by apostolical succession is quite certain. Hooker admits that deviations from the general rule have been frequent, and with a boldness worthy of his high and statesmanlike intellect, pronounces them to have been often justifiable. "There may be," says he, "sometimes very

just and sufficient reason to allow ordination made without a bishop. Where the Church must needs have some ordained, and neither hath nor can have possibly a bishop to ordain, in case of such necessity the ordinary institu tion of God hath given oftentimes, and may give