fiefs adjoined his own, and with whom he was probably as often at variance as at peace. His only companions were his wife and children; others might come and go, but these were always about him: war and the sports of the field sometimes called him from home, but his return was ever into the bosom of his family. Thus domestic manners were formed-thus woman gained her influence-thus she became the companion of man, and ceased to be his slave. It is to the Feudal system therefore that she owes that exaltation from the rank of inferiority and servitude to one of equality and honour, which had been denied her in every social system * which had prevailed on earth ever since our first mother

Brought death into the world and all our woe.

It has been the practice of a certain school of historians to depreciate the Feudal system, denying or underrating its good results, and magnifying to the utmost the evils which, if it did not produce, it certainly did not entirely remove. But further inquiry in a fairer spirit has led later writers to judge more favourably of it. One of these-the present Prime Minister of France-exclaims-"It is impossible to open the history of those times without meeting with a crowd of noble sentiments, of great actions, of beautiful developements of humanity, evidently generated in the bosom of Feudal life." And we shall less wonder at its want of complete success, when we remember the character of the society upon which it had to work. In England, the Barons were seldom at peace among themselves, and their vassals had few opportunities for cultivating the peaceful arts, and advancing in civilization and refinement. The kingdom was weakened by the dissensions of those who should have been its chief supports. Science and literature were confined to the monasteries, where they languished for want of encouragement. They had indeed revived for a time during the reigns of William the Conqueror and his sons, under the patronage of Lanfranc, Anselm, and Henry I.; but the contentions of Stephen's reign put a stop to further progress in such pursuits, and they fell again into neglect. The arts which ameliorate mankind were either totally forgotten, or imperfectly cultivated. The moral condition of the people was debased and degraded through ignorance, and the unbridled indulgence of fiery passions; and religion's cheering light, though never quite put out, was dimly seen in the midst of so much darkness, and the path on which it shone was trodden but by few.

Such was the society upon which Feudalism was brought to bear. Α people only one remove from barbarism, unaccustomed to all rule, and ignorant of all the obligations and requirements of rule, can hardly be thought to have presented the most favourable field for the operation of a system of government, which aimed at uniting all the discordant elements of society into one well-compacted whole. La féodalité générale says M. Guizot, était une véritable fédération; yet this federative system

Dans toutes les sociétés anciennes, je ne parle pas de celles où l'esprit de famille n'existait pas, mais dans celles-là même où il etait puissant; dans la vie patriarcale, par exemple, les femmes ne tenaient pas à beaucoup près la place qu'elles ont acquise en Europe sous le régime féodal.-Guizot. Histoire Générale de la Civili sation en Europe. 4e Leçon.

No. IV. APRIL, 1846.

which it attempted to establish requires the greatest developement of reason, morality, and civilization in the society to which it is applied, and is only capable of being fairly worked out where these prerequisites exist. It was tried in times the least fitted for its developement, and it is not difficult to account for its partial failure, when we remember that neither in the governors nor the governed were found the conditions which were indispensable to its success. It required in the superior, knowledge, sympathy, love of peace, and sound religious principle. It found him ignorant, proud, warlike, and superstitious, holding in servitude people more ignorant and superstitious than himself, alternately occupied in war and husbandry, in the former enough to keep them ferocious and revengeful, in the latter too little to make them industrious and civilized.

If what has been said seems to look like an apology for the Feudal system, let it be understood that the apology refers only to the principle of that system-to the essential principle, without its accidental adjuncts. It is the principle which would teach to one the happiness of reliance and dependence, * and to another the sacred duty of care and sympathy and protection; a principle, moreover, which was not then put to its best use, for its accidents were, as we have seen, ignorance, superstition, and love of war; but it is applicable to other times-to days of enlarged intelligence, and greater conscientiousness. And it is for want of this principle, which our forefathers could not or would not act out to the extent to which it may be carried, that the Poor affect a miserable isolation; for want of it, they stand disconnected from the Rich, and look upon them as enemies, not as friends; as task masters, not as protectors; and for want it, also, the Rich have given the Poor cause so to think of them.

The evils of the present state of society are independence and isolation. There is no feeling of brotherhood among men; no practical consciousness that we are all links in a chain, atoms in a mass, members of a body. Life is not regarded as a scene in which each must help his fellow, but one where each must help himself alone. Each class, and each individual of that class looks upon himself as unconnected with the rest, and independent of all. His purpose is to raise himself, heedless whether or not in doing so, he pulls down his brother and rises on his ruin. The class above excites no feelings but envy and emulation; that below none but impatience and contempt, And so all are struggling-not for the great end of a common good, but only to gratify the craving for a selfish good.

These remarks on the Feudal system and its institutions cannot be better concluded than by the observation of Sir James Mackintosh, who says (Hist. Eng. I. 117) that they "probably produced more misery in their first vigour, stirred up more envy in their course, and left behind them more good when the waters were dried up, than any other system of laws by which the race of man have been governed."

(To be continued.)

Southey says of the feeling of Dependence-" a kind and grateful feeling it is, and they who think that it is well exchanged for the pride of independence, are in danger of losing the blessing which has been promised to the poor in spirit and to the meek.'-Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, II. 133.

207

THE SPIRIT OF THE VOICE.

"once

THERE is not in all the Church a more wonderful thing, than the oral origin and the legendary transfer of revealed Truth. We hear the triumphant appeal of the Bibliolator to The Book, as the only source of knowledge necessary to Salvation, we listen to the voluble repetitions of the textuary either in the pulpit or upon the platform, until we frequently forget that the doctrinal foundations of the early Church were vocal, and traditionary alone; and that Holy Bible came in during the first century, as the collateral and accessary handmaid of the Faith, for all delivered to the Saints." The Apostolic Churches were set up in the lands; the services were composed, and the Sacraments delivered to their charge, at least thirty years before the Scriptures of the New Testament had their existence in the earth.* A whole century of worship and doctrine elapsed from the Era of Bethlehem, before any such thing as a collected code of Christian Writings could be found on the lecterns of the Church. The structure of the visible Body of CHRIST Would seem to have been on this wise. An Apostle came to such a city, who breathed the HOLY GHOST; he stood before the people like some visible God; he beat down the graven idols with his voice; he built a certain number of names into a household of believers in JESUS CHRIST; with his own warm hands, he kindled the fires of inspiration in the brows of other men, Bishops and Priests; he gave them no book; the Gospel was almost to be a contrast to a written law : the Apostle put the New Revelation in their inward parts, and wrote that in their hearts; and then he went his way. If, afterwards, a reference was made to him, as a living oracle, for resolution of doubt, then S. Paul or S. James wrote a short brief decision on the controverted points, and sent to the Church, already established by his voice, those parchments or Epistles which bear his name to this day. But even thus and then, a preference appears to have been preserved for oral instruction, rather than written rules; for, although S. Paul was obliged to transmit immediate answer to some anxious appeals produced by the Corinthian schism, he seems to have reserved the more important themes of discipline for his personal appearance in their midst, "The rest," he writes, "I will set in order when I come." The Scriptures of the New Testament, therefore, blessed gift that they are, were, at the first, on the one hand, additions to an existing system of revelation and worship, and on the other, they were examples only of the Sacred Doctrines, and the mighty deeds of old.

Again, the four histories of our Blessed LORD, apart from the record of the chief events of His Life and Cross, are only suggestive, in that which they relate, of an immense body of truth, which they could neither condense nor contain. How many thousands of beautiful similitudes floated perchance, of old time, upon the lips of the eastern multitudes, which we have neither read nor known! Volumes of proverbs may have passed * Save perchance the local and insulated Hebrew copy of the Gospel of the Publican.

away into silence and night, such as survived at Miletus upon the memory of S. Paul! What myriads of miracles were wrought in those days, which for lack of each recording legend, we shall never understand! The world itself would not have contained the books which might have been written.

Thus, too, the scroll of the Acts of the Apostles was manifestly meant to be only a selected picture of the general embodiment of the primary Churches in unrecorded lands. Therein the lives and deeds of one or two Apostles were rehearsed, to develope the fate and fortunes of the whole. Intimation is made that the Twelve underwent the vicissitudes of the blessed S. Paul. But there is one remarkable feature in the records of the early Church, which is fraught with salutary admonition for these presumptuous days. Coevally with the delivery of the written text, there seems to have been committed to the Fathers of the Word, a fixed, secret, oracular, and unalterable meaning. As to the Apostles, together with the parable, was conveyed that one interpretation which was intended by their LORD; so, in all the Bible, it would appear, that none durst affix his own loose, casual, or manifold exposition, to any section or clause of Holy Writ; but one specific sense was linked thereto, as it were, for ever. Whereas men of modern mind will seek in Scripture for ▲ meaning, and that their own, the simple piety of ancient souls was satisfied to find THE meaning of the HOLY GHOST. We mark that distant Churches, and divided by the seas, concur in the similar usage of the self-same phrase. Time passes, generations change, diverse languages repeat the echo from the rock, but all that while, the doctrine travels on, immutable in sound. The mouth of the parable, in every nation under heaven, "saith the same thing." Neither is the spirit of these sentences of Scripture such as would be fixed or breathed by uninitiated minds. They utter, like some ancient oracle, mysterious truth, in strange unearthly tone. If a man, imbued with the spirit of the elders, adduced the doctrine of the Cross, he would not build it up with verses such as now-a-days we hear from ordinary minds; but the text of the atonement would be with him the proof; the sentence which the fathers were accustomed to allege in testimony that the passion had disclosed the gates of Paradise again. "After the death of the High Priest the slayer shall return to the land of his possession" -(Numbers xxxv. 28.) If again, question had been made about the onsecration of a Bishop, or a Priest, and inquiry were sought as to the right of interference in such a mystery by secular men, the lips of old would have been satisfied to rehearse the saying of Moses, when he recorded his own ascension into the Mount with the rulers of his people: "Nevertheless, the LORD laid not His hands. on any of the nobles of the Children of Israel." (Exodus xxiv. 11.) In like manner the descent and transmission of Holy Orders from the Episcopate alone, would be deemed to receive an ample cogency from the spirit of the text, that, "the precious oil went down on the beard, even from Aaron's beard, and went down to the skirts of his clothing." (Ps. cxxxiii. 2.) A graphic instance of this meek and implicit reception of the mystic sense is related by S. Bede. He tells us, that in the days of S. Augustine, a strife had arisen, as to the power or right of a strange priest to exercise

functions of ministry within the borders allotted to another man, or among his brother's flock. Reference for resolution of doubt was made to Gregory of Rome. The decision of this Father of the Western Church is hostile to the interference of the stranger, and appeal for confirmation is made to the Catholic rule of a well-known sentence, interpreted by the old delivery of the Church, "When thou comest into the standing corn of thy neighbour, then thou mayest pluck the ears with thy hand, but thou shalt not move a sickle into thy neighbour's standing corn." (Deut. xxiii. 25.) This application of the text appears to have been sanctioned by the usage of our LORD Himself, who, when He went with His disciples through the corn-fields on the Sabbath-day, was, with reference to the ritual of Moses, a distant priest arrived in an ancient fold. In like manner, at another time, this employment of a secret and conventional meaning, linked by antiquity to the literal word, appears to have obtained in the practice of the LORD. His reply to the Sadducees was embodied in that which would seem to have been, among the orthodox and initiated Hebrews, the acknowledged oracle of the resurrection; "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob." Now these words do not literally reveal the tenet of a second corporeal life; but there was a known and a mythic meaning which put those adversaries to silence, and that language of Moses was conclusive because of the ancestral interpretation of the Hebrew Church.

Let us pass on to the traditionary mysteries of the Evangelistic text, as they were inherited in Christian times. There was as it were an Apostolic Thalmud in the Church, the Mishna and Gemara of the Gospel Day. A Catholic code of vocal doctrine went forth into all lands, to be as it were the inseparable shadow of the text. The public parable to the multitude-the secret theme to the Twelve-such was the Law of the Oracles of God, as exemplified in the general similitude of the Sower and the Seed, with the interpretation thereof. Accordingly, we find that parables which exist only in the letter of Holy Writ, were accompanied whithersoever they came with the self-same spirit of the voice. Take the legend of the Good Samaritan: an Apostle, a Bishop, or a Priest, in any nation under heaven, if of old when such a Gospel had been read in the church, he had stood up to speak, for the post illa verba, he would have said, without deviation or change :-The certain man, signifies Adam, father of us all; he went down, when he fell; it was from Jerusalem, the city of Peace, that he journeyed, to Jericho, the place of moony change, such as is the fallen earth. He fell among thieves, which were Satan and his evil host; they stripped him of his raiment, of righteousness, and wounded him, with the four wounds of the fall, and departed for a while, as they did in the desert from our LORD; ceased, to come again; and left Adam half-dead. His ancient nature did survive, but in struggle with his altered frame; and by chance, there came down a certain Priest, that way, when Aaron brought his law. And when he saw him, when he perceived the wounds he could not heal, for by the law was the knowledge, and again the blood of bulls and goats could not take away sin, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, the type of the commonwealth of