Christian system, the Trinity and the Incarnation. These will be here termed the Protestant Evangelical school. IV. Those who, professedly rejecting all known expressions of dogma, are nevertheless believers in a moral Governor of the Universe, and in a state of probation for mankind, whether annexing or not annexing to this belief any of the particulars of the Christian system, either doctrinal or moral. These I denominate the Theistic school.

V. The Negative school. Negative, that is to say, as to thought which can be called religious in the most usual sense. Under this head I am obliged to place a number of schemes, of which the adherents may resent the collocation. They are so placed on the ground that they agree in denying categorically, or else in declining to recognize or affirm, the reign of a moral Governor or Providence, and the existence of a state of discipline or probation. To this aggregate seem to belong

Of these five main divisions, the first is much before any one of the others in material extension. Its ostensible numbers may nearly equal those of the second and the third taken together. The fourth and the fifth are made up of votaries who are scattered and isolated; or whose creed is unavowed; or who, if they exist in communities at all, exist only in such minute communities as to be but specks in the general prospect.

The Ultramontane system has also the great advantage, for working purposes of by far the most elastic, the most closely knit, and the most highly centralized organization.

Again, it derives its origin by an unbroken succession from Christ and His apostles. No more imposing title can well be conceived; yet it naturally has no conclusive weight with such as remember or believe that a theistic system, given by the Almighty to our first progenitors, passed, in the classic times, and in like manner, through far more fundamental transformations. It was by a series of insensible deviations, and without the shock of any one revolutionary change, that in a long course of ages, after a pure beginning, there were built up many forms of religion, which, at the period of the Advent, had come to be in the main both foul and false. The allegation may possibly be made that the traditions, as well as the personal succession, of the Latin Church, are unbroken. But this will of course be denied by those

who regard the Council of 1870 as having imported at a stroke a fundamental change into the articles of the Christian faith. To the vast numerical majority, however, the Roman authorities seem to have succeeded in recommending the proposition, and the claim passes popularly current.

This singular system, receiving the Sacred Scriptures, and nominally attaching a high authority to the witness of tradition, holds both in subjection to such construction as may be placed upon them from time to time, either by an assemblage of Bishops, together with certain other high functionaries, which derives its authority from the Pope, or by the Pope himself, when he thinks fit to take upon himself the office. It is true that he is said to take advice; but he is the sole judge what advice he shall ask, and whether he shall follow it. It is true that whatever he promulgates as an article of faith he declares to have been contained in the original revelation; but by his vision alone can the question be determined whether it is there or not. To the common eye it seems as if many articles of Christian belief had at the first been written in invisible ink, and as if the Pope alone assumed the office of putting the paper to the fire, and exhibiting these novel antiquities to the gaze of an admiring world. With regard, however, to matters of discipline and government, he is not restrained even by the profession of following antiquity. The Christian community under him is organized like an army, of which each order is in strict subjection to every order that is above it. A thousand bishops are its generals; some two hundred thousand clergy are its subordinate officers; the laity are its proletarians. The auxiliary forces of this great military establishment are the monastic orders. And they differ from the auxiliaries of other armies in that they have a yet stricter discipline, and a more complete dependence on the head, than the ordinary soldiery. Of these four ranks in the hierarchy, two things may be asserted unconditionally: that no rights belong to the laity, and that all right resides in the Pope. All other rights but his are provisional only, and are called rights only by way of accommodation, for they are withdrawable at will. The rights of laymen as against priests, of priests as against bishops, of bishops as against the Pope, depend entirely upon his judgment, or his pleasure, whichever he may think fit to call it. To all commands issued by and from him, under this system, with a demand for absolute obedience, an absolute obedience is due.

To the charm of an unbroken continuity, to the majesty of an immense mass, to the energy of a closely serried organization, the system now justly called Papalism or Vaticanism adds another and a more legitimate source of strength. It undeniably contains within itself a large portion of the individual religious life of Christendom. The faith, the hope, the charity, which it was the

office of the Gospel to engender, flourish within this precinct in the hearts of millions upon millions, who feel little, and know less, of its extreme claims, and of their constantly progressive development. Many beautiful and many noble characters grow up within it. Moreover, the babes and sucklings of the Gospel, the poor, the weak, the uninstructed, the simple souls who in tranquil spheres give the heart and will to God, and whose shaded 1 path is not scorched by the burning questions of human thought and life, these persons are probably in the Roman Church by no means worse than they would be under other Christian systems. They swell the mass of the main body; obey the word of command when it reaches them; and they help to supply the resources by which a vast machinery is kept in motion.

Yet once more. The Papal host has reason to congratulate itself on the compliments it receives from its extremest opponents, when they are contrasted with the scorn which those opponents feel for all that lies between. Thus E. von Hartmann, the chief living oracle of German Pantheism, says it is with an honourable spirit of consistency (Consequenz) that "Catholicism" has, after a long slumber, declared war to the knife against modern culture and the highest acquisitions of the recent mental development ;* and he observes that, while he utterly denounces the mummy-like effeteness and religious incapacity of Ultramontanism, still “it ought to feel flattered by my recognizing in it the legitimate champion of historical Christianity, and denoting its measures against modern culture as the last effort of that system at selfpreservation." Accordingly his most severe denunciations are reserved for "Liberal Protestantism," his next neighbour, even as the loudest thunders of the Vatican are issued to proclaim the iniquities of "Liberal Catholics."t

I shall recite more briefly the besetting causes of weakness in the Ultramontane system. These I take to be principally: (1) its hostility to mental freedom at large; (2) its incompatibility with the thought and movement of modern civilization; (3) its pretensions against the State; (4) its pretensions against parental and conjugal rights; (5) its jealousy, abated in some quarters, of the free circulation and use of the Holy Scripture; (6) the de facto alienation of the educated mind of the countries in which it prevails; (7) its detrimental effects on the comparative strength and morality of the States in which it has sway; (8) its tendency to sap veracity in the individual mind. If this charge were thought harsh, I could refer for a much stronger statement to the works of the late Mr.

* Der Selbstversetzung des Christenthums, p. 15 (Berlin, 1874).

+ Ibid. Vorwort, p. x.

The latest specimen may be seen in a Pastoral of Bishop Bourget, of Montreal, the hero of the remarkable and rather famous Guibord case. Published in the Montreal Weekly Witness of Feb. 10, 1876.

Simpson, himself a convert to the Roman system from the English Church.

II.

Next in order to the Ultramontane school comes a school which may perhaps best be designated as Historical; because, without, holding that all, which has been, has been right, it regards the general consent of Christendom, honestly examined and sufficiently ascertained, as a leading auxiliary to the individual reason in the search for religious truth. To this belong those "Liberal Catholics" who have just been mentioned, and who, unlike the "Old Catholics," remain externally in the Latin communion, bravely and generously hoping against hope, under conditions. which must ensure to them a highly uncomfortable existence. Their position appears to be substantially identical with that of a portion of the Protestants of the sixteenth century, who in perfectly good faith believed that they were maintaining the true system of Christianity as attested by Scripture and sacred history, but who had to uphold this as their own conviction in the teeth of the constituted tribunals of the Latin Church. The appeal now made, indeed, is from the Council of the Vatican to a Council lawfully conducted; but the right of appeal is denied by the living authority, and appears therefore, now that that authority has given a final utterance on the dogma of Infallibility, to rest on the ultimate groundwork of private judgment. The question here, however, is not so much their ecclesiastical position, as their form of religious thought, and their proper place in the general scheme or chart. Few they may be, and isolated they certainly are. But they are essentially in sympathy with many who do not wear the same badge with themselves, in short with all who, rejecting the Papal monarchy, adhere to the ancient dogma formulated in the Creeds, and who believe that our Lord, and His Apostles acting under His authority, founded a society with a promise of visible perpetuity, and with a commission to preach the Gospel and administer the sacraments. That Gospel is the faith once delivered to the saints; and, while some of these believers would admit that the Church may err, they would all agree in holding that she cannot err fatally or finally, and that the pledge of her vitality, if not of her health, is unconditional; unconditional, however, not to any or to every part, but to the whole, as a whole. They would agree that she is divinely kept in the possession of all essential truth. They would agree in accepting those declarations of it, which proceeded, now between twelve and fifteen centuries ago, from her as one united body, acting in lawful councils, which received their final seal from the general acceptance of the faithful. They would recognize no final authority subordinate to that of the united Church; and would plead for a reasonable and free acceptance of

that authority on the part of the individual Christian. Or, if these propositions lead us too far into detail, they believe in an historical Church, constitutional rather than despotic, with its faith long ago immutably, and to all appearance adequately, defined; and they are not to be induced by the pretext of development to allow palpable innovations to take their place beside the truths acknowledged through fifty generations.

If to those, who are thus minded, I give the title of historical, it is because they seem to conform to the essential type of Christianity as it was exhibited under the Apostolical, the Episcopal, and the Patriarchal system; and because they do not tamper in practice with that traditional testimony, of which in theory they admit the real validity and weight, and the great utility in conjunction with the appeal of the Church to Holy Scripture.

This, in its essential outlines, is the system which constitutes the scientific basis of the Eastern or Orthodox Churches. I do not speak of the defects, faults, and abuses, which doubtless abound in them, as in one shape or another they do in every religious body; but of the ultimate grounds, which, when put on their defence, they would assume as the warrant of what is essential to their system.

Great, without doubt, is in every case the interval between the written theory and the practice of ecclesiastical bodies. The difference is scarcely less between their authorized doctrine, in the proper sense, which they hold as of obligation, and the developments which that doctrine receives through the unchecked or little checked predominance of the prevailing bias in the works of individual writers, and in the popular tradition. It is with the former only that I have here to do. Inasmuch, however, as few or none of them are judged among us (in my opinion) so superficially and harshly as the Churches of the East, I would observe, on their behalf, that they know nothing of four great conflicts, which more than ever distract the Latin Church as a whole: conflict between the Church and the State; conflict between the Church and the Scripture; conflict between the Church and the family; conflict between the Church, and modern culture, science, and civilization. While the largest numerical following of this scheme of belief is to be found in the Eastern Churches, a recurrence to the outline, by which I have described it, will show that it includes, together with the so-called Liberal Catholics whom the Papal Court regards as the parasitic vermin of its Church, and the Old Catholics whom it has succeeded in visibly expelling, the classical theology of the English Church. This may be said to form one of its wings. The standard books and the recognized writers, that express the theological mind of Anglicanism, proceed throughout on the assertion, or the assumption, that the Church is a visible society or congre