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THE ECCLESIASTIC

AND

THEOLOGIAN.

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN CHURCH.

Recent Recollections of the Anglo-American Church in the United States. By an English Layman, Five Years Resident in that Republic. In Two Vols. London: Rivingtons. 1861.

THE finished style, the measured sententiousness, the well-digested chapters, the exact statements, even the fair type and attractive binding-in short, the getting up altogether of these well-written and entertaining volumes, proclaim the authorship of an adept in literary effects. The elaborate composition, indeed, would seem to betray some purposed design in the publication; which, however, if this supposition has any good foundation, is most skilfully concealed by a studied sobriety and candour disarming all imputation of partizanship. The only purpose we have been able to elicit, by a critical perusal of the work, over and above the writer's characteristic and, one is tempted to suspect, professional "pleasure in poetic pains," is an honest desire to interest English Churchmen in the struggles and capabilities of the daughter Church, and to encourage the Catholic movement which is going on therein, by showing that English eyes are hopefully and with sympathy fixed upon it. How far the author has been decoyed into an untenable theory on the comparative merits of the American and English systems of Church emoluments and government, and into an exaggerated and one-sided view of the evidence in support of it, it will be the main business of this article to consider presently. There are unquestionably two sides to the shield of American Voluntaryism, of very different metal; the baser of which has found its exponents in such writers as H. Trusta and Sam Slick, while the more precious, or, at any rate, more glistering, is confidently maintained by the author of these "Recent Recollections." VOL. XXIV.-JANUARY, 1862.

B

The treatise before us has no claim to be ranked with the works of the Bishop of Oxford and Dr. Caswall as a history proper of the American Church; it is rather a series of sketches illustrative of the present condition of that Church in certain of its aspects, somewhat after the discursive manner of the Rev. A. Cleveland Coxe's "Impressions of England," or Mrs. Beecher Stowe's "Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands." Each chapter (there are nineteen in all) is a separate cameo, complete in itself, historical, biographical, or descriptive. Now this mode of treatment is always open to the objection of being a one-sided view; that in every thing American, not least certainly in matters ecclesiastical, there is a shady" as well as a sunny side;" that Peep at Number Five" will go far to dispel the pleasant illusions fostered by a couleur de rose visit to Trinity, New York, and however much "close and constant intercourse with many of the Bishops and A few bricks after all Clergy of the Anglo-American Church."

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are scarcely a fair specimen of the whole building. The most elaborate description of the work going on, or of the style of church and services at All Saints', Margaret Street, or S. Barnabas', Pimlico; at S. Saviour's, Leeds, S. Ninian's, Perth, S. Thomas', Oxford, or S. Paul's, Brighton; at Frome, Chiselhurst, Addington, Kemerton; at Hursley, Elford, or Boyne Hill; could not justly be admitted as any sufficient evidence of a wide-spreading progress of Catholic principles among the parochial clergy of the English Church; nor can Oxford, Salisbury, Exeter, be said at all fairly to represent the prevailing sentiment or ability of the Anglican Episcopal Bench. Yet this, by parity of reason, would seem to be the intended inference of our author's "Recollections."

One chapter, the eleventh, is worthy of a special notice for its subject's sake, though interesting on quite distinct grounds from the Catholicity of the American Church. It may serve, too, to illustrate this capital defect in the way of inconclusive argument. An elaborate statement of cumulative circumstantial evidence is given in proof of the astounding fact that an aged American missionary, now deceased, named Eleazar Williams, the supposititious half-caste offspring of a white man's daughter and an Indian chief, was in truth the Dauphin, or rather the de jure King of France, Louis XVII., whom the world has imagined to have perished in Paris more than seventy years ago, the victim of his brutal gaoler, Simon the cobbler, one of the worthies of the first French Revolution, and the details of whose unparalleled sufferings and death must be familiar to many of our readers, if from the teaching of no more authentic history, from the exceedingly well-told and most harrowing narrative of Mr. Paget, published in the "Penny Post" of 1857, under the title, "The Child of the Temple." The evidence adduced in support of this marvellous discovery is chiefly borrowed from a pamphlet by the late

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