though it claimed, undoubtedly, more than it could establish by proof. Authority and evidence are the twin supporters of the Church, and should never be separated; and in those points of doctrine and discipline for which no scriptural evidence can be given, and which are yet reasonable, the authority of the Church must be admitted. But the corruption of the Church had impaired the authority of the Church; and this fact is sufficient to excuse Wickliffe of whatever excesses he may be charged with.

Luther, also, was a spirit of the daring kind, whose character is well contrasted with that of Erasmus. Never was the difference between the speculative and practical reformer so well illustrated as in these two great men. One undertook to stir up men's minds in the cause of learning, the other of religion. To promote the interests of the former, it was not necessary to hurl kings from their thrones, or to eject priests from their altars. But the work was intended only for the learned and their pupils-it was not for the great body of the people. The learned would have had knowledge of the truth, and gloated, like misers, over the secret possession in the seclusion of their closets. It would, however, have been concealed from mankind in general. It cannot be denied that the invention of printing, nevertheless, would soon have communicated all that was known to the public mind; but without the revolution in the Church effected by Luther, the labourers in the vineyard would not have been so abundant, nor their labour so prevalent. The learned languages, also, probably would have been preferred to the vernacular dialects; and the varieties of human speech, now so beautiful in their state of comparative excellence to contemplate, might have remained uncultivated. Luther's translation of the Bible formed a standard of national language; and to the controversial writings composed in the vulgar tongues of other countries, is to be ascribed the first existence of such, as refined vehicles of thoughts and feelings, profound and subtle, lovely and sublime.

Thus the original impulse was given to that tide of inquiry which has since flowed on with accumulated force, even to this our day. The agitation of the waters, however, has not yet ceased; and though three centuries have passed since it first commenced, we still find that something remains to be done; that more was disturbed than could afterwards be re-settled.

The incompleteness of the Reformation is considered under very different aspects by different opinionists. By some literary men it is thought to have retarded by its convulsion the cause of learning. We are told that the literary taste of the Medici, or the hostility of the Venetian to the Roman see, or the commercial liberality of the Genevese, or the philosophic courage of the professors of Padua, would have established in Italy a free press, but for the Reformation-nay, that a purer reformation in the bosom of Italy itself was probably intercepted by the premature violence of Luther and his followers. It is complained that the printers, to whom it was left to disseminate all extant knowledge, not having wheat, sowed tares. Society was, from the want of a vernacular literature, unprovided with elementary books; and the instruction imparted was in quality not only behind the acquirement of the age, but behind the era of the revival of letters.

"The

new public of readers," says a determined literary opponent of the Reformation," had to feed on the husks of a dull and mistaught generation. A style of superstition, which Rome had encouraged two centuries before, and had deposited in the monastic libraries of Europe, was now generalized among the laity of the North by the efficacious industry of the press. Declamations of mystical piety, and arguments of scholastic theologians, which the Italian clergy had already thrown by, were again handed about by the German people as oracles of religion. Errors and prejudices, not easily untaught, were thus scattered far more widely than if literature had remained confined to the possession of manuscripts."

This class of objectors, however, may be readily set down by the orthodox for what would be the consequences contemplated by them from the Reformation which they prefer? It would have changed the whole character of the Revolution. The Socini and their fellowthinkers would, forsooth, have set forth a narrower creed-a version of the Holy Scriptures, "more carefully picked over than by the Council of Trent." Formed in the bosom of Italian taste,-stationed on a classic soil,-surrounded by a refined people,-whose poetry, an Ariosto and a Tasso-whose art, a Michael Angelo and a Raphael were illustrating ;-they, we are told, "would not have enlisted, like the Protestant barbarians, among the destroyers of the beautiful, but would have preserved, in all its majesty, the antique ritual of Rome; they would have associated intellect with our noblest pleasures. Reducing the established hagiolatry to that posthumous veneration for the benefactors of mankind, which is the natural religion of every grateful heart, and the strongest incentive to future excellence, they would have encouraged the people to superadd new altars to those, which were before visited in pilgrimage on the birth-day of the favourite saints, and to include the hero, the patriot, and the sage, among the worthies whose memory was consecrated by public piety.' Rather than to lament, we have, we think, reason to be grateful to Providence for having been preserved from a reformation which would have combined the idolatrous system of the Church of Rome with the cold and heartless creed of the Socinian, whose boast it is that he recognizes not "the divinity which stirs within us," and has no perception of the godlike in the character of the Saviour of the World. Still less would such a reformation come recommended by another consideration which has much weight with its advocates-that it would have proceeded in harmony with the sceptical philosophy, of which toleration is described to have been the appropriate fruit. Of this, it is said, the great diffuser was Bayle, whose opinions are but in a small degree the result of the Reformation, being derived, for the most part, either from the ancient classics which he studied, or from the Latin writers of modern Italy, Pomponatius, and others. It may therefore readily be admitted without injury, in the orthodox mind, to the cause of the Reformation, that "the sceptical philosophy, with all its effects, would, in the person of some Frenchman or Italian, have blossomed and scattered its seeds among the ruling classes of society, whether the Protestant Reformation had or had not taken

place; since the predisposing causes, which were to provide it with apostles, lay in a literature independent of the Reformation."*

Leaving this merely literary objection, we must now proceed to matter of sterner moment. We pass on to the professors of opinion in the opposite extreme. The Puritans stand in direct contrast with the followers of the Socini. They lament that the full Reformation, designed by Wickliffe, had not proceeded to complete accomplishment. They desire that tithes should be considered as alms; that parishioners should be declared to have a right to withhold them where they judge it expedient to do so; and that pontifical and clerical habits should be abolished, with, perhaps, the orders distinguished by them. Some would also expect that the minister, like St. Paul, should labour with his own hands for his maintenance; and, in fact, that there should be no such thing as a Church Establishment. In the opinion of this sect, such prelates as Cranmer and Ridley were only "halting and timeserving;" and, indeed, the "unwieldy times" and reign of Edward the Sixth were no fit season" from whence to pattern out the constitution of a Church discipline." As little are they satisfied with the days of Queen Elizabeth, whose "private counsellors, whoever they were, persuaded her (as Camden writes) that the altering of ecclesiastical policy would move sedition." It is also a grave offence that the Liturgy was "given to a number of moderate divines and Sir Thomas Smith, a statesman, to be purged and physicked;" and that "those constitutions of Edward the Sixth, which in no way satisfied the men that made them, are now established for best, and not to be mended. From that time followed nothing but imprisonments, troubles, disgraces on all those that found fault with the decrees of the convocation, and straight were they branded with the name of Puritans." Such was the reading which Milton (no mean authority for the party he espoused) gave of the history of the times of Edward the Sixth and Elizabeth. Thus far it may be conceded to the statement of the Puritans, that Elizabeth went about the work of the Reformation too much in the spirit of a politician, and not with that purer and more pious feeling which directed the conduct of Edward. She had also an ignorant clergy to deal with-an evil growing out of the spoliation of the Church

"Such poor, mute tongue-tied readers as scarce know,
Whether that God made Adam first or no."+

But, from the first breaking out of the Reformation, there was always a party, who, though they had a keen perception of the abuses in the Church, and some of them, like Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, had even written against and exposed them to literary ridicule, yet were desirous of arresting the tide of revolution. Such men could not look on with complacency to the subversion of existing institutions-their object was not to erect a rival Church, but to purify that in which they were born. It was also the desire of Elizabeth and her counsel

*The opinions which are thus animadverted upon, not too severely, are to be found in the late Mr. Taylor's Historic Survey of German Poetry, vol. i. § 12. + George Wither.

lor to preserve the chain of episcopacy unbroken, and to continue the connexion between the old and the Reformed Church. They wished not to deprive the Church of England of the authority of antiquitybut desired to preserve its Catholicity, and, above all things, to prevent it from being degraded to a mere sect. In this they were right. But there were dissentients from this mode of proceeding, even in the Church itself. If there were, on the one hand, the Jewels and the Hookers on the other, there were the Cartwrights and the Sampsons. In like manner, in a subsequent generation, if there were a Laud, there was an Abbot. Between the two parties the Church, like a pendulum, vacillated first to this side and then to that; and though we may rejoice that by this means the clock was kept going, we have also reason to regret that leisure was not allowed for its proper regulation. A strong antidote was required to purge out the poison of Popery, and a stronger on account of the recent institution of the order of the Jesuits, and which, mighty as it was, has scarcely been specific enough, even to this time, to eradicate the venom. This necessity justifies the course in which the times ran, since none other was perhaps possible; but pity it was that the puritan principle should have prevented the establishment of institutions, equally justifiable by reason and authority, but which, mainly because they were so justifiable, were rejected and forbidden.

The Church of England, therefore, has to complain that this period of its transition partook rather of the character of revolution than reformation. All that she could do was to arrest some of its effects— in this it prevented much evil, but it was obliged also to permit much. The Roman Catholic Church had been defective in discipline, to which the rivalry between the secular and regular clergy, and between the several orders of the latter, was fatal. In these respects, with all its apparent uniformity, it was a house divided against itself, and therefore it stood not. The communion service of the Church of England confesses and laments the want of discipline, also, in the Reformed Church. Our Reformers endeavoured to remedy it, but in vain. The want of provision for the clergy, moreover, is a serious defect. Cranmer sought, with his characteristic sincerity, to better the condition of the inferior clergy, and was followed in the attempt by Jewel and Laud. Much of this might be remedied, if, of the tithes so shamefully abstracted from the Church, some portion were, from time to time, by their present proprietors, annexed to their own livings. It would be but (as is rightly observed by the Rev. J. J. Blunt, in his excellent Sketch of the Reformation)" a reduction, perhaps, of fifty or a hundred pounds per year from an elder brother's rent-roll, to the augmentation, to the like amount, of a younger brother's benefice." Unless the provision for the clergy be enlarged, if pluralities and non-residence be to be disallowed, better, far better, would it be to adopt the recommendation of Milton, and entrust "the piety and conscience of Englishmen, as members of the Church, in the election of pastors to functions that nothing concern a monarch, as well as their worldly wisdoms are privileged, as members of the State, in suffraging their knights and burgesses to matters that concern him nearly." Satisfied as we are of the incompetency of popular opinion to decide in the

higher concernments, whether of Church or State, there can be no doubt, (as it is, indeed, proved in the ranks of dissent,) that whom the people chose they would provide for, however inadequately, after a better fashion than that now current as the consequence of" imperious and stately election in the Church." They would feel that "the minister, whose calling and end is spiritual, ought to be honoured as a father and physician to the soul, (if he be found to be so,) with a soul-like and disciple-like reverence, which is, indeed, the dearest and most affectionate honour, most to be desired by a wise man, and such as will easily command a free and plentiful provision of outward necessaries, without his further care of this world."

Milton, whose language we have just quoted for the sake of the authority, saw in this mode of election a conformity of the Church government to the civil. This is the magnificent way in which he has chosen to express his opinion-" There is no civil government that hath been known, no, not the Spartan, nor the Roman, though both for this respect so much praised by the divine Polybius, more divinely and harmoniously tuned, more equally balanced as it were by the hand and scale of justice, than is the commonwealth of England; where, under a free and untutored monarch, the noblest, worthiest, and most prudent men, with full approbation and suffrage of the people, have in their power the supreme and final determination of highest affairs. Now, if conformity of Church discipline to the civil be so desired, there can be nothing more parallel, more uniform, than when under the sovereign prince, Christ's vicegerent, using the sceptre of David, according to God's law, the godliest, the wisest, the learnedest ministers in their several charges have the instructing and disciplining of God's people, by whose full and free election they are consecrated to that holy and equal aristocracy." Now, although we are far, very far, from being advocates for the system of popular election to Churches, we feel little difficulty in asserting that, in proportion as the State becomes more democratical, so will the Church-for the State was far less so than Milton imagined in the time of which he has above written. And although such democratic principle is incapable of producing all the good effects, and the high rate of fitness for the cure of souls, which the more exclusive mode, if proceeded in in the right spirit, might originate and accomplish; yet, as things are, it is not difficult to believe that, in certain cases, "if, in weighing these several offices, their difference in time and quality be cast in, they will not turn the beam of equal judgement the moiety of a scruple." Moreover, it is one of the chief evils of the Reformation, that it insufficiently provided for the religious discipline of the people, and failed to establish itself in the hearts of the lower classes. "The attachment of the peasantry," says Mr. Southey," to their roods and puppetries was broken, but no wiser attachment was substituted for it. The Romanists impressed their imaginations-the Reformed Clergy failed to impress their understandings. They plucked up the tares, but they were not equally diligent in sowing the good seed. In Catholic countries, the people are passionately attached to the faith of their fathers; while the higher classes, if they have any degree of knowledge, are either unbelievers, or at least indifferents. In England there is a great