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who may happen to be no partisan either of one side or the other, there is a certain amusing feature in this passionate opposition,—the very same men who stay obstinately in prison rather than yield to the authority of a lay court becoming almost frantic at the suggestion that a spiritual superior, their own lawful ruler, should try their offences and regulate their practices. We ask with amazement, By whom, then, do they wish to be judged? or is it the wildest congregational independence which the private members of one of the strongest hierarchies in the world desire?

The Archbishop’s bill was so changed in its passage through the Houses of Parliament as to be almost unrecognisable, and in that passage lost most of its distinctive features; and it has not stood the supreme English test of working well. But the fundamental objection of the clergy to giving to their bishops that obedience which they had all vowed to render, and their revolt from episcopal authority, could not be more clearly shown. It shows how little confidence the ecclesiastic has in his own officers. Such an absence of loyalty and allegiance would bring any other portion of the body politic to swift destruction. Is it not the most incontrovertible proof of a something in the Church which forbids the action of ordinary laws, that even rebellion and mutiny do so little harm? It is an unlovely spectacle; and a hundred times the actum est de ecclesia Anglicana has been pronounced. But it never comes true. Not only “the gates of hell,” but many apparently fatal follies with which, if we may venture to say so, heaven itself is to be accredited, so far as good men and good intentions may be allowed to represent heaven, are never able to prevail against her.

The Ritualistic movement, however, with all its strife and confusion, was not the only or the worst form of danger with which Archbishop Tait had to deal. It is remarkable that within his life and episcopate both of the greatest religious commotions of our time should have sprung up. The effect of the sophistry of Tract xc. had scarcely died out in lengthening circles from the surface of the public mind, when it was again disturbed by a still more alarming missile from another quarter. The ‘Essays and Reviews’ fell like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky upon the not very reflective or deep-thinking English public, which had been conscious indeed of subversive German views for some time, but thought as little of them as their existence in a language comparatively unknown and demanding no immediate attention justified. But when several clergymen of the Church of England came forth to enunciate these views the commotion was overwhelming. The tone of common thought and general intelligence since then has been so modified, that it is difficult to comprehend the passionate emotions raised by that book. For our own part, we allow that a wholesome and lively prejudice against all who had anything to do with the publication exists in our own mind, along with a strong sense of the fact that we should probably have very little to say against them nowadays in view of the change that has come over the whole face of the intellectual and even religious world in respect to the questions involved. Few people now consider the truth of Christianity as bound up with the accuracy of the first chapter of