elevate the inmost heart and conscience above the evil thoughts and low aims, which have tempted and will tempt man to sin and his soul's loss, generation after generation, from the deluge to the final day. So, again, the marvellous show of social and intellectual progress is alike compatible with a stationary measure of real intelligence in the aggregate of civilized men. The masses will still be dependent on the world's great thinkers and inventors, obeying their impulses, the mere instruments to further their ends and carry out their designs; toiling at another's bidding, thinking the thoughts that have been suggested to them, acquiescing passively in discovery after discovery, and being themselves but partially and remotely affected by them. Though science brings the ends of the earth together, and multiplies production a thousand-fold-under the sun there will still be labour of arm, mechanical toil, wrought in the sweat of man's brow to sustain life; and under this universal law and necessity the nature of the toil, and the instruments employed, sink into insignificance, as matter must always do in comparison with man that wields it to his purposes. And if progress leaves men so much as it found them, does not the analogy apply to woman also? If man's nature has its bounds that it cannot pass, if his lot is fixed and certain, though knowledge increase and strive to emancipate him, can woman subvert her six thousand years' destiny, and take upon herself a new course, new duties, and another sphere? Two pictures are set before us of the last days by Him who took upon Him our nature, and both distinctly express the continuance of man and woman in their appointed place, the same at the end of the world as at the beginning. Then, as in the days of Noe, men 'shall marry,' and women be given in marriage,' submitting to be ruled; and then as now man's scene of labour shall be the field, the outer world, and woman's the dwelling, making ready and dispensing what his toil provides. Happy both, equally blessed, if they so accomplish their appointed tasks as to be 'taken' to an eternity of nobler employment, where no lofty aspiration of either shall remain unsatisfied!

48

ART. II.—1. Burn's Ecclesiastical Law. London: Sweet. [9th Edit.]

2.-A Sermon preached before the House of Lords, March 21st, 1855. By WALTER KERR HAMILTON, D.D., Bishop of Salisbury. London: Spottiswoode.

We think that very few, except the most resolute and ignorant of the Dissenters, will deny that, taken as a whole, the Clergy of England are a useful and deserving class, whose secular interests are entitled to their fair share of common justice. Even those persons who may not have been accustomed, by early associations, to venerate them in their sacerdotal character, or to regard the Church of England and Ireland as entrusted with a power of the keys, may yet look on the Church and the Clergy with very considerable respect, as forming one of the most ancient and widely extended religious institutions of the country.

The milder class of dissenters, especially in rural districts; and even more inveterate schismatics; in the times of sickness and poverty, would sincerely regret to see the parochial Clergy as a body disappear from before them. They may indulge at present their nonconforming tendencies without let or hindrance, and revel in the occasional amusement of setting at nought the clergyman of the parish; but if the Church and the clergyman no longer existed, the whole zest and pleasure of the thing would be gone, inasmuch as there would be nothing to separate themselves from, nothing with which they might refuse to conform. What resources would they have in their moments of distress, either temporal or spiritual, when the imperfect systems of their own religious constitution failed them, in the many religious offices which even they respect and adhere to? The Clergy of this country are everywhere the leaders, and, in rural districts almost exclusively, the promoters of education, as well as the great payers for it also. Without being generally eminent in science or literature, they yet furnish individuals most distinguished in both, and are as a body the chief representatives, in their respective localities, of all that civilizes and refines; especially in days when the influential laity no longer live on their estates, or make themselves public characters by mixing freely and without reserve among their dependents and neighbours, even during the brief visits with which they may honour the hereditary mansion. As for the learned professions of law and physic, they accomplish something, no doubt, in diffusing men of education throughout the country; but, of the former class, it is very seldom that a respectable attorney is to be found in a country village, while

medical men take very extensive rounds, and make but flying visits to the distant glen or hill-side hamlet. Everything, therefore, which can be done by the presence of an educated man, freely and constantly mixing with the lower and the toiling classes of society, is left to the clergyman. By his office he is bound to see much of the poor, and to gain influence over their minds during the most impressible moments of life; he gives a tone to parochial education by his visits to the school; and once or twice a-week he assumes the position of a public orator, addressing all his neighbours in the language and with the ideas of an educated man. Who can tell how much of the loyalty which marks the English people is due to the teaching and the moral influence of the Clergy? Apart, therefore, from the higher and more spiritual view of his character, he surely deserves well of the state and of his country, especially in these days of non-resident gentry. The amount of national refinement, which may reasonably be set down as the result of the general standing of the Clergy, and of the necessary contact between them and their parishioners, is no unimportant element in the formation of character among the poorer classes; and, by conse quence, in producing the mutual good-will and coherence of the various, and otherwise widely separated, orders of British society.

These remarks do not apply with equal force to the clergy of the metropolis or large towns. As a body, it is impossible for them to be brought so closely into contact with the poor as their rural brethren find practicable, the comparative fewness of whose parishioners do not outstrip the bounds of personal acquaintance. The case, however, is very different when human souls are numbered by thousands instead of hundreds. Town clergy, if viewed only in their social position, are the ornament of the middle classes, rather than the intimate friends and domestic advisers of the poor. Their spiritual character is, indeed, the same; but the secular position of the country parson has its especial advantages and uses, not enjoyed by the incumbent of a dense and varied population, among whom he possesses no recognised preeminence over many of his neighbours from educational attainment or social influence

In the remarks we are about to make on the fiscal burdens of the Clergy, we shall devote our principal attention to those which bear on the old parish churches of the country; and, therefore, they will in great measure apply to the rural clergy as the more undisturbed representatives of the old parochial system. The incumbents of old parish churches, whether in town or country, are indeed liable to many heavy fiscal charges, of which we hope to show the injustice; but clerical income, in metropolitan or large town districts, is in most cases on so widely different a footing from that of rural districts-is the

result of so many accidental circumstances,' and belongs to such a different aspect of the Church-that we propose to leave town incumbents as such to make known their own distinct and peculiar burdens, to fight their own separate and individual interests, while for the present we confine our detail of fiscal grievances to those which chiefly press on the incumbents of country parishes; or rather on incumbents generally, whose income is derived from what is or has been at some time a commutation for tithe.

Let it not be supposed, however, that in undertaking to expose many things which seem to be unjust burdens on the country clergy, we are entering upon any Quixotic or indiscriminate defence of the imagined temporal interests of this class. It is not our object to excite feelings of universal commiseration for the present rectors of England as individuals. There are unquestionably numerous members of that fraternity, and those, perhaps, the very men who, in the eyes of the public, are types of their class, who are, beyond all doubt, in the enjoyment of as much worldly comfort as falls to the average lot of mortals. What we are about to claim is fair treatment of the Church's property as such, in whatever hands it may be. The very comfort and the wealth of the exceptional cases of rich clergy, who are careless of the undue taxation from which their ecclesiastical income suffers, makes the lot of others harder than it would be: for those small imposts which are serious burdens to a poor priest, when presented to a small benefice after years of hard service, and which, if viewed only with reference to such cases, are manifest grievances and acts of gross injustice, assume another aspect, and are even prudently forgotten, in the case of those who, at the age of twenty-four, are inducted into the family living, or of those who have expended several thousand pounds in the purchase of preferment, taking these drawbacks into their money calculations. Thus, in temporal things as in spiritual, the interests of the Church are made to suffer from the secularizing effect on her property, which the present use of private patronage and the open sale of livings cannot fail to have. This system is the means of preventing many claims of justice, which ought to protect the general rights of the Clergy, from being as clearly recognised as they certainly would be, if the case of poorer benefices and poorer incumbencies stood by itself alone.

The abstract injustice remains, of course, the same under both circumstances; but the remedy, where most needed, is rendered the more inaccessible by the peculiar circumstances which

For instance, the great depreciation of income from the recent burial enact

ments.

belong only to a comparatively few cases. Every time that sympathy for the burdens of the Clergy is checked by the oftrepeated story of the fat rector, we are confident that twenty lean incumbents are suffering actual hardships under an oppressing system of taxation, to one genuine case of plethoric opulence. And this calculation leaves out of view the large body of incumbents, whose private means alone enable them to meet the outgoings of their preferment.

But the cases even of comfortable or wealthy clergymen which have no claim on our individual sympathy, may yet contain a very strong ground of complaint on the part of the Church as an independent corporate body. Men who bring large private fortunes into the Church, and who live in splendour or luxury,. especially when they have bought their livings, or possess them, as part of the family estates, cannot help exhibiting to the public eye a great mixture of, and confusion between, secular and ecclesiastical property. Nor is it necessary to add that the ecclesiastical ideal is too often made to yield, in the estimation especially of the British farmer, to the more tangible object of a well-todo gentleman living in a great house with a good income, who is therefore expected by him to do his duty like an Englishman, especially in the article of bearing every possible pecuniary burden that can be thrust upon him. The principle thus popularly established in these cases, extends to smaller and poorer benefices; and it follows that, while the large ones are secularized, the small ones are oppressed, to the great injury in both. cases of the genuine property of the Church.

Grievances of this kind are not, however, of recent origin; nor have country rectors and vicars to complain only of the taxation which the secular power of modern days has imposed upon them. Indeed, there never existed more unscrupulous appropriators of rural tithes than the spiritual hierarchy, dominant in this land when the English Church was in connexion: with Rome, during the ages before the Reformation.

The Pope made a very good income out of the first-fruits and. tenths of the English Church; while the grants and immunities that were frequently given to monastic institutions of the. whole tithes of a parish, or of other fiscal privileges, thereby grievously impoverished the spiritual condition of many a rural district, substituting a beggared vicar for a rector well endowed, and equal to all the emergencies of an increasing flock. Unfortunately, when the period of reform arrived, this vile example of spoliation was but too naturally and rapaciously copied by the State. Great tithes, far from being restored to their parishes, on the dissolution of monasteries, were, with more injustice than before, appropriated by the crown itself, or given to enrich its favourites. Injustice, which had its beginning at the hands