may supply us with many instances of this salutary reaction. Nothing, we believe, has more tended to diffuse throughout our communion sound views on the Sacrament of Baptism, than the attacks made upon the doctrine of the Church concerning it during the whole process of the Gorham controversy. So we believe it has been already, and will be still more, in the course of the discussions to which the publication of Essays and Reviews' has given birth. The tendency of the human mind, in the individual and in that aggregate of individuals which makes up any community, is to be comparatively careless about truths which it holds without dispute or trouble. The attempt to steal away this possession first wakes up the possessor to its value, and, turning its maintenance into an active effort, gives consciousness and reality to what was before a mere instinctive habit.

The attack upon dogma amongst ourselves has awoke numbers to a sense of the value of dogmatic truth. It is worse than idle to represent this, as Mr. Maurice does, as the community in hatred of those who had differed from each other by being each the representative of different sides of the common truth. It is the agreement of men who have inherited jointly some vast treasure, and who in times of security have differed, it may be, something in their several estimates of the value of its various parts, to defend in a moment of danger the priceless deposit against the common robber. Their bond of union is not hatred of the assailant, but love for that which he assails. It is that which is so forcibly described in the sacred words 'striving together for the faith of the Gospel.' (Philipp. i. 27.)

There are two distinct modes which this defence may assume. It may act by a direct assault on the assailant in defence of the doctrine threatened, or it may proceed by the more positive course of maintaining the threatened truths, and so strengthening the whole system against attack.

Each course has its separate advantages. The first is more direct in its action upon the teachers of the special error to be refuted it exposes their fallacies, and by so doing it damages their claims to authority, and destroys their arms of offence; and it is therefore surest to attract attention and to create immediate interest. There is far more of dramatic power about it. The refutation of error-often a somewhat dull matter in the abstract—is rendered exciting by the satisfied indignation with which the sense of justice sees the individual offenders pursued, brought to trial, and condemned. But against this is to be set the negative tendency of this treatment. To condemn error is not necessarily to maintain truth; and after the satisfaction of a righteous indignation against an offender there is not seldom a reactionary slumber, as if all had been accomplished by his chastisement, although the treasure for the sake of which he was pursued has not been itself recovered. The second mode, though far less exciting, is free from this evil. It proceeds by building up against the perversion or negation of error the positive truth, and so smites the robber of our faith only incidentally. But whilst it lacks much of the strong interest of the former method, it is, in the long run, the most valuable. The work is purely positive, and its interest is enduring. The mere barricade against an enemy may at the moment of attack be the defence of all we value, but when the assault is over it is worthless. But the opening of some great military road, though rendered needful at the time of its construction by some passing exigency of warfare, is of perpetual value, by opening what remains as a permanent approach to districts closed heretofore to all necessary intercommunication.

TheReplies to Essays and Reviews,' to which the Bishop of Oxford has contributed a Preface, and the Aids to Faith,' of which the Bishop (Thomson) of Gloucester and Bristol is the Editor, are good examples of these two methods. The

'Aids to Faith,' as its title signifies, proposes, upon the matters which have come recently into question, to supply detailed statements of, and arguments for, positive truth, which may so inform the reader upon the whole question that he shall be himself a match for the setter-forth of old objections under new garbs, and see at once through the subtleties which would suggest difficulties, and insinuate the charge of impossibility against that which has been received from the beginning as the voice of God in the Revelation of His Truth.

The volume is, in our judgment, worthy of its occasion and its argument. It deals with the foundations of the faith upon all the great matters which have come into dispute; and though with various power and success, in almost every instance it deals with them in a mode well calculated to confirm the faith it is intended to secure. The work consists of nine Essays, dealing respectively with Miracles as Evidences of Christianity; with the Study of the Evidences of Christianity; with Prophecy; with Ideology and Subscription; with the Mosaic Record of Creation; the Genuineness and Authenticity of the Pentateuch; Inspiration; the Death of Christ; and Scripture and its Interpretation.

There is less to object to or allow for than we should have thought possible in so many Essays on such high subjects, contributed by such different writers. In the second Essay, indeed, we think that the writer sometimes pushes too far the inferences which he draws from his leading principle, that Christianity is an historical religion. He sometimes, doubtless quite unintentionally, slides into language which would appear, in exalting the historical, to undervalue the internal evidence of our Faith. This has led him, in our judgment, to condemn too sweepingly what has been called the 'Evangelical' movement in our own Church. We have never been amongst those who have closed their eyes to the many evils

which waited upon that really great awakening. But we do not think that the first loss of theological knowledge amongst us is fairly to be traced to that source. It began earlier. It was the fruit, in great measure, of that wretched policy which, under the influence of Bishop Hoadley and his fellows, discouraged the promotion to the high places of the Church of sound and learned theologians, and thought it wiser to fill our great chairs with safe men, who would be obedient to the party which promoted them, whilst it discouraged divines of powerful minds, high attainments, and holy lives, who might have proved, in the evil days which followed, leaders alike to the clergy and to the laity. This policy led, as it always must lead, to an age of cold hearts, of worldly lives, and of doubting spirits; and in this dark time these evils had spread to a fearful extent amongst our clergy as well as our laity. The Evangelical movement was the awakening reaction of the great soul of the nation against this deathlike slumber. had not long established itself amongst us, and had scarcely reached up to the high places of the land, when the preliminary throes of the great revolutionary earthquake began to make themselves felt; and it was not long before the full consequences of such a decay of faith were written broad before our eyes as in characters of fire in the convulsions of the neighbouring continent; and especially of France; in which from many causes the sleep had been the deepest.

It

The immediate work of the leaders of the new movement was, it is true, far more to awaken souls, and to guide those which were just awakening, than to be great in theological attainments. But they were not a set of ignorant men amongst men of learning, who fought for unlettered subjective religiousness against a school of well furnished theologians; they were men whose hearts were warmed by the great truths of the Gospel in the midst of an apathetic generation. The evil of exclusiveness, it is true, fell upon

their party at a later period, when the followers of the first ranks narrowed all the faith to the comparatively small range of truths (mighty as those truths were) which their fathers had won, and refused to share in the increasing breadth of view which was dawning on the awakened Church. We are bound, therefore, to admit that the indignation which some statements of this Essay have aroused in those who represent the party to whose doors he seeks to lay this great reproach, is not unnatural. We cannot wonder at the aggrieved feelings with which those who know the depth and truthfulness of that hold upon the doctrine of the Atonement and the influences of the Holy Spirit, which was the sheetanchor of the early Evangelical movement, have seen their fathers in the Christian strife here at home described as cooperating in any sense whatever with the authors of that German movement, which brought it to pass among our foreign brethren that 'religion was regarded as an affair of sentiment.'

Closely connected with this vein of thought is another tendency which may perhaps, as we have hinted, be traced here and there in this Essay-we mean a depreciation of the full weight of Authority, and of internal evidence, in the exaltation of the importance of that which is external. We quite agree with the writer, that to abandon the historical and external evidence for the truth of our faith would be alike foolish and fatal. But, in establishing this, we cannot venture to assert that the Gospel certainly never made its way by first recommending itself to the conscious wants and wishes of mankind.' It is true, indeed, as the Essayist says, that 'it was to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness; but that was because in them its accents were drowned by the storm of their prejudices; but wherever it broke upon an ear prepared to receive it, its voice awoke at once in the listener's heart a burst of unutterable joy. We