prelates, was so completely ignorant of the ancient ordination forms, is it likely that our Reformers, living more than half a century before him, and with fewer means of knowing the facts (for some of the Greek ordinals had been printed at Venice before he wrote, but subsequent to the issue of the Elizabethan Prayer-book), should have known those facts?

It is true that Mason in his 'Vindicia Anglicanæ,' first published in 1613, says, 'the Greek Church confers orders not as the Roman, but in a precatory form, as Salmeron informs us.' But these very words show that Mason knew nothing of the Greek ordination offices except from Salmeron; and the information he derived from him seems to have been limited to the one fact he mentions.

The theory, then, to which we are almost driven by the facts of the case is this: The Reformers displaced from their Ordinal the words supposed to convey the sacrificial power. These words they could not trace to Scripture, and they were convinced that the doctrine of which they are an embodiment was false. But when it came to the words of Christ Himself, which, stamped with His authority, seemed altogether on a different and far higher footing, they durst not remove them, ignorant as they were of their comparatively recent and only partial introduction. And this is the more probable, because they actually adopted many hints from an ordination office drawn up by Bucer, whose authority in the English Church was in their days very great; but abandoned his guidance on this point. Bucer excluded these words: they retained them.

It will probably be said that the true reason of their retention is altogether different; that they were retained for the very purpose for which they had been originally introduced. If those who reason thus are prepared to regard the Confessional in the English Church as resting on the same ground with that on which it rests in the Latin Church, one can understand their position; though a very little knowledge of the Reformers' works will show that it is quite untenable. If there was one thing (after the Sacrifice of the Mass) against which the Reformers were more zealous than against any other, it was compulsory auricular confession and absolution, with its necessary accompaniment of the searching and painful enumeration of all the sins that can be recollected since the last confession, which Luther spoke of as a butchery of souls;' and it is idle to say that confession is not made compulsory when it is preached up, as it now is, as the proper or sole remedy for sin, the true and perhaps the sole method of applying the 'Precious blood' to the conscience! The compulsion of doctrine is far stronger 2 P 2

than

than that of law and no ecclesiastical precept could ever obtain such absolute obedience as this recommendation' under the implied menace of damnation if it be not complied with.

The history of the Confessional we have at present no time to deal with. How the public confession (exomologesis) of the primitive Church, made before the whole church by the penitents who wished to be readmitted into her pale, after the commission of great sins, like murder, adultery, or apostasy, became gradually private, made to the priest alone, who then begged the prayers of the congregation for the penitent; how this private confession, made in order to enlist the sympathy and prayers of the people, was turned into one made for the purpose of obtaining the prayers, and then, lastly, the absolution of the priest alone; how absolution itself entirely changed its character, and from being the act of restoring Church privileges, was turned into the necessary condition of retaining those privileges, by the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council; how the Confessional, thus invested with supreme authority in respect to the forgiveness of sin, was gradually turned by the Jesuits into an engine of spiritual and temporal tyranny, the Confessor taking on him the additional function of Director; and how this last worst stage of the abuse is now being revived in the bosom of our own Church, might well offer materials for another paper. Meanwhile it is well to recollect that this whole edifice of spiritual pride and power rests on the Romish construction of one formula, a formula itself utterly destitute of primitive sanction, never adopted at all by one half of the Church, not more than 350 years old in the other half at the time of the Reformation; and retained in our Ordinal by men who had not access to the documents which inform us of its late authority, and who probably were under the false impression that its use went back as far as the time of Christ.

The third Canon of the Council of Trent, 'de Sanctissimo Pœnitentiæ Sacramento,' runs thus: If any one shall say that those words of our Lord and Saviour, "Receive the Holy Ghost: whose sins ye remit, they are remitted, and whose sins ye retain, they are retained," are not to be understood of the power of remitting and retaining sins in the Sacrament of Penance, as the Catholic Church hath always from the beginning understood them (!!!), and shall pervert them against the institution of this Sacrament into an authorisation of the preaching of the Gospel; let him be anathema.'

It is well that the real ground of the modern appeal to this formula as autho rising the Sacrament of Penance, in other words, the Confessional, in our Church should be known.

It is almost unnecessary to add that this supposed consensus of the Catholic Church, in understanding the words as the Fathers of Trent chose to understand them, has no existence save in their assertion.

ART.

ART. X.-1. Further Correspondence respecting the Affairs of Turkey. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. 1877.

2. Two Years of the Eastern Question. By A. Gallenga. London,

1877.

3. Speeches delivered by Mr. Gladstone. August 18 and 20, and Sept. 1 and 27, 1877.

4. Speeches by Lord Granville and Mr. Forster, at Bradford, August 28, 1877.

SINC

INCE we reviewed, three months ago, the state and the prospects of the Eastern Question, its issues have been quickly ripening. It is still, indeed, to all appearance, as far from any definite settlement as it then was: we find ourselves now in the presence of dangers no less serious than those which then threatened Europe; but much that was then doubtful has become clear, many a rash prophecy has been falsified; and the nation, we trust, has learned a lesson which it is not likely soon to forget. In July the war had reached only its early stages. Many still held it for certain that the success of the invading armies would be unbroken; that Abdul Kerim and Redif Pasha were fair samples of the kind of strategy which Turkey had at her command; that the submissive surrender of the passage of the Danube, and the apathy with which they beheld the passes of the Balkans occupied, were to be taken as typical of the patriotic ardour of Turkish soldiers. Already the Russians were masters of Kezanlik and Eski-Saghra; and it was a question of weeks, or perhaps days, when they should seize Adrianople, advance on the capital, and dictate on the shores of the Bosphorus a peace which should settle the Eastern Question in their own way. Russia might be obedient to the call of disinterested philanthropy, or she might be satisfying a craving ambition; but, in any case, her success was imminent and beyond dispute. In the complacency of assured infallibility the advocates of Russia were gathering up the fruits of their patriotic contention: absorbed in the contemplation of the heaven-sent prosperity of Russia's crusade, they had only a passing regret that England had not, in obedience to their urging, shared in the righteous work that had accomplished itself so easily. The policy of sentiment was justified by its fruits, and the day when national interests would be allowed to obtrude themselves upon consideration was past for ever. The horrors of war had not yet been so awful as to obliterate the memory of Turkish misdeeds. Some thousands of Armenians had, it is true, been

driven from their homes and done to death in order to insure good government for Bulgaria; but nothing had occurred to dim the sensation upon which that policy of sentiment had been built.

In these circumstances we ventured to point out that excitement was a dangerous guide in foreign politics; that, whatever might be the ultimate fortune of the war, the policy of sentiment was a hazardous one, and that no amount of righteous indignation could justify the wilful postponement of National Interests to the dictates of a blind fanaticism which called itself National Morality.

What we then urged, when the admirers of Russia were flushed with the heyday of her success, has now, we believe, become the settled conviction of the great mass of the nation. The sentimental politicians find few sympathisers now that a war, probably unparalleled in its barbarity, has given us a surfeit of horrors before which those of the spring of 1876 sink into insignificance. It was so easy to talk of war beforehand; of the sword of the crusader, which was to be so sharp, and unerring, and quick in its despatch! Even when war had begun, its course seemed to be so smooth and straightforward; the frequent reiterations of that slavish cowardice that always had, and always must mark the Turk, seemed to be so fully realised by the event! It is only when the real horrors of war are before us in all their intensity, as they have been for these three months past: when men have been mowed down by thousands, and when the wounded lie festering and uncared for where they fell when women and children have been outraged, starved, tortured to death: when the air is filled with the smoke of burning villages;' when the country round for miles is tainted by unburied corpses'-for so we read; when pestilence in the camp has kept pace with the sword; and when, too, every nation in Europe seems to feel the noise and hurtle of battle coming nearer to itself, and to be watching, with keenest anxiety, for the moment when it may be involved in the strife so rashly and wantonly kindled-it is then only that the nation is forced to ask, Who has done, or helped to do, this thing?

On the guilt that rests upon that Power which is primarily responsible for this war, and which is now reaping the fruits of its rashness, we do not mean to dwell. We fancy there are few men left in Europe who will seek to palliate it. We will quote only a very few words, interesting as coming from a source least likely to speak with undue harshness of Russia, and most extreme in the denunciation of all who ventured to doubt the righteousness of Russia's cause :—

There

'There can be no doubt now that Russia declared war while as yet she was unprepared to carry it on with forces large enough to guarantee success, and that in doing so her government has incurred an immense responsibility. Early in the debates of last Session the Duke of Argyll, having remarked in the House of Lords that any insurrection was justifiable against a government like that of Turkey, was reminded by a member of the Cabinet that no insurrection can be justifiable that is begun without a fair prospect of success. The correction rested on a sound principle. Any government that would extinguish once and for ever the rule of the Ottoman Turks in Europe would be entitled to the gratitude of the civilised world; but to attack the authors of the atrocities of 1876 in such a manner as to bring on a repetition of those atrocities upon a scale of appalling magnitude is a very different affair.'-Daily News, September 19.

We would describe the guilt of Russia in terms more severe, and rest the charge upon a wider foundation, but for the present we do not wish to add anything to these words. Coming from such a source, they are the gravest indictment that can be laid against the prime movers of this war. It is with those nearer home that we purpose now to deal. The time has now come when the nation must settle its accounts with those who have made themselves most notably the encouragers of Russia in this attempt-so ill-starred for Russia herself-so full of danger for all Europe. Reckless appeals to sentiment and fanaticism cannot be made without a grave responsibility being thereby incurred. The nation has a right to inquire upon what careful investigations the prophecies so confidently made to it were based. It has a right to ask what were the grounds upon which a particular line of action was pressed upon it. Above all, it has a right to ask who amongst its public men have,—by angry and excited invective, by rash and inconsiderate proposals, by predictions which the event has proved to be not only false, but recklessly ill-founded-contributed in any degree to the crime of this war. Whether such appears to have been the conduct of individuals or of a party in the State, in either case the nation will know how to bring such conduct to the bar of its own judgmentseat, and will have learned how far confidence, once so freely given, may prudently be renewed. We choose the moment when Russian ambition has been, at least for the moment, balked, to frame this indictment, and to adduce arguments in its support. We do so with a full sense of the gravity of the charge of contributing, even indirectly, to the horrors which are now enacting in the East. But responsibility does not rest solely with those who propose plans in the council chamber, who issue proclamations of war, who sign orders for the advance of troops. There is a responsibility of quite another sort-that of encouraging ambitious