and honor with Roman Catholics, was so framed as to be equally effective for the exclusion of dissenting Protestants from every office, civil or military; the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, received in some parish church, on some Lord's day, immediately after divine service and sermon, being made, as in the Corporation Act, a test or condition. No exemption from the demands or the penalties of that act was provided by the Act of Toleration. In the intendment of English law, a dissenter from the established Church, be he ever so able and upright, was unworthy to serve his country in any public employment-unworthy to sit in Parliament or on the bench of any court-unworthy to hold a commission in the army or navy-unworthy to be a custom-house officer or an exciseman-unwor hy to hold the meanest office for which the most worthless man might qualify himself by profanely receiving the sacramental bread and cup from the hands of an Anglican priest. Fourthly, by similar tests, all dissenters were excluded from the national universities-not only from fellowships and offices of government or instruction, not only from degrees, but even from matriculation. In all these respects, dissenters, of every Protestant name, were still to be not outlaws indeed, but legally outcasts from English society. In the view of English law and statemanship they were a dangerous class that must be tolerated for reasons of political expediency, but could not be trusted; and that was therefore to be kept under, stigmatized, circumscribed with legal disabilities, and shut out from opportunities and means of liberal culture. So lately as twenty years ago, when the most offensive legal disabilities had been taken off, the overbearing appeal of English society towards dissenters was such that an American in England, to whom an English friend was repeating the complaint, then so common there, of the treatment to which free negroes were subjected in our free States, replied, "Yes; it is a shame to our country that colored people in the free States are almost as badly treated as Dissenters are in England.”

It is now a little more than two hundred years since the expulsion of the old Puritanisın from the established Church of England; a little less than two hundred years since separation from the national establishment to worship God in free asso

ciations of Christian believers ceased to be a crime by the laws of England, and began to be tolerated as an evil which could not be forcibly suppressed. The volume which we are commending exhibits the progress of religion and of religious liberty in those two centuries of English history. After an introductory chapter, reviewing summarily the conflicts and sufferings of Non-conformity from the Reformation to the Revolution, Mr. Skeats narrates the story of the Free Churches, including under that name Baptists and Quakers as well as Presbyterians and Independents. Of course the relation of those bodies to the civil government-the disabilities which were the penalty even of tolerated dissent from the Established Church-the harsher penalties which were sometimes ordained by acts of legislation-the methods of evasion, of protest, of passive resistance, or of petition and public agitation, which were from time to time employed-the steady malignity of Toryism, never yielding but by compulsion to the progress of ideas, and always ready to persecute when it had power-the slow concessions made to the discovery that Free Churches were a fixed fact, as intractable, at least, as any other fact of the British constitution, and were not to be got rid of without the total loss of English liberty-the growth of a more tolerant spirit, first spreading among the people, and at last registering itself in acts of Parliament-are a large portion of the history. But other topics are by no means neglected. The decay of spiritual religion; the coming in of religious indifference, polite but undisguised contempt for Christianity; the dead Orthodoxy and dead Unitarianism of the eighteenth century; the efforts of Dissenters (shamefully excluded from the universities) to provide for themselves (though under the ban of the law) such means of learning and intellectual discipline as were essential to their progress; the contributions of Dissenters to the theological and religious literature of the English language; their sympathy and activity in the religious awakening of England under Whitfield and the Wesleys; and their participation in the nineteenth century work of Christian propagandism, and of universal philanthropy prompted by Christian thought, are duly recorded.

ARTICLE V.-YALE COLLEGE-SOME THOUGHTS
RESPECTING ITS FUTURE.

THERE is a somewhat general feeling, we believe, among those who are most deeply interested in Yale College, that the institution is about entering on a new era of its existence. The work of the last seventy years, it is felt, has been a good and a great one, but it is mainly accomplished. Like that of the first century of the College history, and like that of every epoch in the progress of every growing institution, it has laid the foundation for what is larger and higher than itself—not higher, indeed, in the nobleness of the working, but in that the working is nearer to the final and full completion of the plan. The past now is to open itself toward and into the future, and a great step forward is to be or ought to be taken. Indications of this are seen on every side. The suggestions which are presented by those who think earnestly upon the subject of education; the criticisms of the College which, for some reason or other, have been so frequent of late and which, we regret to say, have not been always made either in a wise or a generous spirit; the proposition to change the governing board of the institution by the introduction of new members from the alumni; and the sentiments and aspirations of the instructors within the College walls, all alike bear witness that the coming years are looked upon as containing within themselves possibilities and hopes, which as yet have been unrealized. What are to be the characteristic features of the new era, and what its peculiar and distinctive work, are, therefore, questions of much importance, at the present time, and worthy of serious consideration. Our object in this Article is to present some thoughts as a partial answer to these questions.

The first and most important work to be done in the years immediately before us is, as we believe, a work of unification. Yale College, like most of the older American Colleges, began as a sort of high school. It carried forward the education of the young men who came to it beyond the point which they

had reached in the lower schools of the time, and opened the

But it was lim

way for them to enter upon their active life. ited in its aims, and in the results which it accomplished, by Men had not come, as yet, to take

develop themEven in the denearest to the

the limitations of the age. the widest views of education. The various sciences and branches of learning had scarcely begun to selves—some of them had not begun to exist. partment of theological science, which was minds of the fathers, the demands and possibilities were comparatively small. A general course, moving on but a little way, was all which, as it would seem, could be devised. The wisdom of the early founders was displayed, not in their accomplishment of the entire work, but in the fact that the plan which they formed was one which would, readily and naturally, enlarge itself to meet every requirement or change of the future, so soon as the demand should arise. The school, which they established, would become a university in the course of generations. The College, which, in their day, was a whole in itself, would gradually become but one among several portions of a greater institution. It would lose something of its own prominence as it associated with itself other departments for more special training, but it would gain a new honor in their company, which it could never know without them. It was after the beginning of the present century that the change came. The new features of the times, and the growth to which we have alluded in all branches of knowledge, gave the opportunity, and, in giving the opportunity, they presented the call for a new work. The sagacious and far-seeing mind of the remarkable man who, at that period, had the interests of the College in his special keeping, understood the call. He saw that, if the institution lingered in the old work, it might increase, indeed, in numbers and in influence, but it could never take the high place which was offered to it among the educational institutions of the country. Professional schools must be established, which should take the students at their graduation from the collegiate or academic department and fit them, by a special course of study, for their own peculiar sphere in the world. The beginning, at least, must be made, which should prepare the way for future growth

and render possible the completion of the work. Accordingly, at the earliest practicable moment, he established one of these schools, and devised the plan for another, which was founded a few years later. His immediate successors, who had been largely under his influence, carried forward the same plans. All the professional departments of the College were established, or strengthened until some of them attained a considerable eminence. Finally, within the past twenty-five years, the Scientific School and the department of Philosophy and Philology have made the institution complete in its parts. The work of which we have thus briefly spoken, together with the advancement of scholarship in every branch of learning within the College, has been the work of the past half-century. We have alluded to it, however, not for its own sake, but because we would call attention to a point which is of especial importance. The history of these two great periods of the past shows that the development in this, as in other similar institutions in our country, has not been a development of all the parts together. It has been, on the contrary, a growth for a hundred years of one department alone by itself, and then an addition to this one department of others, which, from their later origin, have seemed to be gathered around it as their center. The life and vigor of our American Colleges-even where they have widened into Universities, as at Yale and Harvard-have continued largely at this center; and the governing powers have regarded the academical department as the object of their peculiar and almost their sole care. The institutions have thus, with all their enlargement and success, been, after all, rather colleges with certain outside sections than universities made up of coördinate and coequal branches. They have not had a well-rounded and perfect development, but one which has been partial and one-sided in its character. This result has been a natural, perhaps in some measure a necessary, result of the origin and history of the institutions. But of the reality of the fact we think no intelligent observer can doubt.

Now the point, which we have to urge, is, that the future years must unite these departments into a common whole, giving the same care to the growth of all. The age of mere