examined, he confessed to the words following: That all false matters were bolstered and clokyd in this court of Paul's Cheyne; moreover he called the apparitor, William Middleton, false knave in the full court, and his father's dettes, said he, by means of his mother-in-law and master commissary, be not payd; and this I will abide by that I have now in this place said no more but truth.' Being called on to answer further, he said he would not; and his lordship did therefore excommunicate him. From so brief an entry we cannot tell on which side the justice lay; but at least we can measure the equity of a tribunal which punished complaints against itself with excommunication, and dismissed the confessed incest of a priest with a fine of a few shillings."

The state of things here referred to has its bearing on the much canvassed question of the dissolution of the monasteries. If such were the feelings which the conduct of ecclesiastics inspired in places like London, where they were to some extent under the restraint of public opinion, we might augur far worse things where the seclusion of convent-life in a country-district would lend comparative impunity to crime. Taking this into consideration, we shall be rather surprised to find that, from the accounts of the official visitors, the larger convents came out of the inquisition to which they were subjected, in many instances, tolerably unscathed. It was in the smaller establishments that the evils of the system had their ripest development; and about the suppression of these little difference of opinion will exist, we should think, among candid Catholics. The distinction made by the visitors in their report in favour of certain convents tells (in the absence of any other motives) in behalf of the correctness of their charges against the rest. On this authority, then, it appears that "two-thirds of the monks of England were living in habits which may not be described." Nor, as had been already observed by Mr. Hallam, and is corroborated by the present author, "will the antithesis which we sometimes hear between the charity of the monasteries, which relieved poverty for the love of God, and the worldly harshness of a poor-law, endure inspection. The monasteries, which had been the support of ' valiant beggary,' had long before transferred to the nation the maintenance of the impotent and the deserving." We cannot, therefore, regret the fall of a system fraught with such evils, which had ceased to be necessary to the preservation of learning, and which had itself fallen far below the standard of the age. The disposal of the funds thus accruing is a question less easily decided; though, on the whole, we are disposed to acquiesce in Cranmer's opinion, adopted by our author, in favour of their entire secularisation. "The subsequent history both of the Scotch and English Church," he well remarks, "induces me to believe that neither would have been benefited by the possession

of larger wealth than was left to them. A purer doctrine has not corrected those careless and questionable habits in the management of property which were exposed by the visitors of 1535. Whether," he continues, with covert sarcasm, "the cause of the phenomenon lies in an indifference to the things of the world, or in the more dubious palliation, that successive incumbents have only a life-interest in their incomes, the experience of three centuries has proved the singular unfitness of spiritual persons for the administration of secular trusts; and we may be grateful that the judgment of the English laity ultimately guided them to this conclusion." The principal drawback at the time to such a decision was the power thus thrown into the hands of the crown. This danger, however, thanks to the peculiar position of the Tudor family, and the spirit of our ancestors in the succeeding century, was happily averted; and looking back upon this and similar deeds of the government of Henry VIII., although we cannot, with Mr. Froude, feel entire confidence in the purity of the motives by which they were actuated, it is impossible that we should be insensible to the substantial benefits which were achieved for us by their sagacious and prudential policy.

ART. V.-THE HARD CHURCH NOVEL.

Perversion; or the Causes and Consequences of Infidelity. A Tale for the Times. Smith, Elder, and Co. 1856.

THERE has recently been a considerable influx into the world. of theological speculation, as well from Nonconformist as from Conformist sources, which may fairly be classed together as manifestoes of the Hard Church. It is a degradation of the solid, sagacious form of Christianity. In this, its undegraded type, it is sincere, eager, pious, good sense, a little stony, but not without a very valuable function in testing the strength and metal of more sentimental and shadowy schools of thought; this may be called the Church of Common Sense. In its worst type it is a hard arrogant infliction, uniting the tone of a schoolmaster to a spirit of intellectual scorn, essentially a Hard Church. We should be very sorry to think that this last type could be found pure in many theologians. It has infected with more or less virulence the writings of several. The school itself, however, in its best phase, is rather an intellectual than a moral phenomenon. It has contained many able and careful thinkers very far removed from any kind of intolerance, and who would look down

on the flogging theology with gentle wonder and warm disapprobation. Paley may be said to have founded the school, not only by bequeathing to it a good fixed capital of masterly argument, but, what is more important, by giving the most pronounced example of its mode of thought. He, first of all men, as the Cambridge tutor, in the fondness of his admiration, happily expressed it, "had the credit of putting Christianity into a form which could be written out at examinations." To have a compact statement of the whole gist of Christianity is the principal "note" of the Common-Sense Church. Its followers have often, indeed, more or less repudiated Paley-whose temporising ethics are certainly quite separable from his theological system. The argument from design has been frequently recast. Archbishop Whately, one of the ablest and most agreeable writers of the school, has supplied the logic and metaphysics; Mr. Rogers, the most slashing and merciless of its captains, has thrown up defences round the conception of authority, and insulated the region of inspiration; Mr. Isaac Taylor has retouched the Evidences; and Mr. Binney lately addressed to young persons, after Paley's manner, a suggestion "how to make the best of both worlds." But, after all, Paley's "case" is but little changed. Its hinging point is the habit of resting the main stress of belief on the argument from design, and the miraculous credentials of revelation. And in this all the school agree, from the Aristotelian thinkers, who concede free will and at least the elements of a natural conscience, to the necessarians and utilitarians, who base morals wholly on the positive authority of Revelation. Broad in inclusion, more because it demands but few articles of belief than because it is wide in theory, this section of the Church is the resort of the strong-minded theologians, and forms a Court standing midway between the narrow crypts of Low Evangelical doctrine beneath, and the venerable decay of the High Church towers above. Perversion is written by a man of this intellectual school; for the time, we will hope only for the time, belonging to its morally ossifying type-a man of vigorous and somewhat menacing understanding not a Broad-Church man, if Hare, and Maurice, and Robertson, are of the Broad Church-latitudinarian, but not Catholic in the tone of his theology-sharp and confident in his logic-given to browbeat his adversary on the spot rather than to going with him his mile, or at least up to the utmost point of common conviction-dry and ungenial towards intellectual doubt-a shrewd partisan-an eager assailant of "extremes"-and a champion of that neutral precipitate of Christian theology,-cooling orthodoxy. But let us not confound the theological school with its least favourable specimens.

This branch of the Church Universal takes its stand on

strong common sense. It sees primarily in theology neither a deep philosophy, like Coleridge; nor a response to the heart, like Neander; nor a Divine reconciliation of the many contradictory yearnings of human nature, like Maurice. Its idea of a theological system is a decisive chain of circumstantial evidence, with a result in facts confirmatory of all sagacious views of life. Its aim and effort is to draw up so masterly a statement of these, that you would think yourself a fool to put a business-agency into the hands of a man so insincere or so dense-minded as to withhold his assent. Its great anxiety is to appeal to no strictly individual experience, but to make it "equally conclusive to all beings of equal rationality." And this foundation of its theology in the dry impersonal understanding is exactly that which makes it the feeder of the Hard Church. There is something essentially unsympathising, stiff, rocky in overweening sense; though conscientious charity will often neutralise its effect. It almost consists, indeed, in a power of steadily conceiving men as so many units of crystallised intelligence, representing different interests, but each fixed in its own type, and all like enough to each other to render a wholesale method of treatment the most remunerative. For what is common sense, but a keen apprehension of moral probability and necessity, or a quick tact in striking a moral average? And may not a sound sure understanding be best described as that which values the teaching of experience exactly in proportion to the generality of the lessons it illustrates, and which has learned to dismiss rapidly from the mind, as immaterial or practically misleading, all those fluctuating elements of human life which do not seem to be deeply imbedded in the average notions of average men? Is it not, in short, the faculty of attending most closely to that which most often comes before the mind, together with a corresponding inability to be lost or absorbed in the special elements of an individual experience?-or a power of generally regulating the judgment according to the force of numerical impressions? And in his relations with other men, a man belonging conspicuously to this sensible type gains an instinctive knowledge of what we may fairly call the inorganic laws of human thought and action, together with a tendency to ignore the more delicate laws of growth and change in social and individual character. The fixed skeleton-truths of social life which never change in form or composition, but are always alike, at least at the same stage of human history,-such, we mean, as the first principles of economy, of customary morals, the elements of political justice, and the general rules of evidence,-these are always recurring again and again in the same form in men's experience, and like inorganic bodies, therefore, their properties become more and more

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familiar with everyday experience. These, therefore, hard sense involuntarily appropriates; and it loves well to discover and rediscover their influence in every department of life. But it will not be so with what we may call the organic truths of human character, those which change their shape and twine in and out, undergoing various transformations at different stages of their influence on men. These, really appearing at different times under different aspects, cannot leave the same impress even on the keenest general observation, and must reckon as different truths, the real link not being detectable without a special and individual insight which would spoil the judgment for its rough general work. Social truths, or truths of character in their different stages of the stalk, the leaf, the bud, the flower, must really count as different things, not as various aspects of the same thing, to a mind that ensures itself, as it were, against the many probable errors of primâ facie impressions by the very great number of cases in which it is obliged to act upon them, and in a large majority of which it will hit sufficiently near the mark. Thus, to the mere understanding, organic truths, i. e. truths of continuous life which have a history and a development of their own, are split up into a number of loose inorganic truths with their links missing. A great number of disconnected fixed notions take the place of insight into the gradual and complex growth of slowly maturing life.

It is easy enough to give examples of the kind of affinity for what we have called inorganic views of life that is displayed by the strong understanding trained to deal with average men in average affairs. In politics, for instance, this class of intellect will generally incline to "low" Whig or Radical views of the duty and value of government, and represent rulers not as the head and strength of a nation, but as the happy expedient of a majority to restrain the dangerous dispositions of a minority. Bentham is an extreme case of such a politician. In social politics a mind of this kind is apt to miss the finer bonds which unite class and class, drawing all together into a living whole, and, like the economical school, to see only or chiefly the coarser and more obvious pressure of human need. In choosing a philosophy, it is blind to delicate distinctions, and in danger of explaining the life of the spirit by the analogies of the outward world. And, as we have said, in theology a mind of this nature will conceive religion less as a principle, which has a witness for itself in every secret of the heart-which begins to work in every man as early, and often far more powerfully than his conscience and which is deeply interwoven with every sacred affection,-than as a compact body of evidence which you ought to be able at any time to thrust bodily upon the understanding,