ART. VIII.-TRACTS FOR PRIESTS AND PEOPLE.

I. Religio Laici. By Thomas Hughes, Author of "Tom Brown's School-Days."

II. The Mote and the Beam: a Clergyman's Lessons from the Present Panic. By the Rev. F. D. Maurice, Incumbent of St. Peter's, Vere Street.

III. The Atonement as a Fact and as a Theory. By the Rev. Francis Garden, Sub-Dean of her Majesty's Chapels Royal.

IV. The Signs of the Kingdom of Heaven: an Appeal to Scripture upon the Question of Miracles. By the Rev. John Llewelyn Davies, M.A., Rector of Christ Church, Marylebone.

V. On Terms of Communion:

1. The Boundaries of the Church. By the Rev. C. K. P. 2. The Message of the Church. By J. N. Langley, M.A. VI. The Sermon of the Bishop of Oxford on Revelation, and the Layman's Answer.

1. A Dialogue on Doubt. By J. M. Ludlow.

2. Morality and Divinity. By the Rev. F. D. Maurice, Incumbent of St. Peter's, Vere Street.

VII. Two Lay Dialogues. By J. M. Ludlow.

1. On Laws of Nature, and the Faith therein.

2. On Positive Philosophy.

London, Macmillan, 1861.

IT is curious to remark the different effect of excitement from danger to the State and from danger to the Church. The former calls into action, even under absolute governments, generous and uniting passions, before which the lines of party disappear, and the spirit of forbearance and self-sacrifice rises to the ascendant. The latter, even in a free country, seems at once to awaken every dormant ecclesiastical egotism, to widen every difference, to intensify all dogmatism, and hoot down the catholic and charitable temper. In critical moments for the nation, Parliament knows how to suspend its inner conflicts, and take its measures with reticent dignity. In critical moments for the Church, her Councils and Convocations break into a Babel of contention, where only one thing is certain,--that new truth and gentle wisdom have no chance, but must leave the game to the wrangling of schoolmen, the chatter of popular preachers, the decorous spite of the scholar, and the arts of ecclesiastical diplomats. The recent panic occasioned by the volume of Essays and Reviews presents in general no exception to this

rule. Every party in the Church, every "denomination" beyond it, has endeavoured to turn the excitement to account, and make sectarian "capital" out of it. The Romanist takes the phenomenon as a fall of the mask from Protestantism: the Anglican, as proving the need of tradition in aid of Scripture: the Comtist, as an instalment of Positivism: the Evangelical, as betraying the cloven foot of "Neology:" the Unitarian,-affectionately embracing in their Oxford dress the daring heresies which he has frowned down in his own household,—as a homage, if not to his doctrines, at least to his method. To the "religious newspapers" the book was as great a godsend as a Garibaldi expedition or an American civil war to the Times in the long vacation. They have discussed it according to their nature. They are the modern receptacles of such debates as in other times found their centre in ecclesiastical assemblies. In their columns it is, that, in our days, a Nicolas of Myra must plant his fist in Arius's jaw: there, that an Athanasius must rage, and a Eusebius truckle: there, that the orthodox shout is raised to expel some obnoxious Theodoret: thence, that peaceable folks keep aloof, like Gregory Nazianzen from "the concourse of geese and cranes." They necessarily take the measure of every theological phenomenon from their own special and exclusive point of view; and, unless from the conflict or balance of opposite exaggerations, leave its true proportions no chance of coming out.

The

The Tracts for Priests and People form, in their whole tone and spirit, a marked exception to this disputatious partizanship. Proceeding from a well-known band of associates,— the oi Tepi Maurice, they are not a manifesto in the interests of a school;-not a pious parody and coarse caricature set up as an altar-piece ;-but a serious, manly, and large-hearted exposition of Christian faith, in its direct relations to human life. In religious depth and moral earnestness, in sympathetic appreciation of the doubts they would relieve, and in a certain openness to truth all round, they stand out in favourable contrast from the mass of literature on this cause célèbre. writers, both clerical and lay, are free from the opposite disabilities of the men of mere thought and the men of mere action. Susceptible, like all persons of liberal culture, to the problems of the hour, they yet are not enclosed in any scientific clique or academic officina, where questions are got up and intellectual formulas hammered into shape; but are immersed in the real life of the world where these things appear in the working;where distributed scepticism ferments in the actual character of the young and thoughtful, preying upon the spirits, unnerving the will;—and where, if class is separated from class, it is

not from political injustice, not from social inhumanity, but from the want of a common reverence uniting all in God. Greatly to the honour of this set of Churchmen it may be said, that no school, born so deep in the dim recesses of philosophy, ever emerged so soon into the light of action, or took on itself so faithfully the yoke of labour: it is truly a paradoxical paternity, by which Coleridge, with his subtle intellect and flabby will, becomes the father of a "muscular Christianity." The double interest which his representatives thus acquire in the religious problems of the day, by mental inheritance and by moral experience, gives to their words a peculiar weight. They are not intellectual cowards, afraid to face any real lights of knowledge, or to scrutinise the passing shades of doubt. Nor are they indifferent spectators of the mere play of thought among the thinkers; but in contact with its human results, nearer than less genial counsellors can be to the confessional of its struggles and its sorrows. In many respects, the Tracts speak in a way not unworthy of this advantageous position.

The characteristic theology of these writers has great resources for dealing with the wants and questionings of religious minds. Itself the product of a spiritual experience, which swept in Coleridge through all latitudes, and in Mr. Maurice has traversed no small arc, it is cognisant of dangers, and aware of safe and quiet channels, where a less searching survey fails to show them. The higher interpretation which it gives to most of the distinctive words and formulas of Church doctrine delivers them from many oppressive difficulties. The well-known explanation of the word "eternal," which lifts it out of the sphere of time, completely transforms the whole "heaven and hell" theology; wipes out the contrast between the present and the future life; and turns "salvation" into a spiritual emancipation, whether now or then, from whatever is contrary to God. We need not say how many gross pictures, at this single touch, vanish into air; how sentient pleasures and pains retire in shame before a more solemn reckoning; and how the suspicion falls to the ground at once that religion is but self-interest with a long look-out. The pravity of human nature returns within the limits of credible fact, when it is no longer "the sin of being born," but is construed into the inherent repugnance of Self to higher and rightful claims: and when, further, those higher claims themselves, as revealed to the soul within and embodied in the moral constitution of the world without, are resolved into the Personal communion with us of the Son's Divine Humanity, it becomes a matter of course to refer all our evil to ourselves, and all our good to what is beyond us. And if indeed there be this supernatural life underlying the natural,

realising the Order of a Perfect Will in the physical world, and pleading for its realisation in our free spirits,—if the phenomena of the visible universe and the march of history are but the external scenery and drama of this inner Divine Personality, then Revelation is simply the emergence of the reality into knowledge: not a making of divine things (which, missed or seen, are always there), but a showing of them: not an exceptional coup d'état in the administration of the world, but an opened sample of its eternal laws. Even that the Son of God should take upon him a human individuality is but the manifesting climax of what, as abiding in our nature and originating all its good, he for ever partially does. And when his death is regarded simply as the uttermost surrender of a holy will, when its efficacy is sought, not in the penal virtue of its sufferings, but in the moral perfection of its obedience, and is found, not in the pacifying of God, but in the redeeming force of such self-sacrifice on man, the atonement itself does its best to return within the shelter of righteous law, and ceases to be a forensic insult and browbeating to the Conscience of mankind. Observe, finally, the proper meaning of the word "Faith," as determined by these antecedents. It is personal trust in the Divine Guide, who speaks with us in every higher claim ;—a trust consciously exercised by the Christian, who discerns in the claim a living and a loving eye; unconsciously, by the righteous Pagan, who knows not the Person but reveres the Law. Salvation by Faith falls thus into coalescence with salvation by Obedience: only, that its true power first declares itself, when the impersonal Law breaks from its cloud and comes forth as the living God; when our surrender is one, not of constraint to a dead statute, but of free affection to an Almighty Guardian; when what else were Morality rises into Divinity. How different is this from that Salvation by dogma,-or, at all events, not without dogma,-which poisons the heart of almost every church, and is little else than Christendom's standing sin against the Holy Ghost! Is it wonderful that Mr. Maurice incessantly recurs,-perhaps not always pertinently, to this distinction, radical to all religion, and scattering an infinitude of doubts, between opinion as critical assent to a proposition, and faith as moral reliance on a higher Person?

From this theology no more wise and welcome consequence flows than the erasure of the false distinction between secular and spiritual things. It is a distinction that has no root in reality, and lies only in our blindness or our vision. The world is divine, whether we see it or not its common duties, its humblest work, the order of its affections, the hierarchy of its relations, in the home, in the village, in the commonwealth,

in the family of nations,-are holy ordinances, the very sacraments of reality, alive with the Highest Presence: they are secular only to those from whom this truth is hid, and whom no secret awe deters from making them the field for the selfish play of humour, interest, or ambition. "There are not two moralities," one for nature, the other for grace: "Conversion" does not alter, but only reveal, a man's spiritual obligations and position it puts him into no divine kingdom, where he was not already he stands in the same universe in which he stood before only the scales have fallen from his eyes. That the new experience thus opened is wonderful, nay even a rebirth of the spirit, may be asserted with the Evangelical: yet that God's grace is contingent on human consciousness and recognition may be denied with the Catholic. In this view, the world and the Church, labour and prayer, morals and religion, the life of nature and the life in God, merge into each other and are objectively one; and stand apart only through the subjective illusion of our darkness or our sin. This consecration of the common ground and work of our humanity relieves many a heart that vainly demands of itself the anguish and raptures of conviction, yet beats with a living pulse of righteousness, and flushes the cheek with joy in what is noble, pure, and true. In all these respects, the distinctive theology of our new “Tractarians" has hold of such deep truths, and stands clear of so many protests which strike home elsewhere, as to address itself with great advantage to the troubled faith of honest and serious minds. There are two forms of religious distress or dearth to which, especially, it brings infinite deliverance. First, where, as in Scotland, the Genevan "plan of salvation,"-with its corresponding plan of damnation,-has at last, by long hammering, broken through the logical crust, and pierced the heart, of humanity; an insurgent agony has arisen, a fierce struggle between defiant denial and believing despair,-on which the gospel of this school opens as a tranquillising revelation, permitting hope and charity without forfeiture of faith and holiness. And, secondly, where a Deistical philosophy or a mere Historical theology had virtually set God away from the "here" and "now," and, under prolonged drought and famine of divine things, even delivered the prophet's rod to Carlyle's hand, to bring water from the rock and show the manna on the ground, -an unspeakable refreshment was brought by a theology which, also lifting the thick veil, showed not only a divine mystery and beauty, but the Living God himself, and re-baptised the present, not simply in wonder and reverence, but in the communion of trust and affection. The depth to which Mr. Maurice's faith is penetrated with this truth,-of the immediate