brought into discussion. The Tractarians denied the truth of it, maintaining that the New Testament derived its authority from the Church, and pointing out that the faith once for all delivered to the saints must have existed as a body of doctrine during the long interval that elapsed between the resurrection of Christ and the appearance of the earliest of the books that formed the New Testament. And they further stated, that when the canon was formed, the test that was applied to every book for which a place was claimed in the sacred volume, was its conformity to the pre-existing body of doctrine. Thus a fierce controversy arose between the advocates of the supremacy of the Church and the maintainers of the supremacy of Scripture.

The evangelical party, though greatly shocked by the statements of their antagonists, had very little to urge in reply to them. Their main position was, that the Scriptures were their own best proof, that they commended themselves to the mind of every man who read them in a right spirit as being the true Word of God, and that if their antagonists did not recognise the evidence of their divine inspiration and paramount authority, it was simply because they did not read them in a proper spirit. Such assertions had some plausibility when applied to many parts of the Psalms, to the prophetic writings, and to the greater part of the New Testament; but they seemed to be hardly borne out by such passages as those which record the murder of Sisera or Eglon, or the slaughter of the worshippers of Baal by Jehu. Such actions might, perhaps, be defended as justifiable under the circumstances in which their perpetrators were placed; but they could scarcely be urged as manifest proofs of the divine origin and inspiration of the books which contain them. ever, the controversy thus commenced raged long and violently, and led many of the Tractarians, in their zeal for the authority of the Church, to use language tending to disparage the authority of Scripture. No one more distinguished himself by his bold-we may almost say reckless-treatment of this subject than Mr., now Dr., Newman, in many of his writings, but especially in his tract on 'Scripture Difficulties.' It would be very unjust to a good and great man to attribute to him the origin of views which he vehemently and pertinaciously combatted;

How

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but there can be no doubt that he employed arguments which were necessary to the maintenance of the position he had taken up, but which tended to unsettle men's minds with regard to the authority of Scripture, and to facilitate the spread of views which were silently making their way in spite of all the efforts he put forth to resist them.

The study of German theology had for some time past been extending at Oxford, and as early as 1840 the works of Kant, Spinoza, Schleiermacher, Hegel, &c., had been eagerly read, and had produced a disposition to advance much further in the free criticism of the Scriptures than Dr. Newman was disposed to venture. The result of these studies showed itself in a very able article that appeared in the Edinburgh Review, as well as in lectures and sermons published by Mr. Stanley, now Dean of Westminster; in Wilson's Brompton Lectures, Professor Jowett's work on the Epistles to the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans; in Professor Baden Powell's Unity of Worlds; and in a volume entitled Essays and Reviews, published in 1860.

This book was made up of seven essays, each of which bore the name of its author. In the first of these the human race was represented as one man, whose mind was formed by the beliefs and doctrines of successive ages, and whose religious and intellectual development is still proceeding. The second was a review of the writings of Baron Bunsen. It stated that the Bible account of the origin of the human race is partly traditional and partly imaginary; that the longevity of the patriarchs is fabulous; that the famous prophecy of Isaiah, 'He is despised and rejected of men, &c,' does not apply to the Messiah; that the Book of Daniel is the work of some patriotic bard, written in the reign of Antiochus; that 'justification by faith' simply means the peace of the soul; that regeneration implies the first strivings of the powers of the human soul; that salvation expresses the victory of virtue over vice and error; that hell is a figure of remorse, and heaven an image of the accomplishment of the love of God towards us. Though this essay professed to be a review of the works of Bunsen, the writer of it evidently adopted the views of their author. In the next essay, the principles which Niebuhr had applied to the documents from which he derived the History of Rome were applied no less boldly to the documents from

which we derive the history of the Hebrews. The fifth essay assailed the Mosaic cosmogony. The sixth was comparatively inoffensive. The seventh recommended the interpretation and criticism of the Bible in the same manner and with the same freedom as any other book.

There was little that was original in these essays. The views they put forward had been enunciated in substance by writers outside the pale of the Church, if not outside the pale of Christianity. But what attracted general attention to this book, obtaining for it the admiring eulogiums of some and the indignant denunciations of others, was the fact that the essays it contained were the work of distinguished members of the national church—of men holding high positions in the University of Oxford or in the great public schools of the kingdom; of the Rev. Dr. Temple, the head-master of Rugby, and now Bishop of Exeter; of the Rev. Dr. Williams, viceprincipal of St. David's College, Lampeter; of the Rev. Baden Powell, Savilian Professor of Astronomy in the University of Oxford; of Mr. Goodwin, a layman distinguished by his high attainments and Biblical learning; of the Rev. Mark Pattison, then tutor, and soon after principal of Lincoln College, Oxford; and, lastly, of the Rev. J. B. Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek in the same university. A short preface stated that each of these gentlemen was responsible only for his own work, yet there was a unity of thought running through them which seemed to prove a foreknown general agreement of principle among them.

A still more audacious exposition of rationalistic views had been published by Dr. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, entitled, The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua critically examined. In this work the Bishop endeavoured to show that the books he criticised were full of errors, that large portions of them were 'unhistorical,' or, in plain English, fabulous. A work of this nature proceeding from the pen of a bishop holding his bishopric and ministering at the altars of the Established Church, provoked a loud outcry, which was rendered louder still by the appearance of the Essays and Reviews soon after. Hence followed appeals to the ecclesiastical tribunals, and ultimately to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. This tribunal, inheriting, as it did, the traditions of the Star Chamber and the

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Court of High Commission, was, nevertheless, the Court by which all questions of this kind had to be decided; the decisions it gave were not calculated to raise its character or inspire confidence. In 1861, the Rev. Isidore Heath, prosecuted by the Bishop of Winchester, for the publication of a work similar in character to the Essays and Reviews, was convicted and deprived of his benefice. On the other hand, proceedings instituted by the Bishop of Salisbury against Dr. Williams, and by a clergyman named Fendall against Mr. Wilson, both writers in the Essays and Reviews, who had gone far beyond Mr. Heath in the advocacy of rationalistic views, were unsuccessful. Dr. Colenso was tried and condemned to deposition by his Metropolitan, the Bishop of Capetown and two of his suffragans, sitting with him as assessors; but this sentence was reversed by the Committee of Council on the ground of the invalidity of the letters patent under which the various episcopal sees in South Africa had been created. An attempt made by the trustees of the episcopal fund to withhold the payment due to Dr. Colenso from that fund was equally unsuccessful. The question was raised before Lord Romilly, who decided it in the bishop's favour.

Far as Dr. Colenso and the authors of Essays and Reviews had gone in the ways of rationalism, another divine had trodden them with a still more fearless step. The Rev. Charles Voysey, vicar of Healaugh, in the county and diocese of York, attracted public attention in 1864 by a strongly-worded criticism of the teaching contained in 2 Samuel xxi. and xxiv. These strictures were followed by a periodical publication of Mr. Voysey's sermons, under the title of the Sling and the Stone, a work which openly assailed every cherished belief of Christendom. But if Mr. Voysey industriously demolished, he also attempted no less industriously to build up. He dwelt with great earnestness on the love and fatherhood of God and on the perfect safety which, as he maintained, all men enjoyed everywhere in time and eternity, under the protection of the Supreme Being. He taught the doctrine of human progress, and insisted that men could only learn what God is by being themselves upright, pure, and loving. He not only preached and published these doctrines, but proclaimed their absolute irreconcileableness with the creed of Chris

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tianity. It was no wonder that the ecclesiastical world protested loudly against such teaching being tolerated in the pulpits of the Church of the Thirty-nine Articles; and that the Archbishop of York being called on to prevent the continuance of such a scandal in his diocese, with evident reluctance, proceeded against Mr. Voysey. Passing over the preliminaries, we come to the real trial, which commenced in London on the 24th of June, 1869. Many persons of eminence, and amongst them Dr. Stanley, Dean of Westminster, contributed to a fund raised for Mr. Voysey's defence. That fund being insufficient, he pleaded his own cause, and endeavoured to show that there was nothing in his teaching that contradicted the express words of the Articles or the Liturgy. But he was sentenced to be deprived of his benefice unless he recanted the opinions he had advanced, which of course he would not consent to do.

We now turn our attention to a very different religious development which had been going on contemporaneously with that whose history we have concisely narrated. The æsthetic side of Tractarianism had contributed as powerfully as its dogmatic side to give impetus and power to the movement. The writers of the Tracts for the Times were generally men of great classical learning, of refined and poetic minds, in whom the imagination had been cultivated at the expense of the reasoning faculties. They were ardent admirers of the beautiful in history, poetry, sculpture, painting, and architecture;-but most especially of the ecclesiastical architecture of the Middle Ages, which had fallen into unmerited neglect. Their good taste was shocked by the manner in which our cathedrals and churches had been disfigured by ugly additions and fittings introduced into them in modern times. Thus to restore the old churches and build new churches in better taste became one of the characteristic objects of the movement; and many who cared little about the doctrines of the Tractarians were drawn towards them by the good taste they displayed while they were repelled by the narrow views and puritanic prejudices of the evangelical party.

Under such influences, the old high-backed pews ridiculed by the Times as 'lidless boxes,' and by Mr. Paget as