from ruin the monuments of their earliest history, and to preserve for succeeding generations the fund of exalted pleasure which is derived from their contemplation.

We hope that we are not yet approaching this degradation. Sunk and debased as is the political intellect of the day, by that materialism which conceals itself under the name of Utilitarianism; base and sordid as is that characteristic of the public mind which weighs every thing in a banker's scales, and has no idea of good, except such good as can be arithmetically calculated; we trust that there is a spirit still alive which will protect our cathedrals: and even should this fail, we must appeal to the justice of Mr. Hume himself, whether the protection which he is anxious to afford to every pagoda and every mosque, to every building where Jehovah is dishonoured and a devil is worshipped, should not be extended to buildings which have echoed from the first dawn of Christianity on this land with the name of the only true God, and of Jesus Christ whom he hath sent.

The safety of our cathedrals, we trust, is not to be discussed at present. Buildings which come down to us rich with every association of our civil and religious history; scenes which beyond all others possess the power of raising the beholder above the present, and of identifying him with the past; scenes which, from the marvellous combination of intrinsic beauty and extraneous interest, exercise an influence on the mind, which few are sunk so low as not to feel, and none raised so high as not to welcome; scenes which could pierce through all the polemic bitterness of Milton's mind, and dissolve him into ecstasy; these surely are too precious in themselves, too dear to the country they belong to, to be ever parted with. Heavy indeed will be the execrations, and deep the loathing, with which succeeding generations will follow the name of him who first lifted up his voice against them, should the nation, in

any paroxysm of economical phrenzy, determine on their retrenchment; and low must he be buried whose bones should escape the indignation of posterity, when it awakes to a sense of the folly into which its fathers had been betrayed through his sophistries.

But still we cannot deny that in an age of which the character seems to be a love of change and a thirst for reform-or what is often more courteously than truly so denominated -our cathedrals offer various points for attack. They have the reputation of wealth; their usefulness is not immediately obvious to superficial spectators; and they exhibit something of the appearance of an ecclesiastical sinecure; an object doubly obnoxious to those who hate ecclesiastics and ecclesiastical matters as much as they do sinecures.

In the first place, then, as to the wealth of our cathedrals, be it great or little, it is property, and property is sacred. In its general amount it is absurdly exaggerated. In many cases, it is too trifling to move the covetousness even of those who raise the outcry. In others, it serves to eke out the poverty of the church in parochial endowments, and makes up an income for a clergyman without involving a plurality of cures of souls. In some cases, where it is undoubtedly large, it is dispensed in a manner which would put to shame nine tenths of the proprietary of the kingdom; and property, if rightly managed, is not inconsistent with the character of a national church establishment, or alien to the spirit of the Gospel. There is nothing in the wealth of our chapters which can reasonably prompt cupidity to attempt their ruin. The clergy who might suffer from such a change as individuals are few in number, compared with the laity who would lose by the forfeiture of the leases under which they now are holding their estates, or who share indirectly in the benefits of the present expenditure; and there can be no doubt that for one ecclesiastic reduced to poverty,

ten laymen would be involved in the same condition by such a transfer.

The next question, then, which presents itself refers to the usefulness of this part of our ecclesiastical establishment; and though we are disposed to maintain that the property vested in their endowment is sacred, and cannot with justice be withdrawn from its present appropriation, we see no reason for refusing to enter into a discussion of the merits of the system, or for considering the changes which it may be proper to introduce. The circumstances under which the Reformation was accomplished in this country gave a peculiar character to the national system of religion which arose out of the shock. Instead of being the work of the multitude, it was, under God, the work of the ruling powers: instead of being a tumultuary overthrow of all that had been established before, it was a gradual and considerate amendment of what was wrong: instead of being a religious revolution, it was strictly speaking a Reformation; in which it was the object of the movement party to spare as much as could be spared with safety, to destroy nothing except that which had the sign of incurable disease upon it, and to introduce a pure faith and a holy practice with as little of unnecessary outrage on feeling as possible. The consequence was, that the external fabric of the church stood nearly as it did before, and nearly such as it had descended from the first ages of Christianity. The voice of antiquity and the language of Scripture were made use of for correcting the deformities which had been fastened on its surface, instead of the passions of men heated by the contests of the day; and it seemed as if our Reformers might have rejoiced in presenting the Church of England to the eyes of her enemies," fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners." As a part of this system, the cathedral chapters became a portion of our ecclesiastical establishment; and by

a peculiar species of preservation, the earliest form of church government was found imbedded in the midst of the large scheme which had followed the extension of religion. It is hardly necessary to repeat, that in the primitive ages of Christianity, when the number of believers was small, and chiefly confined to the inhabitants of towns, the elders of the church, or those who exercised the functions of the ministry, assembled round their bishop in the Basilica or metropolitan church, and went forth under his directions to preach the Gospel in the places which he appointed. In succeeding ages, the piety (though in process of time corrupted by superstition and purgatorian fancies) of Christian proprietors, gradually provided churches, and secured the privilege of a stated ministry in their villages; but the bishop still retained around him, as counsellors and assistants in the work of preaching some of the more aged and experienced clergy. The same plan seems to have been acted on in every effort made for the propagation of the Gospel. When Austin and his monks landed on the coast of Kent, their first settlement was one of this kind at Canterbury; and as long as the heathenism of the country rendered their positions perilous, they found that this concentration of their force was essential to their safety. But, as it often happens in other cases, the plan which had been originally adopted from necessity was continued on other grounds; and while the work of conversion was going forward, and churches were multiplying on every side, it still seemed conducive to discipline, or consistent with the office of the bishop, to retain a certain portion of the clergy in immediate connexion with the cathedral church. That the bishops found it convenient to substitute regulars for secular clergy, was merely part of the policy which prevailed during the dark ages; and thus, when at last the Reformation broke upon the country, the cathedrals were found occupied by men

separated from all parochial cares, and engrossed by the laborious and superstitious ritual of services which their church had imposed upon them. Many of them embraced the new doctrines, and those who did not, made way for others who did; but those who succeeded to the immunities and revenues of their offices, could not succeed to the employments by which their predecessors were engrossed. The old services of the church, the matins, nones, vespers, nocturns, and complends, were abolished by law, and a reasonable service, no other than that of the Liturgy of the Church of England, was introduced in their stead; and men who used to be worn-out by the ceaseless recurrence of the services of the Romish worship, now felt that their situation was completely changed by the reformation of religion.

From that moment the offices in our cathedrals assumed a distinct and original character. The circumstance that they had been held by regulars had broken the connexion between the stall and the parochial charge with which it had been once combined; while the change in the national religion dissolved all those rules by which the monks had been fettered, and swept away the tedious services in which their time used to be wasted. But though the work of the ministry was not specifically entrusted to them, Cranmer, and the great men who laboured with him, knew full well that the interests of religion required services of various kinds; and that the cathedrals offered facilities of inestimable value for cherishing and encouraging that knowledge which was essential to the development of truth. Many of the first Reformers were themselves holders of cathedral preferment. Brecon was a prebendary of Canterbury, as well as chaplain to Cranmer; Rogers, the first of the Marian martyrs, was prebendary of St. Paul's; so was John Bradford; and it was from the pulpits filled by such men as these that the doctrines of the Reformation

were published with the widest influence. They had as their hearers the magistrates, the civil officers, the men of learning and of power. The court, the judges, the students in the inns of court, formed part of the congregations which assembled every Sunday round the pulpit of St. Paul's; and at a time when the scarcity of books rendered the office of the preacher so peculiarly important, it is not easy to conceive the power which the sermons of these men possessed, or the degree in which they forwarded the incipient Reformation. In truth, the very temper of the times required such agents as these. It was not without a struggle, a long and a severe struggle, that the community was rescued from the thraldom of Popery, and brought into the liberty of evangelical truth. That subtle system against which the Reformers were engaged, had not neglected the opportunities for consolidating its empire, which the undisturbed possession of centuries had afforded. During that long period, it had wielded all the resources of learning and acuteness, and had used them all for the purpose of rivetting its fetters on the human mind. We should greatly err if we were to imagine that in those days it was possible to appeal at once to the word of God, and to convict the Church of Rome by the opposition between its principles and those of original truth. That word itself had hardly been heard to speak. As yet it was as a light shining in darkness; struggling to emit its rays through imperfect translations, little known and hardly understood. The audience too, before whom the controversy was carried on, were not prepared for the appeal. Instead of being ready to admit the authority of Scripture as conclusive, they asked for the judgments of fathers, for the decisions of councils; and required, as the very foundations of argument, a variety of information which nothing but profound and laborious study could supply. The time was not yet come when the champions of

truth might go forth like the stripling David, and, with no other arms than his Bible, accept the challenge of the giant the contest was to be fought on a very different arena, and one of the blessings of the present day is to be attributed under God to the labours of those who won for their successors a field in which even a child may turn to flight an army of aliens by the simple power of the word of God. The use of these situations, therefore, commended them at once to the minds of our early reformers. They knew that, in addition to the stated parochial ministry of the land, a force would be needed which was not likely to be derived from thence. In that ministry they anticipated the means by which, through the Divine blessing, the spark of true religion should be kept alive when once it had been kindled, and through which its warmth and light might be conveyed into every cottage of the land. But they felt that there were classes in society for whom a different mode of treatment might be requisite; that the polished intellect of the courtier, the acuteness of the lawyer, the learning of the scholar, demanded more of learning and more of the power of grappling with a cultivated understanding in their spiritual pastor, than was at that time to be anticipated in the parochial clergy; and they thought that the prebends and stalls of our cathedrals opened in the several cities where an auditory of superior acquirements might be expected, a succession of divines, who, being exempt from the daily pressure of parochial duty, and possessed of leisure for study and mental cultivation, might be able to give to every individual that portion of spiritual food which seemed most appropriate to his character.

For many years the habits of social life justified their wisdom in this provision. The cathedral towns were more or less the resort of the provincial nobility and gentry. There, at least, were established the ecclesiastical courts; there were lo

cated the great luminaries of education; there was the seat of county business; and there were found the activity and intellect of the district in what are commonly called the learned professions. Thus far the sketch which has here been offered of our cathedral establishments, seems to justify the wisdom of our Reformers in retaining them; and, independently of that charm which the solemnities of the service possess, we may admit that it is reasonable to collect men of distinguished attainments at those points where they may be useful, and to offer to those who are disposed deeply to cultivate the science of theology, the opportunities which are necessary for that purpose. Thus far the wisdom of the institution can bear scrutiny ; and if our cathedrals have not realised this promise, the fault must lie not in the office, but in its administration;-in those who perverted the institution from its original intention, not in those who projected it.

So clear, indeed, and so manifest are the advantages which might be reasonably anticipated from such a portion of our ecclesiastical system, that nothing but a loud and urgent cry of necessity could induce any friend of the church to admit the idea of any such alterations as would materially contravene the original plan of our Reformers. It is true, no doubt, that circumstances have materially altered, both within and without our cathedrals, since they were first adopted by those wise and holy men. Our provincial cities are no longer the resort of our provincial nobility: the great vortex of London has absorbed, with few exceptions, the leisure of our gentry; and the theology of the country no longer takes its colour, merely, or perhaps chiefly, from the pulpit: the press pours forth its streams; and every controverted question is discussed, not by rival preachers, but by pamphlets, reviews, and journals. The crowds which this immense metropolis could emit, and which no voice could ever reach from the airy heights of Paul's