Notwithstanding, however, these adverse external circumstances, and the scantiness of our English community, our Consecration service was bright and hearty, and the committee, who have not shrunk from incurring the personal responsibility of a debt of nearly 1,250l., willingly gave up the proceeds of the offertory to the fund in relief of the many homes in France laid waste by the war. The church is Byzantine in style, and stands on a most eligible site given by the French Government. On the morrow, a Baptism and Confirmation, and on the Epiphany the consecration of a portion of the public cemetery specially set apart for Anglican interments. It is beautifully situated, high on the hill sides, and is marked off by post and chain, and a line of cypresses.

On the 7th I left Algiers for Tunis in one of the French Messageries Maritimes steamers, transferring myself to another at Stora. The coast is not very picturesque, except at Bongie, where, as well as at Dgigeli and Bona, there are good harbours capable of further improvement. The weather was very wild throughout the voyage: while at anchor at Stora, a furious storm, lasting twenty-four hours, during which the lightning twice availed itself of our conductors. I had hoped to visit Constantina, to which there is a railway from Stora or Philippeville, but the weather was too threatening; and it was well I took warning, as our sea-storm at Constantina let fall a foot of snow, and caused such inundations as to render impassable the road to Bona, where I must have rejoined the steamer. I could not, however, help being struck with the great resources of Algeria, and with the development, in forty years, of harbours, roads, and traffic, that has been brought about. Notwithstanding its winter hail-showers, I still feel bound to give the palm to Algiers above any station I have yet seen in the Mediterranean, whether in respect of climate, comfort, or scenery. Five days passed away very pleasantly at Tunis, under the hospitable roof of the Vice-Consul. Here again hail-showers and night frosts, developing in its fullest perfection the chief physical characteristic of Tunis—mud. For depth, colour, smell, and consistence, I have nowhere seen it equalled—nor for universal distribution. The inhabitants apparently make no effort to get rid of it, strange to say, though its odour pervades everything. Tunis is singularly healthy, so much so that many boldly attribute the one fact to the other; and so men of substance quietly put on their pattens, like Wiltshire maids of all work, and sally forth to their day's duties.

We met for service on Sunday in the house of Mr. Fenner, a Missionary of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, who was absent at Jerusalem. We numbered twelve around our temporary altar. I once more visited the Jewish schools, and assisted in distributing prizes among the gaily-clad Jewish maidens. The "three R's" seem fairly taught among the elder children, but, beyond that, there seems little worthy of commendation.

From Tunis I crossed over to Cagliari, in Sardinia, a very picturesque town, on a commanding height, between two extensive tracts of lagune and salt marsh, backed by high mountains. At Iglesias, forty miles

from Cagliari, there are some rich mines of argentiferous lead ore and calamine, worked by an English company. The distance prevented my visiting them during the short space of thirty hours allowed me by the steamer; but, in a few months, railway communication will be opened with Iglesias, also by English hands, and I hope on another occasion to establish a chaplaincy there, an object which I believe the miners are anxious to promote.

From Cagliari my course lay to Palermo, where, I rejoice to say, the order has gone forth for the commencement of a church, which will do credit to its liberal founders, and to its architect, Mr. Barker, of Leicester. Sunday, as usual at Palermo, was pleasantly spent, not the less so from the presence of my brother of Argyle and the Isles. Sunday, January 29th, found me at Messina, where, I am glad to say, our church room is now our own, and fitted up by ourselves, instead of being hired for two hours per week from the German Protestant community, as of old. I had much pleasure, too, in finding at Catania a regularly-established ministry, under the Rev. Rothwell Johnson, who, in one of the rooms of the Grand Hôtel de Catanie, gathers on each Sunday a congregation for weekly communion, at the morning and evening prayer. The climate is a very favourable one for invalids in winter, and the accommodation excellent; the roads also are fair, and the views of Etna in its glistening winter garb of snow most majestic. I indulged my geological tastes by visiting the sulphur mines near Muglia, on the railroad from Catania to Leon Forte. They are high up among some chalky limestone hills, and are worked on the simplest, rudest principle. A sloping cavern, descending to a depth of 130 feet, has been dug out, the ore conveyed on men's shoulders, placed in kilns, covered over, and set on fire; the heat from the sulphur consumed melting the rest, which gathers at the bottom of the kiln, which at the end of ten days is tapped, and the sulphur flows out into moulds, forming blocks of about 150 lbs. weight. The mine is scarcely ventilated, and the smell anything but pleasant. The railway being now open to Syracuse, I availed myself of it, passing through Augusta, and under olive-clad hills, with the sea on the other side forming a number of little bays. At Syracuse I found the Archimède at anchor, which, by noon on the morrow, February 3rd, brought me safely into the grand harbour of Valetta, not a little glad, after nearly four months of bad weather, to see the bright sunshine and clear northwester of Malta, and "the pretty soldiers," and to hear once more the great bell of San Giovanni, and the galloping go-carts, and the shouting of the Smyetes.

THE PAN-ROMAN SYNOD AND THE ANTI-ROMAN
REACTION.

(Correspondence between Dr. Michelis and Dr. Biber.

To the Rev. E. Biber, greeting in Christ.

In responding to your lucid exposition of your views by a more exact declaration likewise of mine, I beg, in the first place, that you will

allow me to correct certain mistakes which have crept into the printed copy of my last letter.1 Some of these, for which, I hope, the printer is responsible, do not affect the argument. Another, into which I myself have fallen, is more important, and enables me to resume our discussion by supplying an omission. When I contended for two points as notes of the true Church founded by Jesus Christ, whereon we are agreed that the welfare and progress of individuals and of the whole human race depends, namely, the Real Presence in a Mystery of the Saviour God-man Himself, -which is the inward bond and substance, so to speak, of Divine Love restored in mankind by the Grace of God,—and the chief outlines of the Divine constitution of the Church, which might rightly be called its form, I ought to have added a third point, the preservation of the Apostolic Succession, which is the sole exhibition of the supernatural Mystery working in the Church. In mentioning this expressly I do not, however, mean to imply that I suppose it to be other than understood between us,2 or to give additional weight to the other two points.

And now I shall proceed to set forth my views more exactly, in order to convince you that I have paid the most scrupulous attention to the several arguments advanced by you, although I may not seem to reply to them in detail; which is in my opinion the only true method of conducting controversy, to prevent its becoming bootless. In that you suppose that by charging Pope Pius IX. with heresy on account of his declaration of the dogma of Infallibility I have denied the Primacy of the Bishop of Rome, you labour under a mistake, for which I have given no handle; seeing that I at once disclaimed the presumption of setting at nought or rejecting the form given to His Church by Jesus Christ, and that this form includes the Primacy, forasmuch as in default of it the Unity of the Church would not be represented on earth.3 By the same necessity, therefore, by which the true Faith demands the form of the Church, it must also demand the Primacy in the Church; whence, if I mistake not, it will be evident to you in what sense I refer to that first pattern and exemplification of the Church, when Peter is seen standing forth with the

1 For the information of those who possess a copy of the Latin original of the correspondence, it may here be stated that the two corrigenda in question were— in line 8 illum, for which read illud; and in line 31 eorum, for which read

earum.

2 It will be seen on reference to p. 14 (C. C. C. for January), that this point has been kept in view by Dr. Biber, in his suggestion that the Nicene Creed should be taken as the basis of Union by "all the Churches which, through the succession of their Bishops, are of Apostolic origin.'

The expression of Professor Michelis in his first reply, in which he spoke of the impossibility of having a free Ecumenical Council"absque Papa SIVE co Episcopo qui Unitatem Ecclesiæ repræsentat," admitted of two interpretations; it might mean either that the Pope was the Bishop who should represent the Unity of the Church, or that, failing the Pope, some other Bishop might preside as representative of that Unity. Dr. Biber preferred this latter interpretation, as more favourable to the object of the correspondence, and more consonant with the practice of the Primitive Church; and the phrase "seposito Papa" in Dr. Biber's next letter eliciting no remark, seemed to indicate that he had put the right construction upon the ambiguous word sive. It now, however, appears that the other was the sense in which the word sive was used by Professor Michelis.

Eleven; which is the direct exhibition of the form of the Church as constituted by Jesus Christ; while to the Council of Jerusalem, which does not run counter to that form, I can attach no further weight than this, that it indicates the limit within which excess on the part of the Roman Pontiff in the exercise of his Primacy may be, or ought to be, restrained; provided it be borne in mind that it can never be lawful, on account of any abuse whatsoever, to abrogate a thing which is good in itself, and exists in accordance with the will of God.

Before explaining what hope and what counsels I have under the influence of these my views been led to form, it seems to me that I should more exactly state what importance I think ought to be attached to the form of the Church. For that the whole matter hinges upon this idea no one will, I believe, deny who cannot either imagine it possible that Jesus Christ should have left His work to mere accident and chance, or is not prepared to take upon himself to attempt the introduction of some other form besides that which Jesus Christ has established. From a correct estimate of the weight which attaches to the form inherent in the organic nature of the Church results a certain rule, whereby as well the mischief of every schism whatever, as the truly heretical character of this recent attempt into which the Roman Pontiff has allowed himself to be drawn by the machinations of the Jesuits, may be known and judged. For, as the form cannot be divided from that in which it is inherent, so schism, which denotes dissolution of a formally represented unity, cannot have place except in conjunction with error in regard to the very substance of truth. As, therefore, it was not by mere accident that the secession of the English Church from the Roman made a kind of home for the errors of the Protestants, so the dogmatic declaration of Infallibility is truly heretical; so much so that, according to the very Canon Law, the Pope may be, and ought to be, adjudged a heretic by the Church-that is, by the general body of all who profess the Faith of Christ. I have the conscious

ness, therefore, that in charging Pius IX. before the Church with heresy, I have not gone beyond the power divinely given to the Church by Christ. Nor can it with truth be contended that the whole Church, not even that the Roman Catholic Church, is in communion with that heresy; for not even in point of form does the decree of that Vatican Conventicle bear the stamp of an Universal Council; and there are at present not a few Bishops who refuse their assent, while the vast majority of the Faithful is either openly or silently opposed to it; so that there is sufficient ground to hope that, on the thorough exposure and defeat of the machinations by which the semblance of a Council has been procured, the true form of the Primacy and of Unity may be restored in the Western Church, to which, in that case, all the branches of the Church, unless they be bent upon schism, will not hesitate to join themselves. And this hope I am the more encouraged to cherish, forasmuch as I am convinced that the primary source of all the schisms and heresies that rend the Church, is to be sought in some deficiency of knowledge, which itself again is to be traced to the idea of the Church's proper form. Plainly to declare to you my mind on this subject, which for that very reason I ask your permission to do, it appears to me much more agreeable to that mutual charity—which

by any means fully to restore in the Church of Jesus Christ and among all mankind is, if by God's Grace we be willing, our aspiration-to lay the blame of these plagues of the Church on deficiency of understanding rather than on perverseness of will. In saying this I fall in with your observations touching the high authority of the Nicene Creed on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the denial of the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son in the Formulary of the Greeks. The fact is that the very nature of dogmas consists in circumscribing within the limits of certain ideas or words, as far as can and ought to be done, the substance of the perfect revelation given in Jesus Christ, and thus to reduce it to a certain form; and it was impossible, therefore, that this function of the Church, which is governed by the guidance of the Holy Ghost, but carried out by the action of the human mind, should not be bound by those laws which flow from the very nature of all form. For this is the common law of all sublunary things, that while nothing can, without being clothed in a form, come forth from the secret fountain of life, that very form indicates a certain rigidity of life. Accordingly, the consolidation of the Christian dogma in the form of ideas is necessarily reduced to the employment of philosophy, which the Church could not repudiate without proclaiming herself unequal to that function. But the employment of philosophy, which the Church may not repudiate, involves, as we learn from the history of the human race, the process of reconciling on the field of human thought the controversy between Plato and Aristotle, or, as it is commonly called, the ideal and the empirical. The bearing of this upon our subject is, that in the school of Alexandria, which may justly be termed the chief university of Christian letters, the attempt to amalgamate the Christian doctrine with philosophy resulted in a Neoplatonic system, in which the so-called Platonic idealism is reduced to an Aristotelic form, so as to give rise to something like a revival of paganism. This form of philosophy was afterwards imported into the Christian Church by the writer who goes by the name of Pseudo-Dionysius, whose authority prevailed first with the Orthodox Eastern Church, whereby it came to pass that its doctrine was cast into a scholastic mould by John of Damascus, and the true force and vigour of the Divine Faith which subdues all things to itself, was overlaid by a sort of torpidity, as is proved by the error of denying the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son; for thus the fundamental mystery of the Faith, on which everything else depends, cannot be rightly understood or maintained. That the Neoplatonism which lurks under the name of the Pseudo-Dionysius did not at that time gain a similar ascendancy in the Western Church, is due chiefly to the influence of St. Augustine; and a further attempt involved in the philosophy of Scotus Erigena was defeated by the Roman Church, when in the 4th Lateran Council the ground-work of the Faith contained in the Creed was more accurately defined. Nevertheless it came to pass that the same Neo-Platonism, having been re-cast into a new form of Aristotelic Philosophy by the Arab philosophers, and thence imported into the Western Church, obtained, through the authority of the Schoolmen, and chiefly of Thomas Aquinas, the ascendancy in the Roman Church also,