of his final, or latest letter, the writer expresses himself as follows:

"Neither in the interest of truth, nor for the benefit of man, is it necessary to assert what we do not know. No cause is great enough to demand a sacrifice of candour. The mysteries of life and death, of good and evil, have never yet been solved."*

How good, how wise are these words! But coming at the close of the controversy, have they not some of the ineffectual features of a death-bed repentance? They can hardly be said to represent in all points the rules under which the pages preceding them have been composed; or he, who so justly says that we ought not to assert what we do not know, could hardly have laid down the law as we find it a few pages earlier,† when it is pronounced that "an infinite God has no excuse for leaving His children in doubt and darkness." Candour and upright intention are indeed everywhere manifest amidst the flashing coruscations which really compose the staple of the article. Candour and upright intention also impose upon a commentator the duty of formu. lating his animadversions. I sum them up under two heads. Whereas we are placed in an atmosphere of mystery, relieved only by a little sphere of light round each of us, like a clearing in an American forest (which this writer has so well described), and rarely can see farther than is necessary for the direction of our own conduct from day to day, we find here, assumed by a particular person, the character of an universal judge without appeal. And whereas the highest self-restraint

*N. A. R., vol. 146, p. 46.

† Ibid. p. 40.

is necessary in these dark but, therefore, all the more exciting inquiries, in order to keep steady the ever-quivering balance of our faculty of judgment, this writer chooses to ride an unbroken horse, and to throw the reins upon his neck. I have endeavoured to give a sample of the results.

V.

THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF

RELIGION.*

1888.

IN the great movement of the sixteenth century, England stands contrasted with other great European countries in this vital respect, that the instinct of national unity was throughout more powerful than the disintegrating tendencies of religious controversy. Hence there went abroad a notion, highly injurious to the nation, that it was ready to accept whatever religion the sovereign might think proper to give it. I recollect a slight but curious illustration of this fact as recently as near the beginning of the present auspicious reign. In the year 1838, travelling through Calabria, I fell into conversation with an intelligent Italian of the middle class, interested in the religion of his country. He expressed to me his fervent desire that the Queen might become Roman Catholic; for in that case it would follow as a matter of course that the English nation would also return to the obedience of the Pope! It is plain that, both in England and in Scotland, purely secular interests played a very great and important

* Reprinted from the Nineteenth Century.

part. In the reign of Mary, the Latin service was soon and easily re-established: but the reaction did not dare to lay a finger on the alienated estates of the dissolved monasteries. There was a strong Roman, and a strong Puritan, sentiment of religion. But what afterwards came to be known as Anglicanism, the product of a composition of heterogeneous forces, had neither a visible nor, except perhaps in individual cases, a conscious existence. There was not, as there was in Scotland and in Ireland, a single dominant religious tendency, Protestant in the one, Roman Catholic (much more decisively) in the other. And it was the comparatively near balance of the various forces, which made it possible to have in England, not merely one, but three or four religious revolutions; revolutions which, by the action of the same causes, were softened as well as multiplied.

The consequence has been that the historic presentation of the subject ever since to general readers has been secular, and not religious, or even ecclesiastical. It has been largely overlooked that what the sixteenth century lacked, the seventeenth supplied. The consciences of the country then came to a settlement of their accounts with one another. The Anglican idea of religion, very traceable in the mind and action of Elizabeth, of Parker, and of Cecil, had received scientific form through the works of Hooker. The Roman antagonist had been reduced, by the accommodations of the Prayer Book and the law, to civil impotence; and he only counted, in the grand struggle under Charles the First, as a minor auxiliary on the royal side. The Church, as its organisation was worked under Laud, had become a vast and definite force, but it was fatally

compromised by its close alliance with despotism and with cruel severities, and in retribution for its sins it shared the ruin of arbitrary power. In consequence of this association and its result, for nearly twenty years the Puritan element was supreme, and the Anglican almost suppressed. But when the monarchical instinct of the nation brought about the restoration of Charles the Second, and the comparative strength of the religious parties came to be ascertained, what had been taken for a minority asserted itself in overwhelming force, and the ecclesiastical settlement of that epoch, whatever may have been in other respects its merits or defects, expressed the prevailing sentiment of probably nine-tenths of the community, and is now running through its third century of stable duration.

Down to that time, the question which cast of belief and opinion should prevail, as between Anglican and Puritan, had been fought within the precinct of the National Church. It was now determined by the summary method of excluding the weaker party. In its negative or prohibitory part, the settlement accomplished at the Restoration was either wholly new, or it formulated a tendency, that had become paramount, into a fact. But in its positive bases it was, as to all main interests and purposes, an acceptance and revival of the Elizabethan settlement. On this, therefore, in giving an account of herself, the Church of England must fall back.

And such an account it is obvious she must, now and henceforward, be prepared to give. It is no longer with her as it was in the eighteenth century—and God forbid it should ever be so again-when her clergy were the companions of the peers and the gentry, as magistrates