led of necessity to a reawakening of the human intellect; its growth has been coeval with the progress of modern science-with the progress, also, of all that is most distinctive in modern civilization. In asserting the right of private judgment in spiritual matters, it furnished a basis for the intellectual development of modern times and for our modern theories of liberty. The human reason was invested with its God-given privileges, the sanctity of which had been so long violated; and with this investiture came also an awful and majestic consciousness of individual responsibility. Contemplate for an instant the sublime height to which reason was thus raised! It was as if a slave had been crowned and enthroned,

"Servumque posuere in æterna basi; " not because he had been a slave,-ah, no!--but because he had been unjustly fettered, and because his elevation, in æterna basi, was the apotheosis at once of justice and humanity. Privileges thus sacred conferred upon human reason, responsibilities thus awful incurred -these have been the basis of modern progress.

And what has been the result? An universal protest, say the Ritualists, against all authority, human and divine. The divine right of kings has been denied. Peoples have invaded thrones; step by step they have advanced toward the theory of self-government. The temporal authority of the church has been driven back by compulsion to its last strongholds; every year witnesses some fresh abdication of this traditional supremacy. And these political tendencies promise to go on to their consummation. The Protestant powers are triumphant in every new conflict. Even within two years we have seen a great nation born in a day; and now what do we see in Austria, the Roman Catholic rival of this new Protestant power? Popular education in that empire has been released from priestcraft; marriage-hitherto a sacrament of the church has become a civil ordinance; all religious sects have been placed upon the same political level, and the minis

ter of public instruction replies to the remonstrances of the clerical party, that "society may be Catholic, but the State cannot be Catholic, if it wishes to be just to all its citizens." And how long can Rome maintain herself against the distinctly-pronounced will of the Italian people? Unquestionably there has been going on during the entire Protestant era a tremendous political revolution. But it is not so certain that it tends toward anarchy-that the liberty of the people is the destruction of order.

And how is it as to the other count in the charge against Protestantism, namely, the opposition which it has evoked against all divine authority? Here it is that the Ritualists, in common with Roman Catholics, find the fulcrum for their mightiest lever. This unfettered and enthroned reason, say they, is on a mad chase devil-ward, and is carrying along with it the system which nourished and protected it. The original schism has been the parent of a succession of schisms, until the Protestant Church has a dozen ramifications, and has thus lost its efficiency as an organization for its dissensions are not only a scandal to Christianity, but lead to an exhaustion, in rivalry and strife, of powers which ought to be directed against the common enemy; they lead, also, to a waste of material resources, since, as may be seen in almost every Protestant community, half-a-dozen separate organizations have to be sustained where one would suffice. But Protestantism, it is added, does not expose its principal error in these dissensions within the church, but rather in the opposition which it has provoked against the church in any form and against the Bible.

Now, nothing can be gained by evasion or misrepresentation. Let us stand up and accept the full volley of this attack, and then count our dead, wounded, and missing. Let us put in plain words the charge of our assailants. "You Protestants," say they, "are responsible for modern rationalism and infidelity. You opened the gates to these deadly enemies of the faith; they

did not creep in while you slept,-but you deliberately let them in. And what is worse-you could not help yourselves, for they had your proper countersign. You made the human reason king; how, then, could you deny the royalty of these his children? You rejected the material superstructure of the Roman Catholic Church, which, with its symbolism and impressive appeal to the sense, was an expression of a spiritual faith; you professed to retain the original faith while divesting it of its material alliance. But you accepted in place of this old ally, a new one; you made the human intellect the grand interpreter of the mysteries of faith, the sole imperator over the individual conscience and judgment. You said the old alliance was a mistake, because the material, instead of revealing, veiled the spiritual. But we claim, in turn, that the new alliance is fatal, since the human understanding neither veils nor reveals, but only destroys faith. You rejected a sleepy narcotic, for a poisonous acid. You fled from the inert but solid earth, into the variable and fickle sky. You transformed the cloud of darkness, which only covered our faith, into fire, which consumes it. In all ages thought has been the antagonist of belief. In all ages, also, it is equally true that the soul of man has found its genuine counterpart in the body—that which is most spiritual in that which is most sensuous. The marriage of faith with sense -not that of faith with reason-is divinely ordained in the very constitution of humanity. You Protestants, moreover, have chosen a sad king in intellect, which is really and by nature a slave both to sense and to faith; and the moment you lift it above the office of simple ministration to these, you introduce an abnormal sovereignty. Not a modest sovereign, either, does the intellect, thus elevated, become; it defiantly denies the existence of all that it cannot see. Its weakness and pride are mutually correlative. Its activity is not lost, because the province into which it has been thrust is to its vision an empty desert; thus, although it cannot whis

per Yes in answer to one of the anxious questionings of the human heart, it confidently thunders No. You cannot tease your oracle into an affirmative, but his monstrous and shuddering negations reverberate with endless iteration over the dreary waste. You began by divorcing faith from its material images and symbols, and your movement naturally ends in universal negation, in infidelity."

But hold one moment, Mr. Ritualist! We are getting impatient. You have been filching the arguments of rationalism by the wholesale; but you make an incomplete, and, therefore, an unfair statement. You have been reading Kant, we perceive. We also have read Kant, and find in him something which you have inexcusably ignored. Kant was the first man who proved the impossibility of attaining to the idea of God or of immortality by the speculative reason. That is the conclusion of his Analytic of Pure Reason. But he did not stop there. He announced also the doctrine-the most sublime among all the doctrines of modern metaphysicsof a Practical Reason, whose very function it is imperatively to impose laws for action, just as pure reason does laws for thought; and these laws, or postulates, by necessary implication, presuppose the existence of God and immortality, to which the Pure Reason cannot reach by analysis. And to this Practical Reason Kant gives the primacy over all the powers of the human soul. Thus, by the sage of Königsberg was inaugu rated a revolution in the province of rationalism itself, by which the destructive tendencies of human thought were arrested, its negations met by a categorical affirmative, its poisonous acids neutralized; and by which a philosophical basis was furnished for the moral development of humanity.

If, then, we admit the destructive tendencies of modern philosophy, we also as confidently assert that within the very confines of this philosophy we find a remedy interposed against their iconoclasm. And if we pass from natural to revealed religion, we find that

there, also, if there have been philosophical antagonists to Christianity, there have been likewise philosophical advocates-aroused to action by this very antagonism; and, even judged by a purely intellectual standard, the arguments of the advocates are far more effective than those advanced by the opposition. But the conflict is not simply metaphysical. That which Protestantism primarily depends upon for victory is not the intellectual armor with which it clothes each individual Christian, but the grand argument furnished by the gospel itself, and which profoundly affects the heart, promising divine help to the consciously helpless, and realizing that promise wherever it is accepted. And there is something sublime-as involving the strongest faith-in the confidence with which Protestants rely upon the efficiency of this great argument, unaided by an appeal to the senses through a stately ceremonial. The attack made by a Christian bishop upon the Mosaic arithmetic does not disturb their equanimity. The attacks of modern science upon the Hebrew cosmogony and astronomy do not touch them; even if they were deprived of the doctrine of inspiration, and had only left them the human testimony of the four Evangels as to the teachings of Christ and as to the events of that significant drama, beginning with his birth and terminating in his ascension to heaven, their fortress would still remain impregnable against the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.

Our readers will observe that we have had but little to say on that feature of the new Anglican movement, which is most obvious to the popular eye, and from which, accordingly, it derives its name. Not that we would make the vulgar mistake of ascribing the ritualism of the new reformers to a love of unmeaning pomp. So far are these pomps from being unmeaning, that their pregnant significance attracts the attention of thoughtful minds from the sign to the thing signified. We have been more careful to unfold the ideas which they represent, than to

dwell on the details of millinery, and upholstery, and processional tactics, in which they consist. To all diligent readers of newspapers, these details are already familiar. As briefly summed by the Bishop of Gloucester, they are as follows:

"The communion-service of the prayer-book is set, as it were, in the frame of the Roman Catholic ceremonial, with all the accompaniments of the high or chanted Mass, vestments, lights, incense, postures, and gestures of the officiating clergy. It is interpolated with corresponding hymns, and supplemented by private prayers, translated from the Roman missal. To make the resemblance more complete, several of the clearest directions of our own rubric are disobeyed, and the Roman observance substituted for that appointed by our church. To the eye hardly any thing appears to be wanting for an exact identity between the two liturgies; and it is but rarely that any difference can be detected by the ear." In one of the private prayers, at the close of the Mass, the priest implores that the sacrifice which he has offered "may be propitiatory for himself and all for whom he has offered it." In one of the ritualistic manuals of devotion the sacrament is described as "a sacrifice of praise and propitiation," in which our Lord, “through His own presence, communicates the virtues of His most precious death and passion to all His faithful, living and departed." The consecrated elements are not elevated for worship, but this concession to Protestant sentiments is expressly declared by the Ritualists to be only for a time.

Among the most advanced of the Ritualists other usages have sprung up, such as confession, priestly absolution, and vows of celibacy.

Such is the new faith. In England the controversy which it has excited awakens alarm. The Earl of Shaftesbury declares that unless the laity come forward to oppose the movement, nothing less than a miracle can save the Reformation. Disraeli fears that it may do away with the connection between

church and state. Merle D'Aubigné writes from Geneva that the Church of England, agitated as it is by the invasion of Ritualism, is like a fine ship amidst breakers, and sailing without a helm. In this country, where the Anglican Church has no state connection and no preponderance in numbers over other denominations, the movement excites less interest. But it advances here as in England, and toward exactly the same end. And it finds no feeble support in the claim put forward by the Rev. Morgan Dix, that the priesthood is endowed with supernatural powers not accorded to other men, and that the laws and traditions of the church can no more be altered than we can choose a new Redeemer.

The movement tends toward Rome. And what then? What if it reaches its goal? Why, then, say we, let Rome beware of her converts. Strange as it may seem, it is still true that Roman Catholicism loses, and Protestantism gains, by every conversion to the Papal Church. Of course, we allude to conversions from Protestantism. The case of Dr. Newman will serve as an example. He has been a member of the Roman Catholic Church over twenty years, and in point of eminence yields precedence to no other convert. But after this long probation, he declares (in his controversy with Dr. Pusey): "I prefer English habits of belief and devotion to foreign, from the same causes and by the same right which justifies foreigners in preferring their own." There lurks in this declaration the inevitable antagonism between Eastern and Western thought, of which the Papal authorities may well be suspicious. And they are suspicious of it. They know that the Anglo-Saxon civilization of today is itself a protest against Rome; they know that the conversion of Dr. Newman does not eradicate from his mind the influences of that civilization. Father Faber's writings, with their glamour of Italian enthusiasm, may have influenced him for a time; but as he himself confesses, "to whatever extent I might be carried away, my mind in no

long time fell back to what seems to me to be a safer and more practical course." He relies upon the national good sense preserving English Catholics "from the extravagancies which are elsewhere to be found," and goes on to say: "If the Catholic faith spreads in England these peculiarities will not spread with it. There is a healthy devotion to the Blessed Mary, and there is an artificial. It is possible to love her as a Mother, to honor her as a Virgin, to seek her as a Patron, and to exalt her as a Queen, without any injury to solid piety and Christian good sense; I cannot help calling this the English style." Creature-worship may seem necessary “to Italian youths and Italian maidens;" but as an Englishman he holds that the dogma of a mediatrix between man and his Redeemer is not to be inculcated on his countrymen. And regarding some sayings, quoted by Dr. Pusey from foreign Catholic writers of great authority, he says: As spoken by man to man in England in the nineteenth century, I consider them calculated to prejudice inquirers, to frighten the unlearned, to unsettle consciences, to provoke blasphemy, and to work the loss of souls." Of course, Archbishop Manning (also a convert) denounces this sort of criticism as "the illuminism of the individual revising the discernment of the church; the climax and efflorescence of the private judgment which criticises all things-first Scripture, then fathers, then churches, then councils, then pontiffs, finally, the accumulated living Christianity of the Catholic church, in which the head and mind of fathers, councils, and pontiffs breathe and teach and worship." But what could an archbishop say less? And what is Dr. Newman to do against this array of fathers, councils, pontiffs, et cetera? Why, still write on, we presume, after his cherished English style of thinking what he pleases, and speaking his thought when and how he pleases. From such a convert the Holy Father certainly obtains poor comfort, and but for courtesy to so eminent a writer, we should long ago have found Dr. New

But let us take another case, that of an American convert to RomanismFather Hecker, who, Mr. Parton says, is at the head of an organization (the Paulist Fathers), the object of which is "to convert Mr. Emerson and his friends and the educated people of America." Let us consider some of his peculiar ideas, as quoted by Mr. Parton. "Man

has no right to surrender his judgment." "Endowed with free will, man has no right to yield up his liberty. Reason and free will constitute man a responsible being, and he has no right to abdicate his independence. Judgment, liberty, independence, these are divine and inalienable gifts; and man cannot renounce them if he would." Again: Religion is a question between God and the soul. No human authority, therefore, has any right to enter its sacred sphere. Every man was made by his Creator to do his own thinking." "There is no degradation so abject as the submission of the eternal interests of the soul to the private authority or dictation of any man, or body of men, whatever may be their titles. Reasonable religious belief does not supplant reason, nor diminish its exercise, but presupposes its activity, extends its boundaries, elevates and ennobles it by applying its powers to the highest order of truth. There are several primary, independent, and authoritative sources of truth. Among others, and the first, is reason."

Well, this is good enough Protestantism for us-though we very much doubt whether it would go down with the Ritualists. Go on, by all means, say we, and convert "Mr. Emerson and his friends and all the educated people of America" on that basis. If this is to be the occidental style of Roman Catholicism, we will give it a hearty welcome. And we opine that such it is really to be in a good time coming. It makes us rub our eyes to think of it-Rome coming over to us, and turning herself inside out to suit our institutions, instead of our following these Ritualists over to Rome with a surrender on our

The fact, then, that Roman Catholicism is gaining ground in America is perfectly consistent with the other indisputable fact, that on the Continent of Europe it is daily losing ground. Its loss is where it is most distinctively Roman Catholic; its gain is where it is compelled by the tendencies of civilization to relax its ancient claims. We have nothing to fear from the spread of the Romish Church in this country. No religious organization can prevail here except in conformity with the outward circumstances under which its development goes on; and all these circumstances are fatal to the mediaval claims of the Papacy. The Roman Bishop, in the first instance, it must be remembered, gained a preeminence over the other early episcopates, not through the theory of his succession to Peter (which was an after-thought), but through the sounder and more practical development of the Western Church, in those days, as compared with that of the Eastern, which had become entangled with Neo-Platonic speculations. This healthier development was largely due, also, to the executive capacity growing out of familiarity with Roman jurisprudence. The practical rather than the speculative tendencies of the early Western Church, and its larger executive capacity, were due to local circumstances. In the same way, and for similar causes, Roman Catholicism in England and America cannot be the same thing which it is in Continental Europe. It is the old conflict repeated between the West and the East.

It is not difficult, from this point of view, to foresee that America is destined, not only to develop for the world the theory of popular government, but also to furnish the basis for an universal Christian brotherhood. The union of the Christian churches is not to come through compromise, but as the result of the conflict of the last three hundred years. The intense activities which were aroused by the Reformation tend finally toward rest from strife-toward the peace of Christendom.