certain: the first, that all men have their faults, and the clergy, however chosen, will be no exceptions; the second, that all modes of choice have their faults, and time alone proves real merit. However obvious these truths they are constantly neglected. On the one hand, that the clergy have faults is imputed not at all to human nature, but altogether to patronage. On the other hand, because patronage is not always successful, popular election is to be an infallible panacea for getting the man of merit.

Are there, then, no defects in popular election? This is the question which Mr. Gladstone ignores when, in his manifesto, to hereditary Lords he opposes elective men of knowledge and virtue; as if the members of the House of Commons were, or were going to be, all men of knowledge and virtue because they are chosen by the people. It is also the question which the Rev. Mr. Barnett ignores when for patrons he would substitute the people; as if the Dissenters, who choose their own ministers, elected better men than the present clergy of the Established Church. This confusion of election and merit is the fallacy of the present age.

Popular election in any form whatever is the best mode of electing the person whom the majority thinks it is going to like at the moment. But the person most liked is not the person best for them; he is usually nothing but an orator, who is capable of coming down to them and saying what they please and proposing what they please, in order to keep his place. Men's likes and dislikes are not their good and evil; and public opinion, about which one hears so much, is a test of the former, but not of the latter opposites. In short, there is no evidence, from the present English House of Commons or any other popular body, that popular election chooses men who know and wish to attain the

public good and avoid the public evil; it mainly chooses waiters on public opinion. It gives the majority what they want at the moment, like a spoilt child, but it does not give them what is good for them even at the moment, still less in the distant future. The consequence is that it sacrifices the permanent good of a nation to the chance opinion, fancy, whim, demand, cry, of the moment.

Patronage, on the other hand, has been proved by time. Are the clergy of England really faulty as a class? He is an ingrate who says so; the Church and its history in every parish of England gives him the lie; the English clergyman is the friend without being the flatterer of the people. The patrons, therefore, cannot be bad electors. The truth is that when they are individuals they are always men of position, members of the Church, and nearly always responsible, both from intention and because an individual is always more responsible than an elective body. Secondly, the patrons are in a great measure the Universities and the Colleges in the Universities, often the Chapters and the Bishops, frequently the Crown. Thirdly, patronage is not their patronage, but patronage of an educated class. The patron cannot take anybody; he is limited to those who have been made clergymen by the Universities and Colleges. How long would this remain in popular elections? If the election was really popular, the Thirty-nine Articles and the orthodox education would soon disappear. The people would elect the clergy, like the School Board, from any denomination or undenomination. The same parish church would be tenanted by everybody in turn, from a Roman Catholic to a Salvationist. Even if it were kept, by the election not being really popular, to the Church of England, the pulpit, Sir, would always be occupied by a flatterer.

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A REMINISCENCE OF BOWEN AT OXFORD Baron Bowen was born in 1835, and was educated at Rugby and Balliol. He had a brilliant career as an undergraduate, carrying off the chief prizes and other honours in Classics. In 1858 be gained a Fellowship at Balliol. He was called to the Bar in 1861. In 1879 be became a judge of the Queen's Bench, and in 1893 a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. He died in 1894.

FROM The Times, APRIL 12, 1894.

When I came up from Rugby to Balliol in 1863, Bowen (Bonv ȧyalós), as he was wittily called by another old Rugbeian (Mr. Arthur Sidgwick, I think), was still a great name at Balliol. The old porter told me that in the morning after lecture Bowen would often come into the lodge; there and then would first carefully read over his lecture notes, and finally would make the sheets on which they were written into a large spill to light his pipe. This is a striking contrast to the practice of the modern undergraduate, who accumulates vast note-books, copied down at many lectures, but seldom looks at them again until he is too far from the lectures and too near the schools to digest them properly. Oxford, April 10, 1894.

THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH

Discussions on the relation between science and religion were much engaged in during the last forty years of Queen Victoria's reign. Mary Augusta Ward (1851-1920) was a granddaughter of Dr. Arnold of Rugby and was the wife of Thomas Humphry Ward, Fellow of Brasenose College. She was prominent in the social life of the University until 1880, when her husband moved the household to London. In 1888 Mrs. Ward created a great sensation in literary and religious circles by the publication of Robert Elsmere', a novel. Mrs. Ward owed much to the teaching of Thomas Hill Green (1836– 82), Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Oxford, and to Benjamin Jowett (1817-93), Master of Balliol College. Edward Caird (1835-1908) was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow from 1866 to 1893, when he succeeded to

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Jowett as Master of Balliol. Jowett was a clergyman of the Church of England; Caird was a layman.

James Martineau (1805-1900) was a noted Unitarian teacher and writer on philosophy and religion.

FROM The Times, SEPTEMBER 19, 1899.

Your correspondent 'Rara Avis' on September 1 contends that the present position of the Church is untenable, on account of the rise of a new scientific philosophy and the growth of historical criticism, and the passing away of the forms of thought which gave us the Athanasian Creed and the XXXIX Articles, as well as for lesser reasons. Wisely, he refrains from telling us what he means by the new scientific philosophy', which he presumes to be sound enough to reform our religion. Less wisely, Mrs. Humphry Ward in her letter to you of September s fills up the programme of the ' great movement of thought, as she calls it. It is, she says, ' a movement of critical and philosophical reconstruction', and she holds it to be time that this alternative Christianity, the Christianity of Jowett, Caird, Martineau, and Green should put forward claims that, indeed, it has delayed and dissembled too long '.

Now, I had the privilege of knowing Jowett and Green, first as pupil and afterwards as colleague, and protest that their names ought not to be associated. Both, indeed, were in favour of free criticism of the Scriptures. But Green was a disciple of Absolute Idealism or the philosophy of Hegel; whereas Jowett himself told me, among other remarks, which I need not repeat, that, though Hegel had said many brilliant things, he did not think that the Hegelian system would hold water. We may even go so far as to say that, while Green was an enthusiastic Hegelian, Jowett had no enthusiasm for any philosophy unless it were the ancient philosophy of Plato. The resemblance and difference between the two men is most instructive in its bearing on the

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present question. 'Rara Avis' and Mrs. Ward speak as if biblical criticism and new philosophy were inseparable conditions of a new reformation of religion. But the former, which Jowett recommended, is simply inevitable; the latter, which he evidently thought exaggerated, is quite another question.

Before we take so great a leap as a new reformation of the Christian religion by a new philosophy of the universe, we ought to consider carefully what this new philosophy will be. It is very plain that neither Comte's religion of humanity, nor Mr. Spencer's worship of the Unknowable, nor any form of Agnosticism stands any chance. The current philosophy is some form of idealism, and Mrs. Ward evidently recommends the Absolute Idealism of Hegel in the Anglican shape given to it by Green and his followers. But there is this initial difficulty. Many philosophies, from the Platonic and Aristotelian downwards, have been applied to Christianity as explanations, because they agreed with it in the main. The peculiarity of Absolute Idealism is that it is opposed in principle to Christian theology, and, nevertheless, it is proposed to call it by the same name in spite of the most palpable differences. Take, for example, the following description of Green's Christianity by his sympathetic biographer, Nettleship, in the memoir (page C) prefixed to the third volume of Green's works:

To the question which is sure to be asked by those who hear 'or read of Green, Was he a Christian? the answer must depend on what to be a Christian " means. If it means 'I believe that every man has God in him, that religion is 'the continual death of a lower and coming to life of a higher self, and that these truths were more vividly realized in 'thought and life by Jesus of Nazareth and some of His 'followers than by any other known men, then without doubt ་ he was a Christian. If it means to believe that the above 'truths depend upon the fact that Jesus was born and died