present Parliament were to expire without helping the Church. to become clearer of ancient evils and freer for the effective discharge of her great mission than she was in 1895. In that event, it is quite conceivable that the movement for Disestablishment, obtaining from within the Church that stimulus of religious fervour which it once possessed but has mainly lost, outside her pale, might gather sudden and dangerous strength. The Radical party would leap at any indications that a considerable number of justly influential Churchmen would be found on the side of a destruction, rather than a reform, of the present national position of the Church. Politicians in opposition have been studying the tactical virtues of concentration, but are still much at a loss in which direction to concentrate. No more welcome or effective lead could be given them than such a failure on the part of the present Parliament to assist reasonable measures of Church Reform as would make sick the hearts of earnest Church Reformers. If, however, without further procrastination, a good beginning be made and it is a subject to which the present Government may be expected to give the most earnest attention-we, at least, shall regard without anxiety, though not without regret, the propaganda of the Society whose history we have traced. ART. THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. I.-1. The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman. By Wilfrid Ward. London, 1897. 2. The Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey. By H. P. Liddon, D.D., &c. Edited and prepared for publication by the Rev. J. O. Johnston, the Rev. R. J. Wilson, and the Rev. W. C. E. Newbolt. Vol. IV. London, 1897. IF F Edward Gibbon were now alive, and, looking back to the century that is fast running out, were asked to describe it in a sentence, he might startle us by calling it The Age of Great Churchmen.' For he was too deeply read in European history not to have learnt how misleading it is to distinguish between events as secular and ecclesiastical; how strong has been the influence of religious disputes on the course of civilization, the development of science, and the revolutions of parties; how much of human thought is wrapped up in controversies seemingly technical or antiquarian; and how the fortunes of the Western world are still dependent on vicissitudes of belief and scepticism, the object of which is Christianity as it has come down from the Hebrew and Roman past. By the side of statesmen Gibbon would have set the bishops, preachers, disputants who rivalled them in renown, whose names were as often on the lips of multitudes, or were tossed to and fro in the columns of newspapers. To him it would not appear wonderful that we are yet discussing the Tractarian Movement, the school of Tübingen, Schleiermacher and Strauss, Newman and Renan, Pusey, Wiseman, Döllinger, Manning, Lamennais; and, despite his grave ironies and solemn sneer, what an interest would attach to the chapter, as surely exact as it was brilliant and suggestive, in which this singular Church historian would paint the details, and sum up the issues, of the Christian Revival, Vol. 187.-No. 374. a Revival Y a Revival not foreseen in 1798-the low-water mark, at Oxford no less than at Rome, of learning and religion-but inevitable, unless 'Enlightenment' was to have its way. Now, 'Enlightenment' was Voltaire with a torch in his hand which the wild-eyed Rousseau had thrust upon him, as much to his horror as to his astonishment; and all the institutions of old time were on fire. Alarm had reached its height; every sincere Christian was a sleeper awakened; and the ancient, comfortloving, orders of the Church, who had slumbered upon silken pillows, found their ease invaded by sansculottes, or turned into a crime by rebellious needlemen'-nay, a scandal to the pious, hitherto employed in decking their couch with cloth of gold, and putting feathers beneath their warm shoulders. No sooner did the French come in sight than this enchanted sleep was broken by the sound of their bugles; and, though coalitions might scatter them at Leipzig or Waterloo, and Pius VII. return, and mere political reaction set in with Metternich, abroad as at home a new movement was beginning, of which it is not altogether impossible to seize the main outlines. As a general idea, it has had many spokesmen, from De Maistre and Chateaubriand to the foremost ecclesiastics who are leading today, whether in England or on the Continent. Divided as these may be in many points of doctrine, their agreement in others is profound. Alike they insist upon a turning back to the spirit of the first centuries, when the Church was a distinct society, self-governed, supreme in her own dominion, unworldly, and an acknowledged brotherhood, in which the poor held, as Bossuet preaches, an eminent dignity. They recognize the State, but decline its interference in all that is spiritual; on principle, they are enemies to the Erastian dogma; nor do they look with any regard upon the great reformers, Luther, Knox, or Calvin, in whose theologies they detect a formalism which has stifled the free movement of the Christian life, while taking from it the colour of pleasant things, and reducing to a bare secularity the ten thousand particulars of daily business. There was another Movement, unlike this in origin, and, as not a few have maintained, hostile to it in principle, the large effort which Germans, chiefly, were expending on a criticism of sacred documents, on the true account of the rise and fortunes of creeds, on the contents of divinity, the philosophy of miracles, and the scope of Revelation. If we take the year 1778 as a convenient landmark, when Lessing was putting forth the famous "Fragments,' we shall perceive that German Liberalism, or the Aufklärung, had got twenty years' start of the Catholic Revival. On the other hand, its roots were not so deep. Rome Rome could point away in the far distance to a Middle Age that bowed beneath its Theocracy, and the outward form of which was hierarchical, in the State no less than the Church. But Oxford remembered the year 1636, in which it was moulded by Archbishop Laud on a pattern at once loyal and antique. If the old faith was to be revived, precedents were not wanting. Liberalism united in one monstrous shape the unbelief that had laughed at the Bible with the anarchy that had pulled down altars and thrones. To resist it was to The restore, among Englishmen, the principles upheld by a long succession of divines, who though forgotten since the Nonjurors, were still unrefuted and the old genuine teachers of Church of England doctrine; but, from the Roman point of view this, however excellent as a beginning, did not suffice. Laudian was caught between two fires; he occupied the battle-ground upon which armies from the North and the South were marching to combat. He stood in a Via Media by the nature of the case; and both parties sought to dislodge him. It was a complicated action, fought out upon a narrow stage, that has made the Tractarians so much more interesting to us than any religious leaders who were more consistent or more simple. How did they lie in relation to Rome? How, after all, to Berlin and Tübingen? The first question was decided in 1845, when Newman went, and Pusey stayed. The second has still to be wrought out; and if 'Lux Mundi ' should prove, as Tract Ninety has done, though with less tumult and public disquietude, to be the touchstone of another difference in opinion, historians may at last declare, in a saying which has been attributed to Cardinal Newman, that this was the end of the Tractarian Movement. By sifting out its component parts, and assigning them to their several places, it would have resolved the issues of science and authority which were raised in the year 1833. Two biographies have lately claimed the attention of the world-we mean those of Dr. Pusey and of Cardinal Wiseman, -in which no little light has been thrown upon these picturesque and vital questions. We are, perhaps, equally indebted to the late Canon Liddon and to Mr. Wilfrid Ward, although not quite on the same grounds, for the volumes to which they have set their names. Canon Liddon, whose memory will ever be held in benediction as a rare and striking instance of spiritual power, expressing itself through the medium of a rhetoric at once nervous and refined, was such a disciple of Dr. Pusey's as that in his chief he could perceive only as spots on the sun those imperfections that cleave to the best of men. He has painted much of this immense picture on his knees,—a difficult attitude, in which the lights are apt to be mistaken here and there, or the perspective brought down below the average line of observation. None would, of course, imagine that a less tender handling on his part of a master so venerated, was even desirable; yet, on various points, we must be willing to hear a different, and perhaps a cooler estimate, or to suppose that the relative importance both of persons and events was not entirely such as it seemed to Canon Liddon. In the end there will be no ungenerous denial of the learning, holiness, zeal, and self-sacrifice which were Pusey's high characteristics, or of the success that waited upon him during those days of disaster and rebuke when he rallied the forces, which Newman's historic surrender had thrown into the utmost disarray. Not in vain had the party been nicknamed Puseyite. Such it was, even under the fascination of a mightier spirit, and of a philosophy to which this devout student of languages or of manuscripts could lay no claim. His remarkable contribution to the story of the last fifty years is that, like the great Fabius,cunctando restituit rem.' More, perhaps, than Keble, wide as Keble's influence was, did the large and massive weight of Pusey's example and teaching give time for the Church of England to recover from that stunning blow, under which she had reeled. Thanks to this stubborn captain, though not to him alone, when the panic of 1845 had subsided, the old High Church Movement, not Roman but Laudian, was seen to be proceeding on its way. Newman had enquired in 1837 whether 'what is called Anglo-Catholicism, the religion of Andrewes, Laud, Hammond, Butler, and Wilson, is capable of being professed, acted on, and maintained on a large sphere of action, and through a sufficient period; or whether it be a mere modification or transitionstate either of Romanism or of popular Protestantism, according as we view it.' Less than thirty years afterwards, in 1863, Mr. Mark Pattison wrote: The Church of England is Anglicanized. Not that every young clergyman goes to his cure imbued with the tenets of Archdeacon Denison. Far from it. The extreme Puseyites, if we may use the term, form an inner nucleus, inconsiderable in numbers, of the whole High Church party. But Anglican feeling and sentiment is now the feeling and sentiment generally diffused over the face of the Established Church.' And |