sense. them we have the union of Church and State in its strictest Of course, in a perfect community, toleration, religious liberty, would be simply unnecessary. But in a state of society such as we have at present, I imagine that religious liberty may, without impugning what I conceive to be the true theory of Church and State, go so far as to admit to civil offices men who are opponents of the national religion. Do we not, even in religious actions for a religious end, often make use of emotions and faculties which are not specially religious? ago. And while speaking on this point, may I be allowed to say, that if this question could only be fairly argued out, it might be well for the prospects of Christianity in England? Dissent now is not the nonconformity of two or or three hundred years Then its objections were laid against the religious tenets and against the religious government of the Established Church. Now its objections are against the Establishment, as such; and it has, to my knowledge, been declared that there is no dissent now but political dissent. And this fact will serve to show to all the importance of the question we are discussing. If we can prove the lawfulness of religious establishments, surely Peace is advancing with no tardy step. And I trust that if I shall not be found to have made out my case, I shall nevertheless have laid down lines of argument by which a right judgment may be arrived at in some future time. But if my estimate of the duties of government be incorrect, the propriety of a Church and State union does not fall with it. The argument is susceptible of other and most valuable developments. And this brings me to the concluding portion of my subject. I promised to advocate the connection between the Church and the State-III. From an intelligent consideration of the circumstances of the present time, and of the benefits resulting from such union. It may be said, that even granting the theory I have advanced as to the relation subsisting between the civil and the ecclesiastical organizations, that theory has been rudely broken in upon-first, when the Bill was passed for Catholic Emancipation in 1829; afterwards, when the Test and Corporation Acts were repealed in 1834; and that the same kind of process is continually being repeated, until, in fact, the union is but the shadow of its former self. Now, I have already endeavoured to show that toleration, and even the admission of dissenters to civil offices, does not destroy the union. It destroys its perfection, no doubt, in the same way as the presence of a Roman Catholic member destroys the perfection of a Protestant household, but not its essence. And, perhaps, even now there is hope that in happier times the accidents may be more in accordance with the essence. It is, of course, plain and evident that in a hundred ways, which I need not specify, the union still remains; and there is nothing in the circumstances of the time which makes it less needful now than in times past it has been. This last assertion will, I trust, appear more plainly true, if we consider for a moment what are the advantages which the union is calculated to confer upon the nation and the world in general. And here I shall have the valuable aid of Lord Macaulay in his "Gladstone on Church and State." The principle which is the groundwork of Macaulay's Essay, that the theory of association, the nature of the original compact, or "ever-originating social compact," is the same in the government of a State as it is in the formation and regulation of a joint-stock company, and that, therefore, it is as ridiculous for a State to set up a religion as for a mail-coach company to do so, is, of course, diametrically opposed to the principles of government which I have attempted to lay down. But whether I shall have succeeded in proving that Church and State are names for two different functions or aspects of the same body politic, and that when they are separated violence is done; or whether I may be myself forced to confess that there is no such necessary or sacred relationship between the two; in either case the considerations of utility, of which I shall now offer only two or three, will have a precisely equal validity. 1. The union of Church and State forms, or might be made to form, an effectual guarantee that humanizing, civilizing, cultivating, and Christianizing influences shall be diffused over the length and breadth of the land: a more effectual guarantee than any voluntary system could possibly form, or at any rate ever has formed. This aspect of the question is forcibly urged by the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose remarkable treatise on the subject would demand for its due consideration, an article to itself. I can only thus mention it here. 2. The influence of the State, which has more of the wisdom of the serpent (a due, commendable wisdom) than the Church, will be found to effectuate a better division of revenues, a better system of ecclesiastical finance, than any purely voluntary system. How much less dependent, as a whole, on the sentiments, nay, the whims of his congregation, is the Church of England clergyman than the Nonconformist. 3. Above all, how effectual is a national Church compared with any Dissenting denomination, in the treatment and the evangelization of the poor. With all charity I wish to say it. How seldom chapels are built, how often churches are built, in neighbourhoods peopled by the destitute poor. How mournfully was it confessed at a recent assembly of Nonconformists, that they had failed to enlist the poor. Is not the inference inevitable, that this is due, either to the superior spiritual capacities of the Church, or to her superior ecclesiastical organization? And here, at least for the present, I must close this subject. And in doing so I can only hope that the feebleness of the advocate may not be taken for the weakness of his cause. Nay, more, I trust that I shall not be for one moment imagined to believe that the Church of Christ, with all her divine powers, is absolutely dependent for her usefulness on any alliance of any kind whatever. Is it not possible for a divine power to work by human means, to accept as it were of human aids? Yet, further, if the State should ever ask too high a price for her consent to a continuance of the union (and I fear the price is going up); if the Church should ever be required to sign away by an all-embracing comprehension the liberty and rights which she derives from heaven, she must, as she would preserve her life and shun the curse of Esau, declare herself free. In no combination of circumstances that can possibly arise, save by abdicating the sacred rights and duties which belong to her, do I believe that the Church of England will lose the noble place which God has given her among the Churches of the saints. If she were left to-morrow to her own resources-nay, if every penny of so-called State endowment were taken from her-if Westminster Abbey were given up to the Independents, the Romanists, the Unitarians by turns, the Divine life within her would yet endure to make her still the greatest evangelizer that the world has ever known. Body and soul, spiritual and temporal, Church and State. There are purer regions, no doubt, where the soul is free from the entanglements of the body, and enjoys her life divine without a worldly care. But in the world a wise and merciful decree has fixed both body and soul in a necessary union. Such a union is that of Church and State. Married, as we have seen, from Paradise till now, they move on together, doing, each in a peculiar way, an appointed work. And if this union has been blessed to the nations of the world, and unless one of its members be unfaithful to the other, let us beware lest we break through the ancient precept, "What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." Non aliunde beata Civitas, aliunde homo. A. C. M. DANTE ALIGHIERI, ALIGHIERI, THE POET OF THE THE appearance a short time since of Gustave Doré's re markable illustrations of Dante, and now of a translation of the poet's great work by the popular and scholarly poet, Longfellow, is likely to create a more general desire of reading the Divine Comedy than has been felt of late. At all events, the admirers of the great Italian must feel it incumbent on them to use the opportunity the above works give of urging the claims their prized author has upon the attention of every educated man and woman. Of the French artist's illustrations, it is not our design to speak; and of the American poet's edition we will say but a word, as our wish is to sit at the feet of the great master himself. As far as we have examined Longfellow's translation, it appears to be very correct and literal, so literal that it is much harder reading than Cary's. Yet if the translation is somewhat wearisome, the copious and apposite notes and illustrations make the book a most desirable companion for the student of Dante. No one can get on with Dante without a full commentary, and this of Longfellow's is the best that we have met with. And not only does this edition supply all that can be required as explanatory notes, it also furnishes copious extracts from historical authorities to help the reader to a view of Dante's times, as well as whole critical essays upon the poem from the greatest critics of all Europe. Perhaps some may think the book is thus made needlessly bulky, as most readers of Dante can refer to Milman, Quinet, Carlyle, and others, but we are inclined to commend the translator for his fulness, since we often take Dante into the country and leave our library behind us. To understand any poet, and most of all Dante, we need to form an idea of his time. Dante's great work is full of religion, of philosophy, and of politics, and his pages are dark and unintelligible till we have a conception of what the poet's religion, philosophy, and politics were. At the end of the thirteenth, and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries (Dante was born in 1265, and died in 1321), the Romish Church ruled the religious life of Europe. Dante had been dead forty years when Wickliffe began to preach reformation, and nearly a whole century before John Huss and Jerome of Prague died "for Christ's Gospel." Petrarch (130474), the restorer of classical learning in Europe, was still in his teens when Dante was laid in his grave in Ravenna, and only began to learn Greek twenty years after (1342), while the study of the classics did not become general and earnest before the fourth decade of the next century." * Thus, neither the piety of the Reformers, nor the free thought of the classical scholars had yet shaken men's faith in the awful sanctity of the Catholic Church. Devout catholics might deplore the immorality and worldliness of some of her ministers, but they rested in her * Gibbon, vii. p. 244-259. Hallam, "Lit. of Europe," ch. ii. § 20. |