should continue to exist; and I believe in my heart that, in spite of all the protests and all the declamations that may be made, the Anglican communion in Ireland as an Establishment is doomed. He added: We have trifled too long with these great questions, and when the statesmen who have now proposed a better state of things have been taunted with the inconsistency of not having proposed the disestablishment of the Irish Church before, the answer is, The time was not come." The time has come now; and I believe the thing will be done. In the House of Lords, the other night, the Primate of the Anglican communion in Ireland, whom I honour for his courtesy and kindness, said in my hearing that if you disestablish the Anglican communion the result will be-what? -emigration, or apostasy, and the immediate setting up of the Roman Catholic religion. (Cheers.) That is the death-knell uttered by the Primate of Ireland of the existing Anglican communion in that country. We will not quote Dr. Pusey. It is notorious that he and the leaders of the Ritualist party are quite prepared for disestablishment, but they are in such very bad repute, that we will not call them as witnesses to the change which is going on in the minds of the clergy on the question of the day. We turn rather to the Evangelical Clergy. Shall we not find amongst them some trace of discernment, some cheerful expectation of liberty, some noble triumph in anticipating spiritual successes wrought by the instrumentality of their fervour and their prayer? Seest thou no sign of rain? No, the heavens are as brass; Evangelicalism is as dry, arid, dusty, and unprofitable as the baked fields on which the cattle now vainly browse. The only service which they render now, is to insist on the maintenance of the Queen's supremacy. See Lord Shaftesbury, with his Bill for maintaining uniformity of worship in the Church of England! It only prohibits Popish vestments and lighted candles, and is not everybody saying that the Ritualists are rushing the Church to ruin? Yet only one Bishop can be found to say a good word for his Bill. The Archbishop of Canterbury will not hear of it, and several other Bishops were in their places ready to oppose it if there were any need. The leaders of parties, the influential lay peers who in private assure Earl Shaftesbury that they abhor Ritualism, dread it, and are most desirous to have it put down, one after another haw and hesitate; hinting that this is not the time, that the noble lord had better "wait a little longer," till the poor Earl rushes out of the House with his Bill, exclaiming that he will never more put any confidence in peers, especially Earl Russell,-never! Yet there are Evangelical men who are better than Evangelicals. The best part of the Church of England is not represented by the Record and the Rock. What mean these unwonted sounds in the pleasant glades of Cheshunt? Shall the dulcet notes of a Dean be heard in the groves devoted to the teaching of youths who will, in all probability, go preaching about the country without asking Epis. copal leave, and perhaps will talk Anti-State Churchism from their schismatic tubs ? It is even so. Yet no thunder has fallen out of the sky. Dr. Alford is Dean of Canterbury still. Convocation has not appointed a Committee to sit on himhe has not been cited into any Ecclesiastical Court, and if he has been admonished, it has been in private. Even in America the Bishops have more pluck. There they cite and publicly rebuke clergymen for fraternizing with the uncovenanted, but here in England they are dumb, being afraid. A very amicable, pleasant " opportunity," as our Methodist friends would say, was the Cheshunt reunion. The Dean spoke manfully. The Dissenters showed courtesy and self-respect. There was neither rant nor cant. Mere expressions of mutual esteem and goodwill do not count for much, but when Dean Alford speaks in this wise, we may be sure he means a good deal : : We, in this land, have been long endeavouring to make our Christianity stand on its narrowest and finest point. And the inevitable result of equilibrium on the apex has followed. It has been unstable equilibrium. Our English Christianity has had to be propped all round. So thickly indeed, that many have failed to discern the building itself for the multitude of shores that surrounded it. It is high time that this vain experiment were abandoned-high time that we change our course, and try whether we cannot attain stable equilibrium by setting our English Christianity on its base. It may be true that this reversal of position will require great caution and delicacy of handling. Two things certainly are true that the process cannot be accomplished unless the artificial props be struck away-and that, when it is accomplished, they will no longer be wanted. Now it has seemed to myself, and to others, that the day has come for setting one's hands with advantage to this work. As has been said elsewhere, "The visit was on both sides designed and accepted as an indication of future alliances in prospects of impending change." Dean Alford knows well enough what are the " artificial props" that will have to be struck away before we can have a "Church of England" in reality. He understands-who can doubt it?-that the Establishment principle is that which divides, and keeps apart the Protestant, Christian and spiritual men who ought to be labouring together for the conservation and spread of the truth. Thus, daily, do fresh tokens discover themselves that men of high position, learning and piety in the Established Church are meditating the inevitable future, and trying to prepare themselves and others for the adoption of the Voluntary Principle. AND DR. RALEIGH'S ADDRESS TO THE CONGREGATIONAL UNION OF ENGLAND WALES. IT T may be necessary to inform some of our readers what is meant by the Congregational Union of England and Wales. From 400 to 600 Independent Ministers, with a sprinkling of laymen, lawyers, merchants, and thriving tradesmen, and now and then one or two members of Parliament, all of whom take a keen interest in the religious welfare of mankind, meet together in London once a year-in the month of May. They do not meet to legislate for their religious community; they have no authority to enforce any practice upon the most obscure meeting in the country. The object of their assembly is to consider the situation. The meeting in London is generally adjourned to October, when a smaller number assemble in some large provincial town. At the meeting in May they elect from among themselves a chairman a year beforehand. The chairman has not always been a man of shining abilitiessometimes of little more than smiling ability-but he has always been a man who, either in the provinces or in London, has shown himself "a workman that needeth not to be ashamed." It has become the custom for the chairman of this democratic ecclesiastical assembly to inaugurate himself by reading an address, which is generally a very able, always a somewhat laboured affair. In some instances these addresses have afforded curious specimens of the English language-invaluable, we should suppose, to civil-service examiners. Such as have essayed to be philosophical would have been interesting alike to Dr. Mansell and Mr. Mill, as showing the power of wordiness to represent no distinct thought at all; but nearly all of them have had a certain homiletical value, whilst one or two. have stirred the stagnant pool of theological dogma. In these two last-mentioned respects they have done good which can scarcely be over-estimated, even though it has been done at the cost, as Mr. Dale says, of a twelvemonth's misery to each of the chairmen. In this country, where (happily on the whole) every cobbler considers himself to be a theological authority, and in an assembly principally composed of Church teachers or preachers, all of whom are men of some ability (about one-third of them of vigorous intellect and fair culture, another third inferior to these both in culture and intellect, and the remainder men of some intellectual power with scarcely any culture at all), in such an assembly it is not to be supposed that any man can touch the long-settled duck weed which covers popular theology, without bringing upon himself some of that "odium" which, above all other, is proverbial. Dr. Raleigh, the well-known minister of the Canonbury Congregational Church, fills the chair this year. On assuming office he delivered an address, which has been published under the title of "Christianity and Modern Progress." The address has, of course, been criticized in the leading journal of the Independents, and the criticism has led to an interesting correspondence, in which Drs. Raleigh and Lindsay Alexander, Messrs. G. W. Conder, Edward White, Ingram, and Fraser, and writers who sign themselves "Canonicus" and "A Bystander," have taken part. We wish briefly to call attention to the point which gave occasion to strictures in the critique, and to the supposed conflict of opinion which shows itself in the corre spondence of the gentlemen we have named. But before we do this, we have a word or two to say in general of the chairman, of his address, of the criticism which appeared in the English Independent, and of the correspondents. The look of Dr. Raleigh, as he stood in the pulpit of the Weigh House Chapel, was enough to conciliate the liking of his audience, even if nothing had been known of him beforehand. He seemed to us An awful, reverend, and religious man, His eyes diffused a venerable grace, When he opened his lips, for once at least the Scottish tone was pleasing, even to sensitive ears; its distinctness was kept from being harsh by the mellow music of the speaker's voice and manner, and one almost lost sight of his Presbyterian fancy for" sawing the air" as he read. So natural and easy; so full of poetic beauty; so marked by ever-fresh but appropriate quotations from the Bible, was nearly every passage. It is true, indeed, that the doctor was less happy when he got out of the region of plain common sense and familiar Scripture; and that careful reading of the address after hearing it, does not lead us to the conclusion that he has great aptitude for exact statement of a point; in fact, the more laboured of his endeavours in this direction are the least successful. Take for instance his opening paragraph, in which—if we may dare to guess at the ideas which were flowing embryo-like in Dr. Raleigh's mind-he appears to desire to set forth the following points : 1. That religion is, in the largest sense of the words, the science and the art of right living. 2. That we may learn some things concerning both the science and the art of right living from other sources besides the Bible. 3. That a generally-recognized distinction is made between those things which we learn from the Bible and those things which we learn from other sources. These simple but important ideas-ideas most appropriate to the introduction of his discourse--the doctor puts before us in the following inexact and nebulous paragraph: |