On the other hand, the modern Englishman of the middle or upper class at least affects a taste for feudalism in civil and a certain tinge of mediævalism in religious life, which he is far from entertaining any serious belief in. The result is that the Ritualists, mistaking all this Brummagem metal of mediævalism for the real article, assumed that there was a reaction when there was none, and so two tides of church opinion came together, with the result that we have seen in a short-lived panic, the second we have here to record as the mushroom growth around the decaying roots of the old church and state policy.

The third of these spasms of fear grew out of a volume of seven essays, thrown together in a haphazard fashion by seven Oxford and Cambridge men of some mark, a quarter of a century ago. Several of these writers are forgotten, some are dead, and one only of the seven, Dr. Temple, still holds his head up before the public in very prominent form. But all who know the present Bishop of London will acquit him of any dangerous tendencies. Tried by the usual tests of orthodoxy, he is as safe and as unimpeachable as was his blameless predecessor, Dr. Jackson. It is a lesson in life to glance back a quarter of a century to the dust raised about this challenge of the "septem contra Christum," as some schoolmaster critic described them, and by endless iteration the phrase got a vogue it was far from deserving. Detailed criticism of a book now out of print more than twenty years ago would be such surplusage that we shall not inflict it on our readers. The Essays and Reviews are the whetstone on which many young and budding critics of that day, not excepting the present writer, sharpened their critical tomahawk. But now, alas! the books of the heretics and of the heresy-hunters slumber peacefully side by side on the upper shelf of the libraries of country clergymen, peace to their memory; hunter and hunted are now gone to the world where, unlike the Indians whose heaven is a huntingfield, there are no dogs and no deer. Now the Essays and Reviews are dead and buried, we can afford to smile at a panic which, when at its height, made even sensible people ask themselves whether we were approaching another glacial epoch of general unbelief arising from the objections of men of science.

The new criticism, rejected off-hand on the Tertullian plea of prescription, was "neology," as it was vaguely called-new and not true by those who resented the intrusion of reason in that preserve of theology which the Church has always claimed as her own. The more educated minds who had widened their horizon

saw that criticism, which had worked such havoc with Greek and Roman history, was not to be warned off the Hebrew record merely on the ground that the Book was inspired, or that the Church was its authorized and sole exponent. One school of thought took the one line of defense, and the other the other; but in spite of both, "neology," or the new criticism, took its own course, and, in Dr. Jowett's phrase, handled the Bible as if it were any other book. It was this free handling, rather than any direct results of this negative method, which alarmed the popular mind in England, and sent the religious press into factitious exclamations of horror at such profanity.

The educated minority saw that the results of negative criticism in Germany had been surprisingly small. Strauss, the Corypheus of the movement, long before his death made frank confession of this, and in his last polemic," The half and the whole," he turned round on his own followers, much in the same way as Wilkes in his day did on the Wilkites, when he had the impudence to say to the king, "Please your Majesty I am not a Wilkite." Strauss, in the same way, had rounded before his death on the Straussites. He had renounced theology, negative as well as positive, and had turned to humanism. The hero of his last biographical sketch, "Ulrich von Hutten," had ended his troublous career in disappointment, and Strauss instinctively felt that he was the Von Hutten of our day, and that the humanism of which he was the chosen chief would die and make no mark, as Hutten died in exile on the shores of the Lake of Zurich.

On these grounds the new criticism should not have been treated as the disturbing force that it was for some time in English theological circles, and by those who were untrained to see that German rationalism was among the little systems "which have their day - they have their day and cease to be."

Looking back on the Essays and Reviews panic of 1862, we can only account for it by the strange and unnatural alliance of Dr. Pusey and his followers, who sought to join hands with the Record and its followers in making common cause against a common foe. Men said (with what little reason the sequel soon showed) how serious must be the peril when in presence of a greater foe these Ritualists and Evangelists drop their arms and rally pro aris et focis for the Church and the Bible, attacked at once by these Sadducees of modern age who believe in neither. This joining of hands of such opposite extremes led men to conjure up a peril which was great only because it was seen to be so

through the magnifying glass of their fears. This is exactly the way in which panics propagate themselves. The cake of barley bread tumbling into the camp of the Midianites must be the sword of Gideon, and as men think in their heart so are they. Men are cowards or brave in proportion as they betray the succors which reason offers, or, on the other hand, retain their presence of mind, take time to think, and so see a way of escape springing out of the very temptation.

We cannot pass this subject of panics in theology by without one lesson in conclusion which the churches in America will do well to lay to heart.

There are some chapters of experience in which the Old World can teach the New, as there are certainly several in which the New World has made history for the instruction of the Old. In the long death-agony of domestic slavery, with secession and a civil war, the bloodiest on record, as its twin progeny, the New World has written a chapter in history to which the long annals of the Old World have nothing to compare. What are Persian invasions of Greece, or the three Punic wars in which Rome and Carthage closed in a death-grapple, in comparison with this duel of North and South, when, like the Scandinavian brothers of old Norse tales, they were strapped together till one has gashed the other to death. Neither Europe nor Asia has ever seen a social problem fought out on such a scale, and so fiercely to the bitter end. This is what our American children have to teach us, who are the "old folk at home." On the other hand, the strange interlacing of Church and State in the Old World has brought about a condition of affairs very favorable to panic-mongering. It arises, as we have seen, whenever politicians for their own worldly ends go, as Alexander and his craftsmen did, into the Agora of Ephesus, and, instead of our craft in danger, deliberately raise the cry of "Great is Diana of the Ephesians." The churches of America are, so to speak, an archipelago of independence, and even if there is an earthquake on one of these islets, it is on so small a scale that the area of devastation is bounded on all sides by the sea. It is well for the United States that it is so, since even when a whole denomination is rent with the cries of a particular controversy, as the New England States were when the Old and New Light theology question arose half a century ago, the disturbance is not felt over so vast an area as the Union, which has as many separate churches as it has States, and none of them so predominant as the Establishment is in England, whereat its controversies rise to the height of national quarrels.

The cry of the "Church in danger" is getting antiquated even in England. It could scarcely arise at all in a state of society like that of the New World. This is a great advantage for America, and is one of which we may admire the wisdom which led them early in their history to cut the Gordian knot of State and Church connection. In this sense the lines of Clough's poem are full of meaning:

"Come back, come back, and wherefore and for what?

To idly finger some old Gordian knot,

Too weak to sever and too frail to cleave,

And idly clinging to some make-believe."

It is these "make-believes" arising out of Church and State connection which are the parent of all or nearly all these panics we have glanced at. In proof of this we may remark that the Free Churches of Great Britain have as a rule been comparatively exempt from these shakings and quakings about nothing at all. The most disgraceful victims of these periodical ague fits have been the orthodox Evangelicals of the old Church and State party. At one time it was the gunpowder treason over again with the Jesuits in disguise and undermining our youth at Oxford; at another time it was the Pope dictating from the Flaminian Gate an epistle for the subjection of England to the Papal See. Then the dream changed, and the nightmare took the form of the hag of unbelief squat at the breast of young Oxford, and whispering some unmeaning formula of the Hegelian Left, that everything is naught and naught is everything. Such are panics; they cannot be reasoned with when they arise, for to reason is to assume a state of mind panicproof. Still they can be guarded against in the future, but only in one way, a firm grasp of essentials summed up in the phrase, "the faith once delivered to the saints." This is the best, and indeed the only, safeguard. As long as Christians will hold by all those figments of our traditional theology, such as apostolical succession, verbal inspiration, and, above all, the Augustinian anthropology and eschatology, they will be a prey to panics whenever criticism touches, as it must do on the side of science or history, any of these dogmas. A dogmatic church, then, must be a timorous church, and timorous in proportion to its excess of dogma over the portion of assimilated spiritual truth. Happily, if the past has its warnings, the future has its encouragements. The age of dogmatism is declining and that of simple faith at first hand in a living personal and ever-present Saviour is on the increase. Our activity in foreign missions proves this, for whenever was a Church

Evangelistic but it was able to shake off the venomous beast of unbelief or misbelief and to take no harm from the serpent's fang.

We may hope, then, on the whole, that the age of panics is past and over, or nearly so; and we close this brief record of three which we have lived through with much the same comment as the French Abbé who had lived through the horror of the French Revolution, "J'ai vécu."

CATESHAM Valley, England.

J. B. Heard.

IDEALISM IN LITERATURE.

"L'Art n'est pas une étude de la vérité positive; c'est une recherche de la vérité idéale."— G. SAND.

THIS is not a disquisition on Hegel. Neither do I meditate an attack on the position of Dr. M'Cosh as established in the "Princeton Review." Philosophy is not my aim. I wish only to examine certain tendencies in literature, which, it seems to me, are capable of generalization in a line not attempted hitherto, at least to my knowledge.

We hear a great deal at present of the realistic school. Created, so to speak, by Balzac and Stendhal, it has grown and developed in the hands of such men as Flaubert and M. Daudet in France, George Eliot in England, Mr. Howells and Mr. James among ourselves. It has drawn to itself so much talent, so much brilliancy, that one is half inclined to surrender at discretion, and let the young genius of the age lead us whither it will. Yet one must not always allow one's self to follow one's inclinations. Perhaps even here it will be worth while to stop and ask ourselves: What is realism? where did it come from? whither is it leading us? At least such an afterthought sometimes possesses me; and it may be that others will follow out the inquiry with me. In order to do this clearly, let us go back for a minute and take a rapid historical survey.

Modern Literature may be said to have begun with the first real influence of Christianity upon life. The result of this influence was twofold. Among the Ancients, literature had included in itself poetry, religion, and philosophy. Their ideal was a union of these three. Hence the deepest and intensest emotion did not scorn to occupy itself with considerations of art. Passion and