were brought to him. It was in this fortress prison, he said, that he read "Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." This testimony is in striking contrast to the article to which I have called attention, which says that in the Ravelin was disallowed" everything that might help to occupy the attention." Does Prince Krapotkine know where was written the Russian novel, Tchto Dyealit? ("What's to be Done?") which was published in 1863 in the Sovremennik (or Contemporary) ? Mr. Robinson told me that Tchernichevsky, the author, was with him in the Ravelin, and wrote it there. So that Tchernichevsky's mind did not die for want of occupation. Nor do I think "he fell ill in no time." I am acquainted with a former exile who was with him at the mines of Nertschinsk. He describes Tchernichevsky, indeed, as feeble and of a naturally delicate constitution; but a third quondam exile told me, less than two years ago, that notwithstanding prison, mines, and exile, this author was still living in Siberia, at Viluisk. Mr. Robinson said that he never heard or saw anything corroborative of the story of salt fish being given to the prisoners, nor of their being flogged, in the fortress. Such things, if done, could not well have been hid, for the prisoners communicate with each other by knocks, notwithstanding that the walls are two feet thick. Also, Robinson had a friend who had been four times in the fortress, and many other friends likely to know the truth, but none of these had ever spoken to him of cruelties enacted there. During his three years' confinement two prisoners died, but not from bad treatment, and two went mad-the latter by their own fault. I have no further information respecting sickness and death in the fortress, nor have I any means of testing the accuracy of the number of deaths recorded in the article in the Nineteenth Century as occurring-two hundred out of five hundred inmates in four months-at the Kharkoff prison, or the deaths by hundreds in a month at Kieff. But it is at least comforting to know that in other parts of Russia the prisoners enjoy better health. Thus, quoting from tables at the end of "Siberia as a Colony," published last year by one who knows the prison system well, and has written thereon before, Mr. Yadrintseff, I learn that, out of 17,191 prisoners who passed through the prison at Tiumen in 1878, there died only 220 children, 80 men, and 21 women; and when I was at Tiumen last August, I was informed by the chief officer who superintends the removal of the exiles, that out of 6,000 prisoners taken from Tiumen to Tomsk, a distance of nearly 2,000 miles, on eight barges (that is, 750 on each), only two persons, a child and an adult, had died in transit. Mr. Robinson, I ought to mention, corroborated one thing mentioned in the article, which, to be candid, I thought at first to be a mistake—namely, that a gendarme and a soldier were stationed within the cells. Robinson at first had one placed in his room, but upon petitioning the Empress that the soldier might remain outside the request was granted. I have no recollection of seeing any chapel in the prison, though of course there is the well-known church close at hand within the fortress wall. Mr. Robinson did not go to church during his imprisonment, but a priest came thrice a year, and administered the sacrament once. On these occasions the prisoners learned from him something of what was going on in the outer world. Otherwise my informant said that for the first nine months he was not allowed to see any of his relations, and, even then, only his father, mother and sister, in the cabinet of the Commandant. The reader will have perceived, of course, that the above statements respecting the visits of friends, and the rich table of diet in the case of Mr. Robinson, do not agree with what came under my notice in the prison itself. I do not think it necessary to attempt to reconcile the two accounts, but content myself with having given a faithful record of what I saw and heard, having extenuated nothing, nor set down aught in malice. Whether or not what I have said in my work on Siberian convicts and gaols" can only convey false ideas" I must leave to those best qualified to judge. It may interest some to know that Count Tolstoy, the Minister of the Interior, in writing me an official letter of thanks for the contents of the book, has been pleased to say that he hopes to make certain improvements at one of the penal colonies-that of Kara-of which I spoke so gloomily. May the Count speedily begin his efforts and prosper in them! I have never maintained that the Russian prisons are what they ought to be; I do not believe they are what they might be, and I am sure they are not what those highest in authority would like them to be; but all this does not justify the representation of them to be what they are not. HENRY LANSDELL. CANONICAL OBEDIENCE. THE THE modern relation of a parish priest to the bishop of his diocese contains elements which can be traced to many different periods of history; but the most important of those elements belong to the earlier part of the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the eighth century the ecclesiastical discipline of the Western Church had almost entirely broken down. The original theory of Church government had long before passed away, and with it had gone the original conception, both of the place of the sacraments in the Christian economy, and of the relation of Church officers to their administration. The idea had taken possession of the majority of Christians that the ministry was a priesthood, and also that the powers of that priesthood were transmitted by the laying on of a bishop's hands. But there was, to use the language of the canonists, no distinction drawn between the potestas ordinis and the potestas jurisdictionis. In a large part of the West it was believed that a bishop had everywhere, not only the power, but also the right of exercising the power, of ordaining and that a presbyter had everywhere, not only the power, but also the right of exercising the power, of ministering. Neither bishops nor presbyters were regarded as necessarily having a superior: for the former there need not be a metropolitan, nor for the latter a diocesan. The majority of the churches were held by unattached clerks (clerici vagantes), appointed by the lay owners without check, and liable to be dismissed by them without appeal. Many of these clerks held Arian or other heretical opinions; some of them were evil livers, who brought religion into disrepute. But whether they were unsound in faith or loose in morals they were subject to no special discipline. The system of annual or semi-annual councils had ceased. The very principle of : cohesion was wanting. There was no central authority. There was no sense of corporate union. There was, consequently, a risk that Western Christendom would become disintegrated and in the anarchy of the Christian Churches, Paganism began to revive again. * The State intervened to save the Western Church from the threatened ruin of its organization. In the last years of the decaying Merovingian monarchy, Carlman, the pious son of Charles Martel, summoned Boniface, the "Apostle of the Germans," to help him in the work of ecclesiastical reform. A council or parliament was held in 742, by whose advice Carlman made a series of enactments which have formed the basis of the ecclesiastical organization of the West from that day until now.† Not least important among them was the enactment that every presbyter in a diocese should be subject to the bishop of that diocese. This enactment, like the others of the same series, was professedly based on earlier ecclesiastical canons. But it went considerably beyond them. In the East, the canons of Laodicea and Antioch had enjoined presbyters not to act without the sanction of their bishop, and had punished with deposition a presbyter who attempted against his bishop's wish to form a separate congregation.‡ In Africa the code had merely dealt with the special case of clerks who refused promotion.§ In Gaul the strongest exhortation to obedience had also been narrowed to the special requirement that clerks should at least celebrate festivals with their bishops.|| And in Spain, on the other hand, the canon of Toledo, which became the basis of the later canon law, did not make particular mention of the relation of a presbyter to a bishop, but required a general promise of submission to superior authority. It was this capitulary of Carlman which first gave a definite legal sanction to the fundamental principle of the later diocesan system, that clerks cannot properly minister within a certain district without the permission of the bishop to whose charge the district is entrusted, and that they are responsible to him for the mode in which they minister. The comparative novelty of the The materials of the picture which is here put together have been drawn from several sources: the most important of these are the letters of Pope Zachary to Boniface, and of Boniface to Pope Zachary. S. Bonifat., Epistt. 66 and 42, printed, e.g., in Jaffe's "Monumenta Moguntina," pp. 187, 112. These enactments have sometimes been represented as the canons of a purely ecclesiastical council, and consequently as being a reform of the Church, not by the State, but by itself; but the enacting clause puts their true character beyond question:— "Ego Karlmannus, dux et princeps Francorum, cum consilio servorum Dei et optimatum meorum episcopos qui in regno meo sunt cum presbiteris et concilium et synodum pro timore Christi congregavi..... Et per consilium sacerdotum et optimatum meorum ordinavimus per civitates episcopos, &c. The enactments have been frequently printed-e.g., Mansi, "Concilia," xii. 365; Pertz, "Legum," i. 16; Boretius, Capit. Reg. Franc." i. 24. . Conc. Laod., c. 57 (in effect = Can. Apost., 38 [40]); Conc. Antioch, c. 5. · § Cod. Eccles. Afric., c. 31. 1 Conc. Matiscon, A.D. 581, c. 10. 11 Conc. Toletan., A.D. 675, c. 10. enactment, and the fact that it was not at once universally obeyed, But in course of time, and no doubt in some cases also at an earlier period, the subordination of a presbyter to the diocesan bishop came to rest, not upon legislation, but upon contract. The promise to obey was made a condition of ordination. Such a condition is first found, in the general terms which have been already mentioned, in the eleventh Council of Toledo. It appears in a more definite form in Italy, in a document of 772, which may probably be taken as a single surviving instance of a general practice; in it one Usipertus, · on being ordained as presbyter of a church in the diocese of Lucca, promises that he will not "sing mass" in the said church without the licence of the bishop, or of the bishop's [arch]-presbyter; undertaking, if he violates the promise, to pay a fine of fifty pounds of gold.‡ The promise was sometimes strengthened by an oath; but both the ecclesiastical Council of Chalons, in 813, and the Imperial Council of Aachen, in 817, inhibited bishops from taking such an oath.§ The hypothesis that the exaction of even a promise was a universal or necessary condition of ordination, is negatived by the fact that no form of promise appears in any of the early ordinals; the earliest ordinals in which it is found are those of Soissons and Salzburg, assigned by Martene to the twelfth century. It is not in which are the early English ordinals which are printed by Maskell; and the *Pippin. Capit. Suession. A.D. 744, c. 4; Conc. Vern. A.D. 755, cc. 3, 8; Karoli M. "Legum," vol. i.) Decretales pseudo-Isidorianæ (ed. Hinschius), Epist. Clem. i. cc. 36, 42; Epist. Clem. iii. cc. 57, 70. + Karoli II. Conventus Attiniacensis, ap. Pertz, "Legum," i. 522. Muratori, "Antiq. Ital. med. ævi," tom. vi. 412. ap. Pertz, "Legum" i. 208. Conc. Cabill., A.D. 813, c. 13, ap. Mansi, xiv. 96: Capit. Aquisgran, A. D. 817 c. 16, |