An interesting number of the "Ecclesiologist" has just appeared, in which we desire especially to direct attention to an able paper on Organs and Choral Music. We observe that the writer alludes to several publications as having given an impulse to the study of Ecclesiastical Music. We cannot help mentioning, however, our own conviction, that the papers on that subject, which appeared in the volumes of the "Christian Remembrancer" for 1841, were among the most efficient-as they certainly were among the earliest-aids to the revival of this branch of ecclesiastical art, in the English Church.

"The Statutes of the Fourth General Council of Lateran, &c." by the Rev. J. Evans, M.A. (Seeley,) is an interesting and erudite discussion of no unimportant question, the authenticity of the Canons of that Council, a question which Mr. Evans decides in the affirmative.

We see little to censure in what we have read of "The Patriarch; or, Oral Tradition; and other Poems," by the Rev. Richard Gascoyne, (Hatchards,) though we strongly suspect the author might find better things to do than writing verses on religious subjects.

We cannot see how young men are to be the better for No. 43 of "The Student's Cabinet Library of Useful Tracts" (Clark, Edinburgh; Simpkin and Marshall, London). It consists of a little work, entitled, "Sketches of Modern Philosophy, especially among the Germans," by J. Murdoch, D.D., of whom we gather from these pages that he is an American writer. The book seems to us much more likely to produce smatterers than anything else; nevertheless, its account of the state of philosophy among the American Unitarians will repay perusal.

We warmly recommend a little treatise which has just appeared, bearing the title, "What is the Church of Christ?" (Rivingtons.) We have seen nothing on the subject which either exhibits so much depth of thought, or contains so much truth within the compass. It is thoroughly adapted to the lay readers of the upper or middling classes, to whom we especially commend our author's distinction between a class and a society, which he illustrates very happily, and which meets some of the prevalent fallacies on the subject of the Church.

"The Three Questions, What am I? Whence came I? Whither do I go?" (Macmillan,) are a fresh contribution to our stock of evidences; a stock already too large. Religion, we can assure this well-meaning and right-minded author, the force of some of whose observations we acknowledge, does not gain by being thus incessantly apologised for. What part of the work is not taken up with evidences consists of practical considerations set before the sceptic.

We call attention to two excellent Tracts, one, (a Cover as well as a Tract,) entitled "Reasons for Daily Service;" the other, "A Few Plain Reasons why Churchmen ought to keep the Festivals and Fasts of the Church." (Burns.)

Archdeacon R. Wilberforce's recent Charge, (York, Sunter,) is so interesting and important, that we should have liked to see a London as well as a provincial publisher's name on the title page.

We need scarcely call attention to Dr. Hook's beautiful and seasonable sermon, "Mutual Forbearance recommended in Things Indifferent," (Rivingtons.) We have also to announce "Acceptable Sacrifices," by Mr. Gresley, with a preface by Mr. Watson, of Cheltenham, in whose church the sermon was preached, (Burns ;) "The Liturgy, a Bond of Brotherhood," preached in All Souls' Church, Langham-place, by the Bishop of Glasgow, (Burns ;) "The Church itself the True Church Union Society," by Mr. Dodsworth, (Burns ;) and "The Coming of Christ," by the Rev. William Henn, M.A. Chaplain to the Lord Bishop of Derry and Raphoe, (Grant and Bolton, Dublin; Burns, London,) a favourable specimen, we may mention, of the theology of the sister island and Church.

MISCELLANEOUS.

[The Editor is not responsible for the opinions expressed in this department.]

ON THE TENDENCY OF MR. CARLYLE'S WRITINGS.

To the Editor of the Christian Remembrancer.

MY DEAR SIR-The Reviewer of Mr. Carlyle's Hero Worship, in your number for August, complains that the author whom he denounces is read by many Churchmen, because they hope that his voice will, in some way or other, "swell the battle-cry of the Church." This hope he tells us is fallacious: Mr. Carlyle's shout is the shout of an enemy; as such it is hailed by dissenters and liberals. Surely we ought to silence it, if we can; not to listen to it, or be pleased by it.

Sir, I am a reader of Mr. Carlyle's works, and I think that I am under very deep obligations to them; I hope, also, that I am a Churchman; but I quite agree with your contributor, that if I, or any man, have studied these books from a notion that they would swell the battle-cry of the Church, our motive has been a very indifferent one, and our reward will be disappointment. I am aware that Mr. Carlyle's works afford some temptation to the feelings which the reviewer attributes to us and our opponents. He indulges in many bitter censures upon Churchmen-these may be read with infinite delight by liberals; he indulges in many bitter censures upon liberals-these may be read with infinite delight by Churchmen. He has written a number of passages which seem to indicate that he regards ecclesiastical institutions with as much respect as his countryman, Mr. Joseph Hume; he has written others, from which it might be gathered that he entertains an affection for them like that of Mr. Newman, or Mr. Kenelm Digby. One party has only to term the latter the unaccountable inconsistencies of an ingenious thinker, the other to welcome them as glorious concessions from one who was led by his education to curse, and had been forced by his honesty to bless and Mr. Carlyle has a class of admirers from each. What is either party the better for its admiration? I grant you, nothing whatever. It only gets another vote in favour of resolutions which it had carried by acclamation already; it only acquires a new stock of self-complacency and dislike to its opponents, with both of which articles the market was already glutted.

I do not know how it may be with liberals, but it seems to me, sir, that a Churchman may act upon a principle very different from this; nay, as nearly as possible the opposite of it. Judging from his professions, one would not suppose that he would be always on the search for that which is pleasing or flattering to himself; for that which would make him easy, or comfortable and contented. One would fancy that he would have learnt to regard that which is painful and mortifying as exceedingly profitable, and, with his better mind, to welcome it. Sharp reproofs must be prized, one would think, by him, if they are by no one else; he may often say, "I do not like this, it frets me and torments me;" but he would not dare to say, Therefore, as a Churchman, I feel it my duty to reject it, and turn away from it;"

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rather he would say, "There is a presumption in its favour, cæteris paribus, this is the thing I ought to choose." If it be asked why we do not, upon this principle, love all the attacks which are made upon us in radical or dissenting journals, my answer is, The main reason for not loving them is, that they are not really attacks upon us, but rather excuses and apologies for us. Most of them say, in terms, "We do not attack these poor, innocent, and well-meaning clergymen, we only abuse the principles which they are supporting, the body to which they belong; apart from these they are well-behaved, even useful, members of society." These are evidently apologies; circumstances have made us the poor creatures we are-the worst of these circumstances is, the Church itself. I hope we do all honestly, and from our hearts, hate the men who use such language as this, because they utter what we know to be lies; because they treat that which is innocent as guilty, and that which is guilty as innocent. But such feelings do not the least bind us to hate those who abuse us in a real, manly way; those who abuse us, not for suffering our high virtues to be dwarfed by connecting them with that which is in itself vile and contemptible, but who tell us that the Church was good and glorious till we had to do with it, and that we have made it ignominious. This is, at all events, plain, straightforward language; there is no shuffling in it; there is no doubt whether it is directed against some abstract notion, or against persons. If our consciences say "Not guilty" to it, well and good; then they must be glad that they were put upon their trial; if they confess their sin, they must be glad, too, for what can be worse than keeping it within us unconfessed?

Now it seems to me, sir, that Mr. Carlyle's attacks upon us are of this character: he likes the Church in the middle ages dearly; he has not the slightest respect for the Church in his own day. Yet he does not prefer the one because it was unreformed, or dislike the other because it is Protestant; he looks upon Knox and Luther as heroes and deliverers; he has an intense hatred, hereditary and personal, to Romanism. The reason is, then, that he thinks our forefathers were better and truer men than we are, even under circumstances on the whole less advantageous. I am aware that he sometimes seems to use different language from this; that he talks of the thing which they believed, in being sound and true in their day, and being worn out in ours. I know, also, that he often imputes virtues to Churchmen and statesmen of the middle ages, which they did not possess, and conceals the evidence that they had the same class of vices as ourselves, even when that evidence is contained in the documents to which he appeals. But, if we look a little closer, we shall find that these very facts only show that Mr. Carlyle does mean something, and something very true, against us. Our own selves granted that the middle ages did not realize the Church ideal as he would pretend they did, but they acknowledged the ideal; they felt it; and it is from our not feeling it, not showing it forth in our lives, but rather merely talking and debating about it, that he concludes the thing has ceased to be,

For instance, he has unaccountably passed over an awkward story respecting a certain fish-pool belonging to Abbot Samson, (the middle-age hero of his late fools.) which fish-pool the abbot permitted to deluge the meadows of neighbouring farmers, in spite of their repeated remonstrances, much as any preservers in our day might

have done.

and that what remains is only a sham and counterfeit. Do I think so? God forbid; I believe that the forms which he declares to be dead are witnesses that there is a mind of God which is permanent and everlasting, amidst all the varieties and inconsistencies of human faith and feeling; not dead, but witnesses against our death; witnesses alike against those who say that everything is true only as man makes it true, and against those whose own lives are untrue, even while they acknowledge these testimonies, and profess to receive these helps. But Mr. Carlyle's words only tell the more bitterly upon me because I have these convictions; for we have caused that an earnest man-one who really loves the idea of the Church-should believe that what we feel and know to be everlasting belonged only to an age which has passed away. What greater offence could we have committed? what more salutary, though more painful, than to have our offence brought home to us?

It seems to me that he has done us an equally good service, by warning us that we shall not recover what we admire in past times, by reproducing the costume and habit of past times; I say, a good service, because I fear we are many of us inclined to fall into this notion, and because I cannot conceive one more at variance with the truth which we profess, or more in accordance with that which is false in Mr. Carlyle. He thinks the Church was alive in the middle ages, and is not alive now. We say it is a kingdom which shall have no end; but do we not practically admit its limitation to one, when we acknowledge that only the circumstances of one age can agree with it, and that we must fetch back those circumstances in order to keep it in health, or to restore its suspended animation? What, sir, did our Lord establish his Church, its sacraments, and its ministry, with no foresight of the changes which should take place in the world of which he is the author and ruler? Did he mean that they should be fit only for dainty times and a regulated atmosphere? Did he not mean that they should dwell in all times and create their own atmosphere? And are we to stand wailing and puling because a middle class has grown up among us; because the age of chivalry has departed; because the days of working men have begun? Are we to repine against Providence for these arrangements in the same breath with which we boast of our piety and reverence, and talk about the permanence of the Church? Are we to sigh and cry because opinion and conventions will soon be no protection to ecclesiastical ordinances; nay, very soon will be no protection to domestic life, to marriage, to any one moral principle or practice? No; if God wills that these should depart, let us not wish that we could preserve them. Let us rejoice, though with trembling, for ourselves and for others, that the time is come when we cannot rest on these weak defenceswhen all human life and human institutions, all morality, must ground themselves upon an eternal truth and mystery, or must be left to perish; when the question will be between faith in a Living Being, or universal selfishness and anarchy.

He who shows us that this is the issue to which things are tending may be called an enemy of the Church; he may even fancy himself an enemy of it; he may lead some to become enemies who were ready to be so before; but he is, in the truest sense, our friend, and I maintain that Churchmen have a right to make use of his friendship. Now,

no writer of the day, in this sense, has been so truly our friend as Mr. Carlyle; no one has given us so much help, if we will use it, in understanding what kind of battle we have to fight, what manner of time we have fallen upon, what are its wants and cries, what abysses lie beneath our feet. That his History of the French Revolution, his Chartism, and his Past and Present, make out a very bad case for Churchmen, as to their actual doings, I admit; they can raise no battle-cry of favour on that ground; but if there be any books in English literature which prove that unless there be a Divine order-a heavenly society-in the world, it must become an anarchy and a devilish society, they are these. Your reviewer may say that he knew that before perhaps he did, and perhaps he may not need to have the fact impressed more deeply upon him by the evidence of history, and of those who have studied it in an earnest and impartial spirit; but there are some of us who feel that they want the help which he can dispense with; some of us who are conscious of a continual tendency to be trifling, in the midst of the most tremendous realities, and who do not find that clever Church novels, or clever newspaper articles, are at all sufficient to check this tendency. Such unfortunates, of whom I acknowledge myself to be one, are deeply grateful to any author, who does not merely echo back to them their own notions and opinions, who forces them to listen rather to the awful echoes of the Divine voice in the actual events of the world, and the doings of men; who frightens them out of the lethargy and stupefaction of customary convictions, and shows them that they must learn to mean what they say, and must strive to act as they mean.

But your reviewer will tell me, that there is in Mr. Carlyle a positive leaven of Pantheism. Sir, I believe there is in all of us, in your contributor, and in me, a great leaven of Pantheism, which often hides itself under decorous church-sounding phrases. If he will show me where it lurks in me, and how I may rid myself of it, I shall be grateful to him; and if he will help me to deepen in myself that conviction which is the antagonist one to Pantheism, and the corrector of it-the belief in a personal God, in an actual Living Judge, in a Being who is not one with the world, but its author-my obligations to him will be infinite. To Mr. Carlyle I owe much for driving this last thought home to me, often by strange, always by stern and effectual, methods. That evil must bring forth evil; that there is an eternal difference between right and wrong; that the world was not made by an evil spirit, but by one in whom might and right are eternally and necessarily coincident; that all evil is the counterfeit of something good; these are truths which are continually repeated in his pages, and which only make themselves the more felt from the struggle which they are maintaining with other notions seemingly more universal-really, I believe, far narrower; seemingly more dear to the writer-actually, I believe, only floating on the surface of his mind. That it is easy to adopt these notions, as if they were especially and characteristically Mr. Carlyle's, I acknowledge: it is always easier to take off the scum of a book, than to enter into its spirit; always easier to observe that which either harmonizes with our own theories, or contradicts them, than to receive those practical lessons which might serve for our help and our correction. I doubt not that some may have suffered a certain amount of moral loss from the passages