alteration of the line in the Christian Year, however unfortunate and misleading I may think it. If the Dean of Chichester sees Dr. Pusey's letter, and thinks himself called upon to deal with it, no doubt he will do so. All that I said in The Times was that the subscriptions to Keble College stopped about the time of that alteration.

Whatever 'fuss' I have been guilty of making was in connection with my caution against 'Keble-worship,' founded upon the difference of tone and teaching traceable in the earlier and later periods of that remarkable man's life. This Dr. Pusey called in the Guardian setting up an imaginary Keble.' I am spared the necessity of enlarging on this point by the recorded words of Mr. Keble himself, to be found in Sir John Coleridge's 'Life,' p. 282, of the first edition; and the quotation of these will, I hope, absolve me from the charge of making a 'fuss.'

Sir John, in 1845, had written to his friend on the subject of the Lyra Innocentium, remarking on the 'difference of tone' between it and the Christian Year, to which Mr. Keble writes as follows

'When I wrote that [the Christian Year] I did not understand (to mention no more points) either the doctrine of Repentance, or that of the Holy Eucharist, as held, e.g., by Bishop Ken, nor that of Justification, and such points as those must surely make a great difference.'

I will venture to ask whether it is possible to possess more absolutely complete testimony than this to the difference between the ' earlier and later John Keble,' and, still further, whether those who, delighting in the Christian Year, yet believe that the subsequent understanding' of the doctrines mentioned was a retrograde, instead of an 'advanced' movement, are not justified in the protests they have made against being called upon to swallow down, on the strength of the well-deserved reputation Keble acquired from his one great work, all that he subsequently wrote? Your readers will judge. I am, Sir, yours faithfully,

Oxford: October 3, 1878.

MONTAGU BURROWS.

[This Correspondence is now absolutely closed.-Ed. C. Q. R.]

CORRECTION.

We have been requested by the Marchese Vitelleschi to state that it was he, and not the Cardinal Vitelleschi, as stated in our last Number, who wrote under the nom de plume of Pomponio Leto. He likewise requests us to add that the Cardinal was not aware of the existence of the book until some time after its publication, and communicated no materials for it.

LONDON: PRINTED BY

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE

AND PARLIAMENT STREET

THE

CHURCH QUARTERLY REVIEW.

NO XIV. JANUARY 1879.

ART. I. IS THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
PROTESTANT?

1. The Quarterly Review. No. 292. (London: October, 1878.) 2. Pastoral Letter to the Diocese of Rochester, from A. W.

THOROLD, D.D., Ninety-eighth Bishop. (London, 1878.) 3. The Coronation Service, according to the Use of the Church of England. Edited by JOHN FULLER RUSSELL, B.C.L., F.S.A. (London, 1875.)

THE sophistical trick commonly known as the 'ambiguous middle term' underlies all that stands for reasoning in an article in the Quarterly Review for October 1878, entitled 'Is the Church of England Protestant?' The evident intention of the writer is to write the history of the great' Anglican Church' in convenient oblivion of that historical continuity, in virtue of which, to use the words of the Low Church Ninety-eighth Bishop of Rochester,' though Reformed, she is Catholic, and dates her birth, not from Henry VIII., but from a pure mother in a far back time.' Contrariwise, with the Quarterly Reviewer, Henry VIII, and his New Learning are paraded as if they were all in all, and the legacy from the 'far back time' is contemptuously left matter of precarious favour and concession, revocable at pleasure, and just now more than desirable to be revoked. As a rule, this view, though not without adherents, has been confined, at any rate since the Restoration, to the less cultured members of the Evangelical party, who have been reared in a narrow groove of sectional tradition, and are fully persuaded that any doctrine or usage which happens to be unfamiliar to. VOL. VII.-NO. XIV,

T

themselves must necessarily contradict not only the Bible, but also the Prayer-Book, Articles, and Canons of the Church of England; while their own tenets and practices, on the other hand, are the accredited standard of loyal conformity. Such men are obviously sincere when claiming to be the only faithful members of the Church, for the statement is true in their sense, and its failure to square with the evidence is a circumstance which no more affects them than S. Paul's advice to Timothy to use a little wine for his stomach's sake touched the teetotal fanatic, who, rather than allow that Scripture can be against him, glossed the passage as referring only to external application.

But the Quarterly Reviewer exhibits no real sympathy with this school of religious belief, and does not attempt to reinstate it in the position which it occupied even so lately as fifty years ago. Had he so striven, it would be possible to respect the zeal which gave birth to the effort, however undesirable its success might be thought, and unfavourable to that success as all contemporary indications appear to be. Nothing of the sort, however, is to be discovered in his argument, which is of the purely negative and destructive kind, intended to pull down, so far as may be, the dykes built up during the last half century by High Church hands, and to let the salt and barren waters of negation surge back again over the fair regions, now fertile with golden corn, which have been reclaimed from them by the Catholic Revival.

The argument, such as it is, may be tersely, but not unfairly, summarised thus:—

The High Church school, actively in its most energetic section, and passively at least in its main body, maintains the tenability, within the Church of England, of certain doctrines, technically by thinkers, and invidiously by scoffers, termed Sacerdotalism; while, notably in respect of the Sacraments and the ministry, chief amongst these stand the tenets of Apostolical Succession and of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. Unless these tenets be the accepted doctrine of the English Church, the whole High Church position breaks down. But these tenets are not Protestant, whereas the Church of England is a Protestant body, and consequently has rejected them, and thereby annihilated the claims of the entire High Church school.'

There is the case, put together with just dexterity enough to satisfy the clients on whose behalf the brief has been drawn up, and with precisely the show of learning sufficient to impress them with admiration for their counsel's erudition.

There is, however, one cardinal omission throughout, which, were it indeed a legal prosecution which was being conducted, would necessarily result in a nonsuit. There is no attempt whatever to define the word Protestant itself, which is, of course, the keystone of the whole argument. Nor is this omission an oversight. It has been deliberately adopted in such a way as to mislead the ordinary reader, and to disguise the fact that the word has not merely several different significations in theology and literature generally, but that it is employed in more than one sense in the prosecuting article itself. We will endeavour to make good this omission, as briefly as may be.

There is, first of all, the only strict and exact historical use of the word, whereby it denotes those German princes, nobles, clergy, burghers and others who, on April 29, 1529, lodged their Protest against the condemnation of Luther by the Diet of Speyer, and appealed thence to a free General Council. So far as the word can be regarded as a 'trademark,' only these persons and their direct representatives by succession or affinity of doctrine have a clear right to its use. That circumstance restricts its most legitimate application to Lutheran Germany, with a possible extension to Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, but in strictness it excludes all other countries and communities. Nor is this a mere technical quibble, for as a fact the word 'Protestant' was used until quite recent times in Germany as distinct from Reformed 'a title confined to the Calvinist and Zuinglian societies; while even now it has undergone a further change of meaning, and while Evangelical' is the official designation of the new syncretist communion, made up of a fusion of Lutherans and Calvinists, and set up as the State Church in Prussia, the word 'Protestant' is now claimed as peculiarly their own by the propagandists of free thought, insomuch that when the Luther Monument was unveiled at Worms on June 25, 1868, all those of the speakers who explicitly described themselves as 'Protestants' seized the opportunity to assail the fundamental doctrines of Christianity itself. A little later, Professor Bluntschli of Heidelberg, President of the 'ProtestantenVerein,' speaking as an unwelcome guest at the Old Catholic Congress in Cologne on S. Matthew's Day, September 21, 1872, asserted that no agreement in dogma or worship is possible for mankind, not even amongst Protestants themselves, but only in moral and ethical life; and that 'every attempt to formulate the truth is merely relative, and cannot be absolute;' explaining that in making these statements he

themselves must necessarily contradict not only the Bible, but also the Prayer-Book, Articles, and Canons of the Church of England; while their own tenets and practices, on the other hand, are the accredited standard of loyal conformity. Such men are obviously sincere when claiming to be the only faithful members of the Church, for the statement is true in their sense, and its failure to square with the evidence is a circumstance which no more affects them than S. Paul's advice to Timothy to use a little wine for his stomach's sake touched the teetotal fanatic, who, rather than allow that Scripture can be against him, glossed the passage as referring only to external application.

But the Quarterly Reviewer exhibits no real sympathy with this school of religious belief, and does not attempt to reinstate it in the position which it occupied even so lately as fifty years ago. Had he so striven, it would be possible to respect the zeal which gave birth to the effort, however undesirable its success might be thought, and unfavourable to that success as all contemporary indications appear to be. Nothing of the sort, however, is to be discovered in his argument, which is of the purely negative and destructive kind, intended to pull down, so far as may be, the dykes built up during the last half century by High Church hands, and to let the salt and barren waters of negation surge back again over the fair regions, now fertile with golden corn, which have been reclaimed from them by the Catholic Revival.

The argument, such as it is, may be tersely, but not unfairly, summarised thus:

The High Church school, actively in its most energetic section, and passively at least in its main body, maintains the tenability, within the Church of England, of certain doctrines, technically by thinkers, and invidiously by scoffers, termed Sacerdotalism; while, notably in respect of the Sacraments and the ministry, chief amongst these stand the tenets of Apostolical Succession and of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. Unless these tenets be the accepted doctrine of the English Church, the whole High Church position breaks down. But these tenets are not Protestant, whereas the Church of England is a Protestant body, and consequently has rejected them, and thereby annihilated the claims of the entire High Church school.'

There is the case, put together with just dexterity enough to satisfy the clients on whose behalf the brief has been drawn up, and with precisely the show of learning sufficient to impress them with admiration for their counsel's erudition.