errors and some superfluities, is rather more than any man, who has not become recreant and apostate from his baptism, will, I believe, choose to affirm. The countenance given from a spirit of controversy to that negative religion may, by degrees, encourage light and unthinking people to a total indifference to everything positive in matters of doctrine; and in the end, of practice too. If continued, it would play the game of that sort of active, proselytising, and persecuting atheism, which is the disgrace and calamity of our time.'

These weighty sentences, applicable word for word in the present day, are part of a letter written from Beaconsfield, on January 3, 1792, to Sir Hercules Langrishe, by Edmund Burke.

Another shrewd thinker of a much more recent date—and he one whose reputation partly depends on his political and literary opposition to Romanism has delivered himself as follows:

'It is not with anything like a wish to carp at words that I avow my ignorance of what is meant by the phrase "the Protestant Faith." "Protestant" and "Faith" are terms which do not seem to me to accord together; the object of "Faith" is Divine Truth; the object of "Protestant " is human error. How, therefore, can one be an

attribute of the other?'

So wrote a divine who was at one time in honour with the Quarterly Review-Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, in his Pastoral Letter of 1851, p. 65.

We need not pursue this branch of the subject any further at present, but will approach the consideration of the evidence tendered in proof of the Reviewer's thesis. We will not follow the same order, because our object is to remove misapprehensions, whereas his course has been to create or revive prejudice and alarm, and the curiously involved order of his various pleas has the effect of confusing untrained readers.

First, then, let us take the foreign policy of Elizabeth and her Ministers, acquiesced in more or less by all her successors, with the single exception of James II., down to the present day; according to which the weight of English influence has been consistently thrown into the Protestant scale in all those European international disputes which had religious controversy as their avowed or secret origin. The fact is so, in the main, but it has absolutely no bearing on the question in hand, which concerns the Church and ecclesiastical polity of England, not the State with its civil and military policy. What is wanted is some proof that formal intercommunion, as distinguished from informal tokens of good will, existed between the Anglican Church and the various Reformed

bodies on the Continent; what is actually tendered is proof of the military support given by Elizabeth, on political grounds, to the insurgents against England's then most formidable enemy, the King of Spain. It was clearly her interest to give him so much to do in his own dominions as would weaken his power for aggression here; and, indeed, the Reviewer's reference to the Armada is a little unhappy, because it reminds all students of history that the Lord High Admiral who commanded the victorious English fleet was Charles Lord Howard of Effingham, a Roman Catholic peer, who, like his co-religionists then in this country, had no mind to accept a foreign despot as his master on any ground of similarity of creed. We have a modern illustration at hand which serves to expose the hollowness of such an argument. Russia has occupied for some thirty years past, in the minds of a powerful section of English publicists and writers, the same position as Spain did three centuries ago, and it has been thought necessary to cripple her power of menacing either the Mediterranean or the Indian interests of England. This feeling led to our offensive and defensive alliance with Turkey five-and-twenty years ago, and has seemed likely to bring on another at any moment for a twelvemonth past. In the Crimean war, England posed as the helper of a Mohammedan Power against a Christian one, and with the undoubted effect of keeping various other Christian populations, eager for liberty, under the Mohammedan yoke. At that date, too, a leading Evangelical nobleman, speaking for his party, lauded the Sultan as a truer friend to the Gospel than the Czar, and gave the impression, by his language, that Islam was, in his mind, superior as a religion to Oriental Christianity. Within the last few months, one of the arguments adduced by the war-zealots in this country, and notably by the Pall Mall Gazette, as a reason for siding against Russia, was that if Turkey should be crushed in the struggle, then the toleration accorded (for the purpose of sowing division) by the Porte to the Protestant missionaries who proselytise from native Christianity, but scarcely even pretend to meddle with the Mohammedans, might in all probability be withdrawn by Russia, which would give a monopoly to the Church of Constantinople; and that on this ground no effort should be spared to keep Islam in the ascendent. What is more, no reasonable doubt exists that a large measure of the exaggerated sympathy expressed for Turkey by certain journals was and is due to the fact that she is an anti-Christian Power, and that Russia, whatever the quality of her religion may be,

is at any rate Christian of some sort. Nothing would be easier than to twist all these circumstances into an assertion that the sympathies of England were with Islam as against Christianity, and to translate this assertion into one making the same allegations in respect of the English Church. But what would it be worth when made? No more than an argument based on the alliance of England with a Roman Catholic Power like Austria against the atheistic propaganda of Revolutionary France just after the Terror, or the notorious fact that one of the chief parties to the coalition of the Treaty of Augsburg, whose most notable result was to place William of Orange on the English throne, was Pope Innocent XI., who secretly abetted the Revolution of 1688 as tending to weaken his great enemy, Louis XIV., by transferring one of the most powerful thrones of Europe from a prince who was almost a French vassal to France's most irreconcilable foe. And if we look forward into the future, there is, to say the very least, no impossibility of a coalition between England and the Roman Catholic Powers of France, Austria, and Belgium against the German Empire, the chief Protestant Power in the world, not by way of theological sympathy, but to resist military aggression.

The next argument to be considered is that deduced from the Coronation Oath as administered to Queen Victoria, which is worded as follows in the one relevant clause :

'Will you, to the utmost of your power, maintain the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel, and the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? And will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the United Church of England and Ireland, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established within England and Ireland, and the territories thereunto belonging? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England and Ireland, and to the Churches there committed to their charges, all such rights and privileges as by law do or shall appertain to them, or any of them?'

This Coronation Service, it is to be noted, is the only document or formulary of the Church of England in which the word 'Protestant' is discoverable,-excluded as that word is, with rigid punctiliousness, from Prayer-Book, Articles, Homilies, and Canons, albeit its use as a theological and controversial term dates back twenty years earlier than the first Prayer-Book of Edward VI., and one hundred and thirtythree years before the last revision and settlement under Charles II., so that its marked omission cannot be other than deliberate and purposeful. Hence the stress laid on the oath

by our Reviewer, and indeed by every one who casts about for some way to establish the Protestantism of the Church of England. Let us see, however, what must be taken along with the coveted word, if the Coronation Service is to be set up as a standard of appeal, and how far the accompanying matter helps the plea. (1.) The first rubric directs the use of the ampulla, with its oil and spoon, for the anointing, thereby retaining certain ornaments of the second year of King Edward VI. other than those allowed by the Judicial Committee of Privy Council in the suits Hebbert v. Purchas and Ridsdale v. Clifton. (2.) The Queen is directed to make 'her humble adoration' before (3) the Altar—a word restricted, like 'Protestant,' to this one Anglican formulary, and vehemently disowned by those who make their boast of the favourite adjective. (4.) The word 'Oblation' is used in a sense which emphasises its employment in the Church Militant Prayer, and makes it difficult to regard it as a mere equivalent for the immediately preceding word 'Alms.' (5.) There are certain rubrics which, construed together, demonstrate that the 'north side of the Holy Table' is not the north end, but the northern part of the west side. (6.) The Anointing takes place in the form of a Cross, and (7) with oil to which the adjective Holy' is conjoined, implying its previous consecration. (8.) The ring is bestowed with the words 'Receive this ring, the ensign of kingly dignity, and of defence of the Catholic Faith'-not of the Protestant Religion.' (9.) The sceptre with the Cross is borne processionally at various times in the course of the Office. (10.) When the Queen offered the bread and wine for the Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury, receiving them at her hands, said the following prayer: Bless, O Lord, we beseech Thee, these Thy gifts, and sanctify them unto this holy use, that by them we may be made partakers of the Body and Blood of Thine only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, and fed unto everlasting life,' &c.—words which are stronger in doctrinal purport than the language of the existing Prayer-Book, and are almost virtually identical with the expressions of the Scottish Office, always loudly denounced by English Puritans; to wit, 'Vouchsafe so to bless and sanctify with Thy Word and Holy Spirit these Thy gifts and creatures of bread and wine, that they may be unto us the Body and Blood of Thy most dearlybeloved Son, and so that we, receiving them according to Thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ's holy institution, in remembrance of His death and passion, may be partakers of the same His most precious Body and Blood.'

So much for what the Office involves. Let us see next what can be extracted from the Oath by way of consolation for all this sacerdotalism and ritualism: No general acceptance of an abstract Protestantism, but only of the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law,' further qualified in words which the Quarterly Reviewer has carefully omitted to quote, as the settlement of the United Church of England and Ireland, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof.' On this let us hear Edmund Burke's comment in the same letter to Langrishe already cited :

'The Oath as effectually prevents the king from doing anything to the prejudice of the Church in favour of sectaries, Jews, Mahometans, or plain avowed infidels, as if he should do the same thing in favour of the Catholics. You will see that it is the same Protestant Church, so described, that the king is to maintain and communicate with, according to the Act of Settlement of the 12th and 13th of William III. The Act of the 5th of Anne, made in prospect of the Union, is entitled "An Act for securing the Church of England as by law established." It meant to guard the Church implicitly against any other mode of Protestant religion which might creep in by means of the Union. It proves beyond doubt, that the legislature did not mean to guard the Church in one part only, and to leave it defenceless and exposed upon every other.'

Here, then, comes in another very weighty fact, that although the Sovereign is crowned as monarch of the United Kingdom, of course including Scotland, which has a Presbyterian Establishment of its own, that Establishment is not recognised in the Coronation Oath as a Church, nor does the Sovereign enter into any personal pledge for its defence and maintenance, although there have been six coronations since the Act of Union in 1707, and seven since the legislative overthrow of the Church of Scotland in 1690. This fact has an important bearing on the argument drawn from the mention of the Church of Scotland' in the Bidding Prayer of Canon LV. of 1604, when Scotland was Presbyterian. Chancellor Harington proved, more than a quarter of a century ago, that the word 'Scotland' was inserted in 1604 in view of the then impending revival of Episcopacy, but, even apart from that fact, the omission of the word in the Oath now is highly significant.

But even if all these facts were otherwise, only very cold comfort could be got out of the Coronation Oath as implicating and conditioning the Church of England, for this very sufficient reason—that the last 'settlement' of the 'doctrine, worship, discipline, and government of the Church of England' was that made at the Restoration, and confirmed by