the impulses of man's mind are ever uncertain, his capacity appears to have no confine in comprehension how like a God. He rules the elements-he applies a natural power to a rude machine, and the machine obeys his will; with such a vast power for good or for evil, with such agents at his command, shall he not be subject to some authority, even although such authority consist in little more than restrictive clauses?

The government, it is alleged, cannot now interfere; they cannot reclaim their abdicated power, or deny to the many what they have granted to the few. It was on this principle Dr. Dodd was hung, because other forgers had suffered before him. And so future generations are to risk their lives and sacrifice their comfort, because others have submitted to the same hazard, and suffered the same inconvenience. The argument is scarcely tenable. The virtue of parliamentary consistency is not always so delicate. On religious questions it has bowed to the rule of expediency; why not where railroads are concerned? The rights of property are too sacred. There is only one right of property, that is the parliamentary right to all property where the public interest is concerned. This, if not the principle, is at least the practice. If parliament can drive through a man's house for the benefit of a company, it can drive through an act of parliament for the benefit of the majority, even although that act secures to a company great and peculiar privileges.

But if our legislators have mistaken national wealth and bold undertakings for the happiness and moral welfare of the people; if they travel in the race of speculation, and prefer discussions on local interests to great general principles,-if we can pardon these errors on the part of men blinded by excess of capital, how can we account for their voluntarily resigning that general control and superintendence which the legislature ought to possess over all undertakings of an extensive and national character? At this moment railway companies are the sole representatives throughout the country of real practical authority. Their will is bye-law, and their bye-law beyond appeal; self-constituted authorities endowed with vast powers, and beyond the reach of responsibility. In what does the company consist? Pecuniary fines are the only punishments which can touch it, awards and damages can be levied upon it as upon an individual, but beyond this power the law is of no avail. The properties of a company are most mysterious, its privileges most undefined; the chairman may be seized as a Holocaust victim, but the chairman is not unfrequently the least active member of the board, or if he be endowed with Mr. Hudson's activity and ingenuity, he is chairman of so many boards at the same moment, that the inte

rests of some must be sacrificed; but the officer which is absolutely essential to the success of great operations is a responsible agent. We should be able to monstrare digito, Hic est. Оп each line some individual should be vested with full control over the officers employed under him, and he should, like a general in the field, be answerable for accidents arising from neglect and over confidence.

In the meanwhile every county is forming vast projects for the next parliamentary campaign; members having recruited their health on the Moors, and in preserves, will return with renewed vigour to committee rooms A, B, C, D, again, again, and oft again.

We shall be told that speculators are the glory of England, and railroad companies its most patriotic guardians. Counsel will plead-barristers pocket their fees; for this, if not the golden age, is at least for them the age of gold. And when this fair land has become one vast forum for brokers and usurers, and the fortunes of thousands shall have been swept away in some of those panics which are incident to all extensive gambling transactions; when the wild excitement which follows upon all great changes shall have passed away, and men learn that even railroads cannot cheapen bread, or bid sorrow be still, they will bitterly look back upon the conduct of a parliament which acted as the high priest at the sacrifice of the moral welfare of the country.

ART. IX.-An Act for the further Amendment of the Church Building Acts, 9 Vict. c. 74.

THE provisions in the Act before us, with which many of the clergy are not cognizant, are of high moment to them all, and there are few which are more likely to produce beneficial results. We claim for the conductors of this Review (in proof of which we need only refer to vol. iii. p. 495) the merit both of the suggestion and even of the technical arrangement of some of its clauses. The district clergy will ever find this Review devoted to the forcible exposition and extirpation of every evil that surrounds them from that partial legislation that never anticipates evils, and simply comes to enactments on them when too late to stop much mischief. The circumstances of the country have long since demanded an entire New Division of Parishes. This Act is one step forward in that direction. It clears up many dark involved points in the legal position of the district churches,

and defines with greater accuracy their functions. If we have to regret that the Government has not at once made those functions more intelligible to the community by giving their ministers the specific titles of the original incumbent, rector, vicar, or as the case may be, to which, applied to their local districts they were fully entitled, it has at least vested them with a power perfectly independent of the old parish. The next stage of legislation will be to do this, and probably the ensuing session will at once get rid of the equivocal terms incumbents, ministers, &c., and divide the whole ecclesiastical body of Presbyters into rectors, vicars, and stipendiary curates. Surely the men who have the whole spiritual charge are fully entitled to the exercise of the full spiritual authority. Dr. Hook has set a generous example of this feeling; we regret to find the examples few, if any, of those men prepared to carry it out in its full extent. We shall now review the Act. One of its first positions of general importance is the direct precept, that in every district chapelry, or consolidated chapelry, formed under this Act, or the Church Building Statutes, there shall annually be appointed churchwardens,-one to be chosen by the minister, the other by the inhabitants of the district. We trust that the district incumbents will perceive the immense importance of this feature of church completeness in their localities, and eagerly embrace it. Their churchwardens incur no liabilities; these it is the duty of those of the Mother Church still to discharge; they are solely appointed for the regulation of the services in their respective churches, but they have nothing to do with the sustentation of them, or with the expenses incident on divine service necessarily. The churchwardens of the Mother Church still remain liable for repairs, &c.

The next clause of great importance to the district incumbent we give at length :

"17. And be it enacted, anything in the herein-before recited Acts, or any of them to the contrary notwithstanding, That the Church of any district chapelry formed or to be hereafter formed under the provisions thereof, although such Church may not have been augmented by the governors of the Bounty of Queen Anne, and also any Church, now or hereafter to be augmented by any order of Her Majesty in council, ratifying any scheme of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for England, and with a district chapelry assigned thereto, shall be and is hereby declared to be a perpetual curacy and benefice, and the license thereto shall operate in the same manner as institution to any benefice, and the minister thereby nominated and licensed thereto, and his successors, shall not be a stipendiary curate, but shall be and be esteemed in law to be a perpetual curate, and body politic and corporate, with per

VOL. VI. NO. II.

E E

petual succession, and he and his successors may receive, take, and hold to himself and themselves all such lands, tithes, and rent charges as shall be granted unto or purchased for him or them by the said Ecclesiastical Commissioners for England, or otherwise, in the same manner as any other incumbent is by law entitled to do; and such perpetual curate shall thenceforth have, within and over the district chapelry so assigned, sole and exclusive cure of souls, and shall not be in anywise subject to the control or interference of the rector, vicar, or minister of the parish or place from which such district chapelry shall have been taken, any law or statute to the contrary notwithstanding, save and except as to any Easter dues and offerings which would not belong to the perpetual curate of such district chapelry if this Act had not been passed, and save and except also as to the fees, if any, reserved to the said incumbent on the assignment of such district chapelry which shall still continue to belong to, and shall be paid over to him by the perpetual curate of such district chapelry according to such reservation. Provided always, that nothing herein contained shall alter or affect the right of nomination or appointment belonging or hereafter to belong to any corporate body or person in respect to the Church of any such district chapelry."

This enactment was most important. We are familiar with a case in which the district incumbent had appointed two sermons for the erection of new churches in a parish of 120,000 souls, which regulation the rector took upon himself to negative, and actually prevented one of the preachers, though printed and advertised, from performing the service. This iron reign is over, and the district incumbent is now enabled to assume that independent position that is his due. He cannot be removed even were the Bishop to concur with the old incumbent-a most improbable circumstance, but not impossible-under the late Church Building Statutes. The ordinary now assumes the entire power, as it is fitting he should; and this can only operate to the disadvantage of the district incumbent, when, as in the case of the old incumbent, offending against the doctrine or discipline of the Established Church. It is scarcely necessary to say, that this enactment is as necessary as it is just. The clearing up the absurd notion of the district incumbent being a stipendiary curate, which position however, the old incumbents affected to throw upon the new, the doing away with the words superintendence and control, in the 59 Geo. III., on which they grounded this extravagant claim, cannot be too much commended. And as this Bill was brought in by the Government, we take it for granted that they will yet advance further as we have said, to a great final adjustment and total re-arrangement of parishes.

The next clause to which we have to direct public attention, and in which enactment we have interested ourselves for years,

and which we regard as second in importance to none in the Act, is one (we allude to the 22nd) by which the Vexata Quæstio of Church-rate, in many large parishes, may be effectively terminated. To take instances in London-St. Sepulchre, St. Andrew, Holborn, and other large parishes, have Church estates of great value, but which have been sadly misappropriated. These funds, under this section, they will be compelled to economise, and supply therefrom the district Churches as well as themselves. We remember in this first parish, that when there was occasion to rebuild the Church, though a Church estate existed applicable to that purpose, and totally inapplicable, legally speaking, for anything else, that the parishioners found themselves compelled to incur the outlay, which event, under judicious management, never could have happened. St. Andrew, Holborn, has a Church estate of upwards of 1,300l. per annum, with churchwardens' fees besides, which we will average at 1007. more; and yet with this immense income, the district churches, two in number-districts of 10,000 and 13,000 souls, embracing about two-thirds of the entire parish-have not enjoyed the means of carrying on divine service either in the necessaries of light or firing, or any possible method of payment for expenses incident on divine service-the Mother Church consuming literally the whole of this immense income, and suffering her children to starve. Nor, although the case was felt to be one of the direst hardship, could the old authorities be prevailed on to attempt anything for the desolate district churches. This occurred in a parish where the spiritual income is 1,334l. a year, by a return before us, and Church estates upwards, as we have shewn, of 1,3007. It was high time for the legislature to step in and remedy this. We insert the clause that does so :

"22. And be it enacted, That where Her Majesty's said Commissioners shall have already formed or shall hereafter form any distinct and separate parish, district parish, or district chapelry, under the provisions of the herein-before recited Acts, or any of them, or this Act, out of any parish or extra-parochial place, it shall be lawful for the Court of Chancery, anything in the herein-before recited Acts to the contrary notwithstanding, on a petition being presented to the said Court by any two persons resident in any such parish or extra-parochial place, such petition to be presented, heard, and determined according to the provisions of an Act passed in the fifty-second year of the reign of His late Majesty King George the Third, intituled An Act to provide a summary Remedy in cases of Abuses of Trusts created for Charitable Purposes, to apportion between the remaining part of such parish or place, and the distinct and separate parish, or district parish, or district chapelry, any charitable devises, bequests, or gifts which shall