an institution which wielded considerable political power on earth and claimed a more tremendous influence beyond the grave.

But this is to anticipate. At the time of which we are speaking the claims of Rome were but adolescent; their full significance was hardly perceived even in Rome; matters were in the stage at which the full drift of human actions was not understood, and at which resistance is more a matter of instinct than of judgment. At such times instinct is at a disadvantage, for it is difficult to justify it, even though the future should abundantly prove it to have been right. It is one of the pathetic truths of life that Wisdom cannot justify herself-she is only justified of her children.

This is just the point at which English and French ecclesiastical histories set up a signpost which shows the parting of the ways. The story of the Church in France is a story in which Ultramontane claims are more and more conceded, till at length the Church became the symbol of a force which was not only not national, but was viewed by the strongest part of the nation as antinational. This does not mean that the national spirit was silent or completely subservient to the influence of ambitious or dissolute monarchs. It has sometimes been thought that the Gallican liberties were flourished in the eyes of Europe as a token of the autocratic disposition of the monarch who said-'L'État! c'est moi.' But, as has been well said by the Rev. Arthur Galton,

'Gallicanism was not. an invention of Louis XIV or of Bossuet, a courtier's theology, designed to match the new absolutism, a theological decoration added to the splendours of Versailles. It is the embodiment and expression of that dislike, even among Churchmen, for those Ultramontane theories against which the French nation has always protested throughout the long course of its history.'

The Articles of 1682 were not novelties; they gave voice to the faith that every nation has a right to religious freedom, unembarrassed by foreign interference. They affirmed that the Bishop of Rome had no authority

* Galton, Church and State in France,' p. 9.

in temporal affairs; they declared the validity of the decrees of Constance, which the popes sought to set aside or to ignore; they claimed the constitutional rights of the Gallican Church against Papal interference; and they restated the ancient Catholic principle that Papal decisions need the confirmation of the Church's judgment. They were articles of national freedom, a declaration of war against the intrigues of the Jesuits; and in the view of many they were a counterblast against the decrees of the Council of Trent. However this may be, the decrees of Trent were not accepted in France, in spite of the underground efforts of the Cardinal de Lorraine. Court and Parliament refused them; and the Articles of 1682 were felt to be the restatement of the immemorial claim to Gallican liberties. Thus the claim of national right was maintained through the difficulties of the 16th and 17th centuries.

But France lost a great national force when the revocation of the Edict of Nantes denuded her of that great class in whom, perhaps more than any other, the national spirit is strong. Unfortunately, too, the way in which some French Protestants relied upon Geneva for their orders tended to weaken the national spirit. It is never well when the religious centre of gravity lies geographically outside national life. France suffered from a double Ultramontanism, the Ultramontanism of Rome and that of Geneva; and the religious life of the people lost its national character. The cleavage between Church and State became perilous, for it became a cleavage in which religious differences determined men's politics, and laws respecting religion were settled by political aims. There has been enough of this in England, but happily the cleavage of politics has not always followed that of religion, nor has a man's religious belief always directed his politics.

In England matters went differently. The spirit of England sometimes slept, when the exigencies of kings bartered English liberties, or when it was silenced by the foreign swords which restored them to despotic power. But, silent or sleeping, it was not dead; it held on to life till it was strong enough to assert itself and translate the freedom of its ideal into practical reality. In doing so, the people claimed their national life; they

would be rulers in their own house; they would determine their own religious rites and ceremonies, for such things were, as the Prayer Book hath it, 'in their own nature indifferent.' They determined them, therefore, after a fashion suited to national needs; but in prescribing them they condemned no other nation'; for they thought it convenient that every country should use such ceremonies as they shall think best to the setting forth of God's honour and glory.' In words like these we hear the voice of the national spirit, which claims its own freedom and recognises a similar right of freedom in other lands. Here speaks the true Christian spirit, which acknowledges diversities of administration as well as diversities of gift, and sees in them manifestations of that one and the selfsame spirit which divides. to every man and every nation severally as he will.

It was thus that the idea of national churches was recognised in England. It is an idea which, I understand, is abhorrent to a certain type of sectarians to-day. Men of this type dream of Catholicism as the path towards union; for union, in their minds, spells uniformity, and uniformity means surrender to Latinism. Not thus will the reunion of Christendom come; it can only come in the frank recognition of divergence, in the same acceptance of varieties, by which the vitality as well as the virility of worship can be preserved. The want in France to-day is the want of a Church which embodies Christian faith in a form natural to the French genius. The Gallican liberties were parted with at a price which robbed the Church of its national character. The restoration of such liberties by the wisdom and intelligence of the French people to-day would be a measure that would bring the spirit of religion and the spirit of patriotism into a noble alliance, and would prove a step along the true road to the reunion of Christendom. The way to world-federation is by the road of free nationality; and the way to Christian union in the world is by the recognition of national varieties in ecclesiastical life.

W. BOYD CARPENTER.

Art. 4.-BRITISH WRITERS ON THE UNITED STATES.

1. Travels in the United States, 1798-1802. Davis, 1803.

2. Odes and Epistles. By Thomas Moore, 1806.

By John

3. The Sketchbook. By Washington Irving, 1819–20.

4. Domestic Manners of the Americans. By Mrs Trollope, 1832.

5. The American Revolution in our School Text-books. By Charles Altschul. New York: Doran Co., 1917. 6. The American Oxonian. Vols I-IV, 1914-17. And other works.

IN 'The Sketchbook,' Washington Irving lamented a 'literary animosity daily growing up between England and America.' Writers in this country, he said, were 'instilling anger and resentment into the bosom of a youthful nation, to grow with its growth and to strengthen with its strength.' In a postscript to 'Bracebridge Hall' he returned to the theme. He quoted from the Quarterly Review' a 'generous text,' which he lamented 'that publication should so often forget':

"There is a sacred bond between us by blood and by language which no circumstances can break. Our literature must always be theirs; and, though their laws are no longer the same as ours, we have the same Bible, and we address one common Father in the same prayer. Nations are too ready to admit that they have natural enemies; why should they be less willing to believe that they have natural friends?'

Irving insisted that the people of the United States were not only the natural but also the conscious and willing friends of the people of Great Britain, but they had 'been rendered morbidly sensitive by the attacks made upon their country by the English press; and their occasional irritability on this subject has been misinterpreted into a settled and unnatural hostility.' The friendship of which Irving spoke was not much more than courtesy, for he was not 'so sanguine as to believe that the two nations are ever to be bound together by any romantic ties of feeling.'

Irving knew this country well. He had been recognised as the first great man of letters that the Republic had produced, and he had many British friends, among them Sir Walter Scott, to whom he had paid (for our pleasure and profit as well as his own) a well-recorded visit at Abbotsford. Of all Americans then living he was probably the most hopeful about the future relations of his country and ours. Other observers were less confident; and, in the year before the 'Sketchbook' was published, John Bristed, an Englishman who had become domiciled in the United States, assured us that Delenda est Carthago' was the motto of America with regard to Great Britain, and that the ocean would 'ere long have its waters deeply dyed with American and British blood.' Bristed's belief was the result, not of acute observation of conditions in America, but of an emotional zeal for his adopted country; and events have proved Irving to be the safer prophet. He himself contributed not a little to the realisation of better things than he dared to prophesy.

Irving's indignation at the treatment of his own country and people by some of the English writers of the early years of the 19th century was not without cause. Yet during the American war itself the tone of men of letters had been friendly to the Americans; and Wraxall scarcely exaggerated when he said, in his Memoirs, that, with the exception of Johnson and Gibbon, 'all the eminent or shining talents of the country were marshalled in support of the Colonies.' Johnson's defence of his position was so weak that Boswell dared to get the better of him in argument. He was rewarded, a little later in the conversation, by an unusually offensive remark, for which the great man apologised by admitting that it was a revenge for the American discussion, and that he had deferred it 'because, Sir, I had nothing ready. A man cannot strike till he has his weapons.' On another occasion, Johnson's ill-tempered vehemence against the Americans subjected him to a rebuke from Miss Seward, who certainly regarded herself as representing (and did, in this instance, represent) the literary opinion of the time: Sir, this is an instance that we are always most violent against those whom we have injured.' Gibbon's silent votes in the House of Commons for what