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to "the fellows who sought the Lord by the light of their own pistolshots." This was one of those sharp, sure glances, by which Sterling, a man of fine though not strong genius, saw occasionally into an important fact. The two main elements in the impulse which acted upon the Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were rigid, literal Biblicism, which shrank as from deadly sin from the adoption in Divine worship of any ceremony not expressly enjoined in Scripture, and intense hostility to that Papal authority which, during those centuries, put into operation all the enginery of diplomatic intrigue and military prowess to crush the Reformation. Neither of these momenta of old Puritanism has now any force in England. Not one Nonconformist in ten thousand has a conscientious objection to those ceremonies of the Church against which his fathers bore testimony to the death; and though Mr. Whalley has views as to the danger to which England is exposed from an invasion of Fenians headed by the Pope, most of us believe that the peril which threatens us from Rome is as shadowy as the fear that Philip II. will rise from the dead. Add that the Westbury decisions and the Act recently passed on clerical subscription have practically thrown the Church of England open to every form of theological belief which does not explicitly reject catholic doctrine; and it will become evident that the old grounds of English Nonconformity have been effectually cut from beneath the feet of modern Nonconformists. The great body of Independents have accordingly fallen back upon, or gone forward to, the position that the Church ought to receive no endowment from the State. On a belief in the sacred duty of kings not to endow religion, assisted by the natural love of Englishmen for anarchic self-assertion, English Nonconformity now, for the most part, takes its stand. The Wesleyan, laying stress upon the practical part of religion and elaborating his apparatus for the promotion of spiritual enthusiasm, has no temptation to antiState Churchism, and can look with respect upon an ecclesiastical establishment to the operations of which his own may be viewed as normally supplemental.

It must be confessed that these essays bear trace of haste both in thought and composition. Dr. Rigg is a hard-worked man, co-operating in all the schemes of his denomination, literary and religious, and prosecuting with extraordinary ardour and success the duties of a preacher and pastor. Under these circumstances we cannot be surprised if we occasionally miss that exact balancing of evidence, and that nice precision of thought, which are the only safeguards from popular and rhetorical fallacies. In one of the pieces, for example -an address or lecture delivered to the Young Men's Christian Association— we find Dr. Rigg indulging in somewhat vague and declamatory statements relating to the all-importance of Christianity in modern civilisation. To Christianity, by which Dr. Rigg must be supposed to mean the Christian Church, we are to impute everything of value that has been achieved in modern times. Christianity has abolished serfdom, blotted out the savage laws which disgraced all the statute-books of Europe, made law in most European lands common and equal for all of every class; she has humanised manners, put an end to judicial combats, abated, and in this country all but abolished, duelling, and, except in such unhappy Popish countries as Spain and Italy, done away with hereditary blood-feuds and revenges; she has mitigated the evils of war, and put a stop, in Western Europe at least, to mere wars of conquest or aggrandisement; she has induced the leading nations to make costly provision for the wants of the unemployed poor; has scattered over the land alms-houses, hospitals, and charitable institutions of every kind; she has in most countries

abolished, and everywhere greatly diminished the slave trade, and throughout a great part of the world has extinguished slavery itself." This is loose and unscientific. I should be the last to dispute Mr. Carlyle's position that Christianity is the life and soul of modern culture, or to deny that the Church, expressly so-called, has been justly classed by Guizot among the most important agencies in European civilisation. But it is unfair to deny that very much of which we are honourably proud in modern habit, sentiment, and general form of life and thought, is due to men who, in the eye of the Church, were vehemently heterodox or altogether infidel. Two hundred years ago no Christian Church or nation was tolerant; to-day most Christians are cordially and congenially tolerant; but whether the doctrine of toleration would have reached its place of universal acceptance among us, had it not been aided by Locke and Voltaire, is a question. Dr. Rigg carries to the credit of Christianity, also, everything that has been done by medical and sanitary science. In this there is some truth. The Christian law of unlimited faith in kindness has been the tap-root of the tree of life in the garden of the modern world. Even in men who declared against Christianity, its spirit has worked. But the Christianity which has been beyond the pale of any known Church or sect has assuredly contributed its share to modern civilisation, and if Dr. Rigg holds manfully to his theorem that everything in the progress of the world is due to Christianity, he must find a place in the temple for Voltaire and Diderot, Kant and Fichte, Goethe and Carlyle. Dr. Rigg's eloquent felicitation of the Christian young men of London on the end put to wars of conquest in Western Europe, has received a still more eloquent commentary in the ten days' campaign of Bismarck.

Another instance of slip-shod thinking occurs in Dr. Rigg's remarks upon a belief in miracles as connected with faith in a personal God. "If there be a personal God," he says, "miracles fall easily into place as a part of His manifestations, as in harmony with the highest law of His character and government." There is a sense in which this is, I think, correct. If you accept a miracle as a fact, your knowledge of God's existence and of His providential government of the world, as revealed in Scripture, may assist you in fitting it into its place in the scheme of things. But if it is your object to obtain evidence, sustainable in the court of scientific criticism, that a miracle is a fact— and if you admit, which you ought not to do, as bearing upon that evidence, any hypothesis of the Divine, then that of a personal, all-wise, omnipotent God will not only refuse to assist you, but will stand in your way more than any other. There is no reason in the world why an Atheist or Pantheist should not believe in a miracle as readily as in any other fact; but a Theist is bound to sift with reverent severity and strictness the evidence for so startling a phenomenon. Try it. A miracle is a deviation from, or suspension of, the order of sequence in the physical world. On the atheistic hypothesis the force carrying on the sequence in question is unintelligent, blind, dead, fortuitous. The faintest nexus of actual power connecting the phenomena of the universe is on this theory undiscoverable. The most aerial and evanescent thrill of purpose, the most delicate and untraceable pulse of intention,—would be the entrance of mind into the universe, and the atheistic theory would collapse in an instant. Work out the logic of Atheism, and it will tell you that you know exclusively the present and the past. Of the future you have no surmise. Atheism cannot promise. How can there be promise where there is no life, no thought, no consciousness, no will? Man's faith in

the constancy of nature on the atheistic hypothesis is, in strict scientific valuation, nothing more, and nothing else, than the animal faculty of habit which brings the dog to his hutch at the feeding hour. The dog knows no reason why his food should be appointed him, but he found it yesterday, and he instinctively trusts that he will find it to-day. The clown falls asleep on the crater of a volcano, secure in the knowledge that there has been no eruption in the last fifty years: but there is an eruption in the night, and his expectation, based on no reason, is disappointed. To pronounce upon the constancy of nature, in a dead and mindless universe, because sequence has been observed to take a certain order during the momentary glimpse of seventy years-the momentary glimpse in relation to the age of the universe of the few thousand years we can partially rescue from oblivion-is to practise the logic at which the old Greeks used to laugh, of buying a crow to see whether it will live two hundred years. The crow in our case has lived, say, a year; can we infer that it will live eternally? If not, the Atheist, knowing only the fact that nature has been constant for so long, cannot conclude therefrom that its constancy will be everlasting. Atheism, accordingly, can assign no grounds for believing that a miracle will not occur at any moment, or that the universe of the future will bear any resemblance to the universe of the past. The Pantheist, in the next place, sees in the universe a perpetually evolved, perpetually manifested God, and no cause can be shown why this evolution, impersonal and unconscious, should not run into the most capricious freaks of miracle and portent. But if we hold that the chains of physical sequence, stretching in million million links across the starry spaces, and drawing the fine infinitude of their reticulation through the grass at our feet, are but the golden reins by which, in mystic wave-like dance of modulated harmony, the chariot of the universe is guided by the living God,—and if every occurrence in the world of humanity has been foreseen and pre-arranged by Him,-it is startling to be told that a power has been exerted cutting the asbestos thread asunder, and cancelling for the time the mode chosen by the Most High for the exertion of his energy. That it should be one and the same Power which bloomed in the fig tree and which blasted the fig tree, does at first surprise us. Dr. Rigg would not attempt to escape the difficulty by setting the universe apart from God, and adopting the theory of a Demiurgus, first constructing the world-machine, and then sitting by to see it go. Such an hypothesis implies that God is less than the universe, not omnipresent, not omniscient, and is therefore essentially idolatrous. The argument against miracles à priori, on the theory of a personal God, has been fully argued out in Germany; and the sole, but quite satisfactory, answer to it is, that in investigating facts of whatever kind, those called natural or those called supernatural, we are to proceed upon the evidence appropriate to the case, and to have regard to no à priori theory whatever. Christ's miracles admit, I believe, of proof as valid as that of any scientific or historical facts, and all hypothesis on the subject is superfluous.

But I have lingered too long on the defects of these essays. They have many and substantial merits. A liberal and genial spirit pervades them, and they burn with a fine wholesome intensity of religious faith and feeling. The subjects are various, and the treatment is generally sound and forcible. On the Vocation and Training of the Clergy, and on the Origin, Causes, and Cure of Pauperism, Dr. Rigg's views are manly and sensible. His voice is for the higher culture of the clergy and their social elevation; and, in accordance with

all the better and bolder among modern economists, he lays great stress, in dealing with the problem of pauperism, on giving the working man a decent dwelling, his own if possible, and an interest in the land.

PETER BAYNE.

GREAT YARMOUTH AND LOWESTOFT; A HANDBOOK FOR VISITORS AND RESIDENTS. With Chapters on the Archæology, Natural History, &c., of the District; a History with Statistics of the East Coast Herring Fishery; and an Etymological and Comparative Glossary of the Dialect of East Anglia. By JOHN GREAVES NALL. Longmans. 1866.

THE good fame of Yarmouth has been severely damaged of late, but the taint of political impurity is chronic, and of old standing. In 1834, on the return of Mr. Thomas Baring and that brilliant verse-maker Winthrop Mackworth Praed, the committee appointed to investigate the petition against their return stated that it was the custom, whether the candidate lost or won, to give every voter who applied for it the sum of two guineas. In 1848, an Act was passed depriving the freemen of Yarmouth of their votes, on the ground of corruption; and in 1853 the town is described, in Dod's Electoral Facts," as

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an open borough, in which money is said to be the best friend." In this respect the town has a foul name, and seems likely to retain it. But, notwithstanding its degradation as a borough, Yarmouth is a place of renown. It has been painted by Turner, sung of by Crabbe, described with curious felicity by Ruskin. It boasts, with the exception of Seville, the finest quay in Europe, a magnificent haven, and the largest parish church in England. It is the head-quarters of one of our most famous fisheries, and is also a fashionable watering-place, with balls, assembly rooms, circulating libraries, and a race-course. It is said to be the healthiest town in the country, and is one of the liveliest towns upon the coast; with a fine beach, good sands, a jetty (beloved of artists and famous upon canvas); river, lake, and ocean for bathing and boating, pleasant roads for driving, and many other attractions which the tourist will duly appreciate.

Lowestoft also, with fine sands and esplanade, cheerful scenery, and a salubrious climate, has much to recommend it; and a good Handbook of these fashionable resorts, which as yet have been unvisited by "Murray," is a desideratum.

Mr. Nall's volume has great merits, but it has also defects which are likely to obscure them. It bears the marks of untiring industry and research, of much reading and careful investigation. The author states that he has been engaged upon it for a long time, and his work confirms his statement. But in his anxiety that nothing should be omitted, too much has been attempted. The book is ill adapted for the ordinary tourist. It consists of more than 700 closely-printed pages, of which about 150 are devoted to the Herring Fishery, and more than 250 to the dialect and provincialisms of East Anglia. On these subjects Mr. Nall writes copiously and well, and the information he has so skilfully collected will always be of value. But, unfortunately, it is not of value in a guide-book, and, being out of place, will be unappreciated. Mr. Nall himself seems to have had some fear of taxing too severely the patience of his public, for he informs us in the introduction that two editions of the volume have been prepared, the cheaper and more condensed being for visitors, and the enlarged edition, with plates, for the resident inhabitants. This idea, however, was afterwards abandoned, or has not yet been carried out. JOHN DENNIS.

THE

FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW.

No. XXXVI.-NOVEMBER 1, 1866.

ELIZABETH AND HER ENGLAND.

It is scarcely possible to imagine a stronger contrast than that between the spirit of Mr. Froude's history' and the spirit of the age of which he is the historian. We scarcely realise how great is the advance of knowledge, the change in our methods of investigation and canons of criticism, and the total alteration in the habits, and judgments, and ideals of the English people since the Tudor period, until some such history as Mr. Froude's brings us face to face with that past which seems so completely to have vanished away. Natural philosophy has a region of its own, and is not compelled even so much as to recognise those earlier efforts, which in comparison with modern discoveries and achievements are scarcely worth remembering. Even metaphysics are so separated from other departments of study, that it is thought possible to teach the philosophy of substance and attribute, without so much as an indirect censure or approval of the doctrine of transubstantiation. To the astronomer or the chemist all religions are of equal importance, or equally of no importance; and the very origin of species is discussed without an allusion to the Mosaic cosmogony. But the historian of the England of Elizabeth finds himself among men to whom theological dogmas and ecclesiastical systems seemed to be the only things worth regarding. It was not asked whether men were good or bad, true or treacherous; it was only beginning to be asked whether foreign alliances and domestic laws were or were not for the good of the nation; but the question which was always asked concerning every individual and every policy was this: How is it related to religion-to the old creed of the Roman Church, or the reformed doctrines of Christ's Gospel? The unmistakable (1) HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE FALL OF WOLSEY TO THE DEATH OF ELIZABETH. By J. A. FROUDE, M.A. Vols. ix. and x. London: Longmans. 1866.

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