of their new faith, there may be some who do not sufficiently dread the danger of hurting or braving the national feeling-a feeling of which it is always so dangerous to make an enemy, and which is nowhere more powerful and more susceptible than in England.

all.

The glory of the Catholic Church-one of the conditions and of the consequences of her immortality-is to render herself always all to It is to lend herself with an indefatigable flexibility [mark the emphatic and antithetical expression-indefatigable flexibility!] to the instiiutions, the manners, the ideas of all countries and of all ages, in all that is not incompatible

with faith and Christian virtue. It is to allow all her children to have, as it were, a private residence to possess a peculiar patrimony of their own, in the midst of that incomparable Catholic Unity which does triumph over all, and survives to all only by its elasticity and its universality. "In my Father's house there are many mansions."'-p. 176.'

as

pause here for a moment to observe, a curiosity in this kind of concio ad clerum, that this Scriptural phrase and its peculiar application is borrowed from the Discours which the Protestant orator, M. Guizot, addressed to M. de Montalembert himself on the day of his Academical reception. As applied by M. Guizot, it was a serious, sincere, and conciliatory application of the comprehensive benevolence of the Gospel-but when reproduced by an uncompromising champion of the exclusive Unity of Popery, and who, in this very volume, as we shall see presently, denies that Protestantism is a religion at all, we can consider its introduction as no better than a sham

a specimen of that flexibility, that soft solder which the foregoing portion of the passage so jesuitically recommends. He proceeds

in the same strain :

England above all claims and deserves in this respect some special precautions; for we must recollect that it is not a heathen country. We cannot treat her as we do the isl nds of the South Sea, or the plains of Thibet. It is a Christian country, where Christianity, though mutilated and disfigured, and in rebellion against the ONLY legitimate ecclesiastical authority, still possesses an energy, a force, and a fecundity which is not to be despised. Moreover, it is a country which was Catholic for a thousand years three times longer than it has been Protestant.'-ib.

This last assertion is begging an important step in the question. The Anglican Church professes to be as Catholic in the sense of Christian-the only one in which the word can have any meaning for a Protestant-as ever she was; that is, she is of the church of Christ and not of Rome-not of 1000, but of 1850 years' date. Even if the author's chronology were to be strictly

adopted, he will hardly venture to deny explicitly that the last 300 years have had a vast intellectual superiority over the preceding ages of comparative barbarism and ignorance, though he very strongly maintains the paradox that all the improvements of modern civilization may be traced back to that obscure period, and strongly advises his friends the new Catholics that their easiest and ablest tactic' would be to direct all their efforts backwards to the past, for which Englishmen have a natural reverence. This is the source and explanation of all M. de Montalembert's enthusiasm for medieval arts, medieval tastes, medieval institutions, medieval happiness, and mediæval glory, which he strews with so lavish a hand over every page of all his works, and which means neither more nor less than to advocate the restoration of the medieval darkness and despotism of Popery as it brooded over benighted and barbarous Europe in the days of St. Thomas à Becket and Sainte Elizabeth of Hungary.

The téméraire auteur' proceeds to develop this theory by the boldest experiments on the chronological and historical memory of his readers.

'The most venerated institutions of England her best and purest glories, are connected with Catholicism. Trial by jury, the Parliament, the Universities, date from the time when England was the submissive daughter of the Holy See.'-ib.

This argument is, as we have just said, deceptive in its terms by the confusion of Catholicism and Christianity, but it is notoriously false in its facts; and we cannot

but wonder that a learned academician who professes to have studied the British constitution in Montesquieu, who prefaces his volumes with epigraphs from Tacitus, and assumes to have examined our social and political state from its earliest foundations, should not know that the essential principles of both Juries and Parliaments existed in Britain before Christianity, Even if we could assent to that illogical reasoning of post, ergo propter,' that M. de Montalembert is so fond of applying to his mediæval theories, we should like to arts, science, manners, and material and meet him in a discussion of the progress of arts, science, manners, and material and social improvements, which have taken place since the Reformation.

'It was Catholic barons,' continues M. de Montalembert, 'who got Magna Charta from King John.'-ib.

It is really somewhat more than bold to attribute to Popery any share in the con

cession of Magna Charta. The fact is notoriously the very reverse. King John,' says Hume, despatched a messenger to Rome to lay before the Pope the Great Charter which he had been compelled to sign, and to complain of the violence imposed upon him. The Pope (Innocent III.) was incensed at the temerity of the Barons, and issued a bull in which he annulled and vacated the whole charter, and denounced a general sentence of excommunication against every one who should persevere in such treasonable and iniquitous pretensions.' (Hume, ch. x.) The anathema of the Pope's bull is even stronger than Hume states it.*

'Except Queen Elizabeth, the only sovereigns of whom the people have kept the memory are Catholic kings-Alfred, Edward the Confessor, Richard Cœur de Lion, Edward III., Henry V. -P. 177.

Of this passage it might be enough to say, in two words, that what is not nonsense is misstatement; for all the kings prior to the Reformation were equally Catholics; and if the names of Alfred, Coeur de Lion, Edward III., and Henry V. be more familiar to us, it is assuredly not from any superior Catholicity, but from their respective triumphs over the Danes and Saracens and at Cressy, Poictiers, and Agincourt. It is not as Papists, but as patriots and heroes, that they are remembered. We know not where M. de Montalembert has consulted the people's memory, but, according to our experience, we should say that the Protestant Edward VI. is even now more popular than any of his name; that for one of the people who knows or cares anything about Edward the Confessor, there are thousands who still take an interest in both the Charleses, in William III. and in Queen Anne, not merely as being of more recent date, but because their reigns are illuminated by the very lights which were wanting to England in those Catholic times.

Still more fatal to our author's scheme of medieval optimism is his enumeration of the illustrious men that the grand mediaval era of Catholicism has produced. He felicitates the puseyite neo-Catholics of our time that

'their fervent devotion finds heaven peopled with English saints, from St. Wilfrid and St. Boniface to St. Thomas of Canterbury. All this is the patrimony-the treasures of the English Catholics.'-ib. p 178.

Now Wilfrid is a saint of 709; Boniface

the one we suppose meant-of 755; and Thomas à Becket of 1170-at best a scanty contribution to the peopling of heaven; but, small as it is, what has that 'pépinière' of saints, the Anglo-Romish Church, been doing ever since? For the For the many hundred years that she ruled the destinies of England, her enthusiastic advocate can produce no more edifying names to greet the advent of Newman & Co. than Wilfrid, Boniface, and Thomas à Becket, and, as if this was not sufficiently ridiculous, M. de Montalembert enhances and enlarges upon the same idea in another and still more absurd form. He laments that the genius, the activity of the Anglo-Saxon race should have been subtracted from the Catholic Church :

'What strength what help, the Roman Church would have found there! what an abundant harvest in the [Anglo-Saxon] race who gave to ecclesiastical liberty St. Anselm, St. Thomas, St. Edmund, the most valiant champions that the Church ever had-that race which now dedicates so many treasures of money and perseverance to the propagation of an and impotent Christianity!'-p. 170.

erroneous

One can hardly believe a writer to be serious who, in looking for instances of the benefits that England had derived from the Roman Catholic religion, and examples of what she might hope from its re-establishment, is obliged to go back to St. Edmund of the Heptarchy, A. D. 900, St. Anselm of Canterbury, 1109, and to St. Thomas à Becket, 1171. If these were indeed the most valiant champions the Church ever had, what has she been about for the five or six hundred years in which she was in the uncontrolled command of this energetic race? Is it not wonderful that a person of the most ordinary common sense should not see at once that the long ages of Papal domination were, even on the author's own showing, an intellectual blank, and that the vigour, energy, and triumph of the AngloSaxon spirit rose just as it escaped from the Papal despotism?

We have seen that M. de Montalembert, by way of tactic,' advises his neophytes to deal cautiously with English Christianity, which, though mutilated, disfigured, and in rebellion, is not to be despised.' We intimated some suspicion of the sincerity of this anodyne advice. We shall now corroborate that suspicion, by showing that he and his school boldly deny that Protestantism is any religion at all.

His early associate, Lamennais, in 1826, even while he still affected to be orthodox,

'There is not in Europe one single educated man who does not know that Protestantism is a

monstrous absurdity. But while they despise it as nonsense, they support it as a revolt.'-Melanges, 434.

M. de Montalembert, in his Intérêts Catholiques, had followed his leader :

What, not one ?-not a preacher, not a divine left in the whole Protestant world since Newman apostatised in England, and one Vinet died in Switzerland? We know something of Newman, and can pretty well appreciate what our Church has lost in him; but who is this wonderful Vinet whose eclipse has left all the Protestant pulpits of the two worlds without one soli

Which he proceeds to prove by such arguments as these:

In Germany the irreparable fall of Protestantism is notorious; and that Bible which Luther boasted of having discovered is now rejected as a tissue of impostures and fables.'-ib.

We regret at least as much as our author can do the numerous instances of scepticism that modern Germany has exhibited; but the laying the blame on Luther's translation, and calling it a tissue of impostures and fables, we can hardly take au sérieux, even from. the historian of Elizabeth of Hungary.

The Protestant Episcopal Church in England and America is, he proceeds to to show, at its last gasp:

'In America and in England life has departed from that fraction of Protestantism, that calling itself orthodox, has preserved a shadow of hierarchy, and has passed over to the Dissenters, to the avowed enemies not merely of all discipline but even revelation.'-ib. 72.

He is, indeed, so candid as to say,

'I know some Protestants whose [religious] illusions do not blind me to their personal virtues. I know that there may be found (çà et là une poignée) here and there a handful of just and pious men, in whom there is not wanting the goodwill to struggle against the consequences of their principle.'

We are by no means sure that we understand what the author means; but from the context we venture to guess that this simple handful of just and pious men to be found here and there in the Anglican Church struggling against their own conviction (a new exercise of justice and piety!)-are no other than the Puseyite fraction of our clergy who have not openly apostatised,

'whose efforts against the common enemy [Protestantism] would not be despised by the CHURCH, if anything could be hoped from a congregation of a thousand sects that pretends to be a church, but which has not produced one preacher or one theologian since the death of Vinet and conversion of Newman! No! no one can seriously

the singular candour with which M. de Montalembert allows that there had been in our times even that one single Protestant decently fit to expound a text? Vinet was a professor of Lausanne, who somehow got into disputes with the governing powers of his own-the established church of Switzerland, and chose, like our late Irving, to set up an opposition preaching of his own; and just because this wrong-headed and troublesome man made a schism in a Protestant community, and cast off his allegiance to a Protestant church, he is thus as it were canonised by M. de Montalembert.

The present work continues and expands the same- extraordinary admiration of all that is Popish, the same contemptuous depreciation of all that is Protestant, and does so with the most illogical pertinacity fesses to abstain from religious subjects. even in those very pages in which he proWe follow him with reluctance into that field, but he leaves us no option. We have no right, and quite as little desire, to question the private merits of the gentlemen who have recently seceded from us, or to derogate from the eulogy that M. de Montalembert pronounces on the integrity of their motives, and the greatness of their sacrifices. We grant it all; but we must at the same time enter our protest on behalf of the great body of the Anglican clergy against M. de Montalembert's in

sidious assertion that

such men as Manning, Newman, Faber, and Wilberforce were, even by the admission of those who have not followed their glorious example, the first of men-first for their virtue as well as for their talent, their science, and their eloquence.'-p. 166.

'Premiers d'entre tous.' Come! that is a little too much! However highly M. de Montalembert may think of these gentlemen-and we ourselves should be very unwilling to speak of them otherwise than with regret and respect he has certainly no justification for saying that all those who have not imitated them admit any such superiority in talents, science, and elo

Again, he attributes the animosity roused in the Protestant mind by the Popish aggression not to that, but to alarm at

'the unexpected progress of a faith supposed to be extinct, and above all at the numerous conversions which have, as it were, beheaded the Anglican clergy, by depriving it of its most eminent theologians and its most exemplary ministers.'-p. 147.

Without discussing the author's estimate of the individual men, we may be at least

allowed to smile at the Academician's me

taphor: a man, it seems, may be said to have been beheaded if he loses by disease or accident two or three fingers or toes. We believe that most unprejudiced persons will believe that if any of the parties to this discussion ont perdu la tête, it is, at least, not the Anglican clergy.

Of the consistency, and perhaps we might even say the sincerity, of M. de Montalembert's opinions, we find in this part of his volume a remarkable and not very favourable test. In the latter end of the year 1853, before he seems to have

assumed the mission of Catholicising England, he published, as we have just seen, in the Intérêts Catholiques, that Protestantism, at best no better than a simple negation was nowhere considered as a serious reality-and was in England absolutely DEAD. But in accordance with the new and handy tactics' which on reconsideration he has adopted and recommends to his neophytes, both by precept and practice, we find in the present work, published only three years later, this remarkable and diametrical contradiction of the former assertion:

To see in Protestantism, such as it is in the national Church of England, what it is in several other sects a negative religion-would be a gross error.'-p. 193.

That is the very error to which he had so recently pledged himself.

'The tempter now is wiser than before;' and he applies a layer of soft solder to amalgamate, if he can, his incoherent opinions; but his palinode is to our taste more offensive than even the original insult. The latter was untrue to a degree that was only ridiculous-the malicious candour of the new version seems to us less pardonable 'The religion of the English has, on the contrary, all the characteristics of a positive, sub

reignly illogical. A faith, sincere and even fervent, in the Divinity and in the merits of our Lord Jesus Christ, fills the souls of a number of laymen and of ministers of the Anglican Church. This is certainly not enough; what is it to believe in the Son of God without believing in the authority and the sacraments that He instituted? We must then pity the Anglicans to be contented with so insufficient and so illogical a solution of the problems propunded by conscience and by nature.'-lb.

Solution si peu logique des problèmes que posent la conscience et la nature.' We confess that we do not understand the meaning of these latter words, and we doubt whether they have any: but as to the rest of the passage, we confidently ask what is their illogical, unnatural, or unconin a God and Saviour, and in the sacred scionable in saying, ' We believe, like you, volume vouchsafed to us as our guide; but we find nothing in that volume about the Pope's infallible authority, or any other

sacraments than the two that we acknowledge-Baptism and the Lord's Supperwhich latter we receive in the same form and in the same words and the same sense in which our Saviour delivered it and the Apostles received it on the night of its

institution'?

rality arrive at a gracious admission that

At last the author's toleration and libe

we cannot deny the good faith of many, nor the deep and serious influence exercised over a great number of souls by the forms of worship and doctrine of Anglicanism.-Ib. 194.

We do not accept this compliment as gratefully as M. de Montalembert probably thinks we should-crumbs from so rich a table: that plusieurs' Anglicans are sincere, and that Anglicanism has an influence over un grand nombre,' is a truth undeniable, but it is, as truth so frequently becomes under Jesuitical manipulationpregnant with untruth-namely, that these cases, though rather numerous, are after all only exceptional. Within a few pages, however, this 'poignée' of good sort of people, swells into a vast number of studious, austere, pious, and charitable men,' to whom M. de Montalembert proceeds in many passages to deal out a measure of approbation and even praise of their morals, zeal, piety, and pastoral virtues, ever just, and we hope very sincere, but totally inconsistent with the greater part of his former statements, and we are sorry to be obliged to add that, even in these more agreeable passages, there always arises amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat, and forcibly reminds us of a tactician alternating be