IN republishing works of acknowledged excellence and enduring interest, it is compliance with the custom of the age, and not the unseemly notion of enhancing by individual suffrage the reputation of accredited and distinguished writers, which leads to the accompaniment ... and sometimes it might be said, the incumbrance... of a Prefatory Address. Assuredly, the "Pastoral Care" of Bishop Burnet can need no commendation to the Anglican Church, by which it has been esteemed so long, and of which it has deserved so well; and (the task of editing the work having been entrusted by the Publishers to a gentleman every way competent*) I have no other object in the remarks which follow, * Frederick P. Pocock, Esq. of St. Peter's College, Cambridge. than to extend the usefulness of the work by doing for it the only thing which the Author himself could not do; i. e. by pointing out its special adaptation to the present circumstances of the Church, after an interval of nearly one hundred and thirty years.* The work treats, though in very unequal proportions, of the "Pastoral Care," or charge, under a twofold aspect; first, the mode of discharging its momentous duties, and then the way of assuming its awful responsibilities; the exercise, first, of clerical functions, and then (whether it be vested in ecclesiastics or in laymen) of the right of patronage. "Of presentations to benefices, indeed," the Bishop says, "I do not intend to treat, as it is a part of our law; I shall content myself with offering an historical account of the progress of it, with the sense that the Ancient Church had of it, together with such reflections as shall arise out of that." (p. 172.) But this he has done so well, as to make us regret that he has not done more, especially as the evils which he discerned and denounced as just beginning to take root in the Church, have now grown up and expanded into a mighty tree, whose noxious influences are felt to the extremity of the land, supplying the most specious palliatives to schism, and consti * The third edition, which received the Bishop's final revision and correction, was published in 1712, the 20th year of his episcopate, and the second before his death. The first edition appeared in 1692. tuting the most plausible of all arguments and apologies for dissent. I shall immediately be understood as referring to the abuse of the right of patronage, and to that unhallowed, though not illegal traffic, in spiritual cures, which goes far towards converting "the house of prayer" into a "den of thieves," and may be said, in every case, to "make my Father's house a house of merchandize." "At first," observes the Bishop, "the right of patronage was an appendant of the estate in which it was vested, and was not to be alienated but with it; and then there was still less danger of an ill nomination. But a new practice has risen among us, and for aught I have been able to learn, it is only among us, and is in no other nation or church whatsoever. How long it has been among us, I am not versed enough in our law books to be able to tell. And that is, the separating the advowson from the estate to which it was annexed, and the selling it, or a turn in it, as an estate by itself. This is so far allowed by our law, that no part of such a traffic comes within the statute of simony, unless when the benefice is open." (p. 180.) What the new practice of 1712 has become in the year 1840, must be obvious to the most superficial observer. In a late number of the "Ecclesiastical Gazette," (which is becoming, as it deserves to be, the organ of all information in which the Church is specially interested or concerned,) I have reckoned no fewer than nineteen advertisements either from persons who are desirous to purchase livings, or of livings which are offered for sale; sometimes the perpetual advowson, sometimes the next presentation, sometimes a "profitable exchange." And not less startling than the fact of spiritual cures being thus publicly hawked abroad as articles of merchandize, are the considerations offered by the vendor to obtain a preference for his wares; in one, "light and easy duty;" in another, "pleasant society and good neighbourhood;" in a third, the facility with which the dues are collected, or the "income arising wholly from land;" in a fourth, the power, through some legal trickery or evasion, of "holding the benefice in plurality;" and in a fifth perhaps "excellent fishing, superb sporting, or a pack of hounds kept in the neighbourhood." Well may every true son of the Church adopt for his own, though, alas! with aggravated and accumulated emphasis, the words of the good Bishop, "I wish with all my heart that these things were not too notorious, and that they did not lay stumbling blocks in men's way which may give advantage to the tribe of profane libertines to harden them in their prejudices, not only against the sacred functions, but all revealed religion." (p. 181.) "In the primitive Church, every thing in the way of practice to arrive at holy orders was equally condemned. When things were reduced into a methodical division, they reckoned a threefold simony; manus, of the hand, |