The attempted fusion of the two denominations into one was baffled by personal and theological controversies that arose soon afterwards, and not by any incompatibility in respect to church government. The so-called Presbyterian churches in England at that time were mutually independent; and the "Heads of Agreement" hardly differ from the Cambridge Platform except as it is less argumentative and theoretical, more compendious in its statement of principles, and generally more felicitous in expression. No good reason can be discovered for the failure of the attempt. Had the fusion of the two denominations in one confederation of churches been effected in accordance with the Heads of Agreement, the Free Churches of England would have been, from the date of the Toleration Act, a more powerful element in the religious life of the nation than they have ever been till within the last forty years.

The existence of Non-conforming churches in England, since the Toleration Act, as well as before, has been a contiuued conflict with the spirit of oppression. While they have been free in the sense of being constituted as voluntary associations, their freedom in relation to the civil power has been only a limited “toleration ”—the very word implying that they existed not because they had a right to exist, but only by concession from a power which had a right to prohibit their existence. In order to understand the legal status of dissenters from the doctrine or ritual of the ecclesiastical establishment in England, at the date at which the old Puritanism was compelled to identify itself with Separation, and till the reign of George IV., it is necessary to recollect the gist and extent of the memorable Toleration Act which was all that William the Deliverer could obtain from his Parliament, by way of concession to Protestant Dissenters. That act does not acknowledge at all the right of an Englishman to hold any opinion or to worship in any way different from the opinions and the worship established by Queen Elizabeth and reëstablished under Charles II. It grounds itself not on any consideration of justice, but only on the consideration of political expediency: "Forasmuch as some ease to scrupulous consciences, in the exercise of religion, may be an effectual means to unite their Majesties' Protestant

subjects in interest and affection." In view of that consideration the legislative power of England enacted that persons dissenting from the Church of England might be exempted from the operation of existing laws against separate assemblies for worship and against absence from the parish churches, on condition of their making certain oaths and declarations supposed to be necessary for the security of the kingdom and of the established religion; but with a proviso that no meeting of dissenters held "with the doors locked, barred, or bolted," and no person present in such a meeting should have the benefit of the exemption. Dissenting ministers were required to subscribe the thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England except three and a part of a fourth-an additional exception being made in favor of Antipedobaptists. A special provision was also made for "certain other persons" (Quakers), who, instead of the oath, were to make a solemn affirmation, and, instead of the Articles, were to subscribe a profession of their belief in the Divine Trinity. But no assembly of Dissenters could have the offered toleration unless it should be held in a place previously certified and registered as a place of worship. Assemblies of registered Dissenters, with registered ministers, in registered houses, were to be protected from disturbance and insult. Such was the Toleration Act under which dissent from the Church of England began to be, under the laws of England, not quite a crime.

To trace the limits of the religious liberty conceded by that memorable Act, we must remember what it did not concede. First, the Act itself provided explicitly that no Dissenter should be exempted from the payment of tithes and other dues for the support of the established worship. Secondly, by the Corporation Act, made in the height of the reaction under Charles II., they were excluded from office in every municipal corporation; a participation in the Lord's Supper, according to the established ritual, as well as a profession under oath that it is unlawful, on any pretence whatever, to take arms against the king, being exacted of all persons elected to such offices. Thirdly, the Test Act, though it was made chiefly for the purpose of preventing Charles II. and his brother James II., then heir presumptive to the crown, from filling all offices of trust

and honor with Roman Catholics, was so framed as to be equally effective for the exclusion of dissenting Protestants from every office, civil or military; the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, received in some parish church, on some Lord's day, immediately after divine service and sermon, being made, as in the Corporation Act, a test or condition. No exemption from the demands or the penalties of that act was provided by the Act of Toleration. In the intendment of English law, a dissenter from the established Church, be he ever so able and upright, was unworthy to serve his country in any public employment-unworthy to sit in Parliament or on the bench of any court-unworthy to hold a commission in the army or navy-unworthy to be a custom-house officer or an exciseman-unwor hy to hold the meanest office for which the most worthless man might qualify himself by profanely receiving the sacramental bread and cup from the hands of an Anglican priest. Fourthly, by similar tests, all dissenters were excluded from the national universities-not only from fellowships and offices of government or instruction, not only from degrees, but even from matriculation. In all these respects, dissenters, of every Protestant name, were still to be not outlaws indeed, but legally outcasts from English society. In the view of English law and statemanship they were a dangerous class that must be tolerated for reasons of political expediency, but could not be trusted; and that was therefore to be kept under, stigmatized, circumscribed with legal disabilities, and shut out from opportunities and means of liberal culture. So lately as twenty years ago, when the most offensive legal disabilities had been taken off, the overbearing appeal of English society towards dissenters was such that an American in England, to whom an English friend was repeating the complaint, then so common there, of the treatment to which free negroes were subjected in our free States, replied, "Yes; it is a shame to our country that colored people in the free States are almost as badly treated as Dissenters are in England."

It is now a little more than two hundred years since the expulsion of the old Puritanism from the established Church of England; a little less than two hundred years since separation from the national establishment to worship God in free asso

ciations of Christian believers ceased to be a crime by the laws of England, and began to be tolerated as an evil which could not be forcibly suppressed. The volume which we are commending exhibits the progress of religion and of religious liberty in those two centuries of English history. After an introductory chapter, reviewing summarily the conflicts and sufferings of Non-conformity from the Reformation to the Revolution, Mr. Skeats narrates the story of the Free Churches, including under that name Baptists and Quakers as well as Presbyterians and Independents. Of course the relation of those bodies to the civil government-the disabilities which were the penalty even of tolerated dissent from the Established Church-the harsher penalties which were sometimes ordained by acts of legislation-the methods of evasion, of protest, of passive resistance, or of petition and public agitation, which were from time to time employed-the steady malignity of Toryism, never yielding but by compulsion to the progress of ideas, and always ready to persecute when it had power-the slow concessions made to the discovery that Free Churches were a fixed fact, as intractable, at least, as any other fact of the British constitution, and were not to be got rid of without the total loss of English liberty-the growth of a more tolerant spirit, first spreading among the people, and at last registering itself in acts of Parliament-are a large portion of the history. But other topics are by no means neglected. The decay of spiritual religion; the coming in of religious indifference, polite but undisguised contempt for Christianity; the dead Orthodoxy and dead Unitarianism of the eighteenth century; the efforts of Dissenters (shamefully excluded from the universities) to provide for themselves (though under the ban of the law) such means of learning and intellectual discipline as were essential to their progress; the contributions of Dissenters to the theological and religious literature of the English language; their sympathy and activity in the religious awakening of England under Whitfield and the Wesleys; and their participation in the nineteenth century work of Christian propagandism, and of universal philanthropy prompted by Christian thought, are duly recorded.

ARTICLE V.-YALE COLLEGE-SOME THOUGHTS
RESPECTING ITS FUTURE.

THERE is a somewhat general feeling, we believe, among those who are most deeply interested in Yale College, that the institution is about entering on a new era of its existence. The work of the last seventy years, it is felt, has been a good and a great one, but it is mainly accomplished. Like that of the first century of the College history, and like that of every epoch in the progress of every growing institution, it has laid the foundation for what is larger and higher than itself-not higher, indeed, in the nobleness of the working, but in that the working is nearer to the final and full completion of the plan. The past now is to open itself toward and into the future, and a great step forward is to be or ought to be taken. Indications of this are seen on every side. The suggestions which are presented by those who think earnestly upon the subject of education; the criticisms of the College which, for some reason or other, have been so frequent of late and which, we regret to say, have not been always made either in a wise or a generous spirit; the proposition to change the governing board of the institution by the introduction of new members from the alumni; and the sentiments and aspirations of the instructors within the College walls, all alike bear witness that the coming years are looked upon as containing within themselves possibilities and hopes, which as yet have been unrealized. What are to be the characteristic features of the new era, and what its peculiar and distinctive work, are, therefore, questions of much importance, at the present time, and worthy of serious consideration. Our object in this Article is to present some thoughts as a partial answer to these questions.

The first and most important work to be done in the years immediately before us is, as we believe, a work of unification. Yale College, like most of the older American Colleges, began as a sort of high school. It carried forward the education of the young men who came to it beyond the point which they