the Pope, at the instigation of the Jesuits, was prompted to make a bold bid to recover all his old authority temporal and spiritual and to set up a territorial episcopate in England parceling the country out into sees. Even here, the Roman Curia seems to have scrupled to set up a titular Bishop of the Roman obedience side by side with one of the Anglican, so making confusion more confounded. Instead of this, it set up an Archbishop of Westminster, while Nottingham, Liverpool and other towns which were not cathedral cities were selected as the seats of the new sees. Notwithstanding this concession to British prejudice, this act of the Pope was regarded by the dregs of the old Protestant ascendancy party as an act of Papal Aggression.

It was a blow aimed not solely at Protestantism, which generally has been able to take good care of itself: it was an attack on the Royal Supremacy, and here the agitation took shape and the alarm grew into a panic. Left to itself, the religious section of the community would have blown off steam in Exeter Hall, -manifestos with eloquent No Popery speeches from "pulpit drum ecclesiastics" of the Macneill and Cumming order. But when lawyers and politicians who ought to have known better, joined the cry, and when constitutional pedants gravely shook their heads as if the Act of Supremacy of such precious defenders of the faith as the eighth Henry or the second Charles were impugned, we can almost excuse the religious world for taking alarm. The men of light and leading had joined in the cry of "the church in danger," and this, as all history attests, is one of those cries to which there is no answer in argument. The populace which has been worked up to this state of mind is "an infant crying in the night, an infant crying for the light, and with no language but a cry."

It is here that men of sense had not long to wait to see the absurdity of this alarm when the panic had abated. The fool is always wise after the event, but there were some who saw from the first the absurdity of the cry and said out what they thought. Archbishop Whately, for instance, ridiculed these No Popery fools much in the vein that Sydney Smith castigated the opponents of the Catholic claims of his day. One of Whately's illustrations in the "Cautions for the Times," a series of papers on popular religious errors of the day, was this:

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He asked the bawling protester against the Papal Aggression to suppose the case of a hearse and pair driven up to his door, ordered, of course, by mistake, or on purpose to play on him a

practical joke. After the first surprise was over, would he not send the undertaker and his men, hearse, horses and all, posting home with a reprimand, and never for an instant suppose he was going to die because some one was good enough to order his funeral car? In this way the Archbishop tried to cover with ridicule these foolish people who supposed that Protestantism was in extremis because the Pope, and his officials, reasoning from their wishes, decided that it must be so.

Men of sense do not succumb in this way to a practical joke. That must be a sickly type of Protestantism which made the mumblings of Giant Pope at his cavern mouth a serious menace to men of the true Pilgrim spirit. Nor was it so: but there are states of body when fear of dying is of the essence of the disease itself. A leading London physician once remarked that of all the mysterious processes of the mind he thought that fear and faith exerted the greatest influence on the body. Fear predisposed to disease, while the simple exercise of faith had been known to produce wonderful and well-authenticated cures and recovery.

A religious panic, then, is a symptom of something unhealthy in the social system. It is a sign that churches lapped in privilege are asleep. They are dying away under state support, which is a pillow but no prop in a real crisis. The danger is that the privileged section of the church soon spreads its idle alarm to the unprivileged, as was seen in 1851. Some dissenters, though not the most intelligent of their class, joined at first with churchmen in an Exeter-Hall No Popery scare, which they were not long in seeing the folly of.

This No Popery panic of 1851 was as short-lived as most panics are. It was soon seen through. Lord John Russell, who was most responsible for it, as the chief panic-monger, when it had served his ends, returned to the principles of civil and religious liberty of which he was only the hereditary champion, and the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, which had been rushed through Parliament, became a dead letter almost from the time of its being enrolled on the Statute Book. But the second panic we have to speak of as having lived down or lived through, has run a longer time and even still is not yet quite dead. The Ritualist Controversy may be described as the after-wave following on the great tidal wave of the Oxford movement. The story of the Tracts for the Times and the Reaction of 1833 in favor of Anglican Theology of the old Catholic type, is too well known to bear repetition here.

The story has been told by two of the leaders of the movement, Cardinal Newman in his Apologia, and Mr. Mozley, his brotherin-law, who after being dissuaded from joining the Church of Rome by Newman, has lived to record his own phases of faith, and in his old days has subsided much in the same way as the hero of "John Inglesant." He has given up that quest of the Holy Grail, a perfect and infallible church on earth.

Ritualism, which we have described as the after-wave of Tractarianism, is at once more popular and also less profound than the Anglican Revival in its earlier stages. It is an appeal to the eye more than to the ear, and we all know the canon, "Segnius irritant animos."

Besides, the men who put themselves at the head of the Ritualistic movement were not like the elder generation, men of high mark at the University. Pusey, Keble, Hurrell-Froude and Newman were all fellows of colleges, and their intellectual horizon, if not bounded by Oxford, certainly did not attempt either to capture the masses by appeals to the ear or to captivate them by still more sensuous appeals to the eye.

Oxford, discarding the black gown for the white in the pulpit, and razeeing down the old three-deckers where preacher, reader and clerk rose Alp upon Alp and looked down on the congregation in our parish churches of the Georgian era, it cannot be said that the older school of Anglicans made any attempt to teach theology through the eye. But the Ritualists waxed bolder, and in defiance of bishops' frowns and churchwardens' growls they "ribbons," as the colored stoles were called. They burned incense, called in thurifers, acolytes, and all the pomp and pageantry of the hierarchy of the middle ages, when it was at its highest. This was laughed at by some as "man millinery," and denounced by others as "pernicious nonsense"; but all the same, it made way in spite of the Bishops, whose grandfatherly warnings against it and denunciations of "lawlessness" were regarded as so many Priam's darts, feeble signs of a senile "No Popery " spirit.

At last, however, the movement began to make way with the classes at least, if not with the masses, and as is always the case, the hangers-on on the skirts of society, milliners' girls, young men from the country whose art-longings had been starved in Puritan homes and with Philistine surroundings, began to see in this Ritualism an escape out of a dreary traditional Protestantism of the doctrinaire type. The most ardent recruits were generally drawn

from this class, so much so that as a rule the leading Ritualists have been generally the runaways from strait-laced Evangelical homes. So many recruits were gained from this class that at last popular Protestantism began to take fire, and to denounce the movement even in the secular press as well as in the two organs of the old Evangelical orthodoxy, the "Rock" and "Record," which had been crying "wolf" so long that men of the world had regarded this bray of Exeter Hall with contempt. But now they took another note. They now told us that this was the result of our connivance with Rome. Catholic emancipation was the first step of our national downfall; the Papal aggression the second; now Ritualism full blown was a proof that it was all over with us and that the invader was in our midst. A Jesuit in disguise was seen in every silly youth who celebrated pontifical mass under the eyes of churchwardens, dumbfounded at the insolence of these boy priests, and so at last, having lived to raise spirits from the vasty deep, spirits came. A panic was upon us, and the panic as in the former case found a politician of the Ahithophel type to champion it. If there was a public man free from theological prejudices of any kind it was the late Lord Beaconsfield, better known as Mr. Disraeli. To do him justice he never indulged in cant, or played with popular prejudices, which he looked at from the serene height of indifference; but the Ritualist panic was an opportunity not to be lost of scoring a point against his old opponent Mr. Gladstone, and so the Public Worship Bill was brought in. It is the latest and probably one of the last attempts to prop up the expiring cause of State regulation of religion.

Byzantinism, as it has been called by Döllinger, has only raised fresh controversies by the means sought to allay them. Church councils sitting with Cæsar for assessor and ultimate judge of appeal are a sorry spectacle; nor does the English type of Byzantinism through debates in Parliament add anything but new elements of discord.

It is needless to say that the Public Worship Bill of 1875 has lain on the statute book almost as much a dead letter as the Papal Aggression Act of 1852. The worst effect of legislation of this kind is that it brings all legislation into contempt, when the Legislature and the Executive are seen to be moving on different lines and out of touch with each other. The one is the head and the other the hand; and when the Executive does not enforce what the Legislature enacts, we have paralysis of the body politic which when partial is anarchy, and when total can only end in death.

The tendency to pass bills of the permissive type is always a sign of compromise. When politicians begin to fumble in this way, they had better give up the game at once. It is a lost cause which is supported by this kind of advocacy, and the old-fashioned Church and State conservatives know in their heart it is so, though they go on repeating musty phrases about the Royal Supremacy and make a great show of sharpening a blunt axe which should long since have been sent to the Tower armory as a weapon of the old Tudor and Stuart days of statescraft.

The true cause of Church panics is not understood until we see that when a church leans on any other supports than her own, and finds them fail under her, then she sinks into a state of mind as unreasoning as that of the carnival revelers overtaken with earthquake on the morning of Ash Wednesday at Nice and other towns of the Riviera. A panic-stricken sermon of this kind was preached some years ago from the University pulpit, at Cambridge, on the text, "For if the foundations be destroyed what shall the righteous do?" The best comment on this kind of pulpiteering under panic is to turn the text right round and read it the other way. If the righteous be destroyed what shall the foundations do? The metaphor of a building is misleading if we suppose that the externals of a church, its endowment, establishment, and so forth, are of the nature of foundations, and that the external cult and social status of its members are the essential part of the edifice of faith, and as such doomed to crumble away when cracks and a settlement are seen in a politico-ecclesiastical church of rubble and concrete not older than Henry or Elizabeth. But enough of these abortive attempts to piece together politics and religion, the kingdom of Cæsar and of Christ. But for the endowments of the Church and its prizes as a profession, its bishoprics, deaneries, and dignities, with canonries major and minor, there is probably not a so-called churchman who would lift a little finger for that archaic anomaly, the Establishment. But if there is a foible of Englishmen it is the affectation for an antiquarian interest in dead and defunct causes out of which the idea is as extinct as the life in a fossil. So it is that they get up Eglinton Tournaments and affect a kind of Wardour Street interest in old oak chests and other musty muniments.

De Tocqueville, as a keen critic of our foibles, has noticed this foible, as in the other extreme: the modern American (till he grows rich and affects the ideas of the "old folk at home") is, if anything, too contemptuous to the past and too fond of novelties.