ing the state of the university during this period is extremely scanty; but the impression conveyed by Lord Macaulay and other writers, that the ordinary studies were altogether discontinued, appears to be erroneous. Oliver Heywood was a student of Trinity at this time, and it is from his account of himself that this impression appears to have been derived. "My time and strength," says he, "were more employed in practical divinity; and experimental truths were more vital and vivical to my soul. I preferred Perkins, Bolton, Preston, Sibbes, far above Aristotle, Plato, Magirus, and Wendeton, though I despise no laborious authors in these subservient subjects." This extract certainly informs us that Oliver Heywood loved to spend his time over books of experimental divinity rather than over the classics, but the inference is by no means necessary that either he or his fellow students wholly neglected secular studies. We know that through the whole of the period Duport was lecturing on the classics.

The Puritans, as was to be anticipated, took especial care to provide what they judged to be sound and faithful religious teaching for the students. The Scriptures were expounded daily, sometimes by the master, sometimes by the fellows in the college chapels. Mr Samuel Hammond, who preached in the pulpit of St Giles, appears to have exercised a wide and salutary influence. He preached, we are told, "with that pious zeal, pungency, and Christian experience, that from all parts of the town, and from the most distant villages, his useful ministry was attended on, and it was crowned with the conversion of some scores, I might have said hundreds of scholars." Heywood says of Hammond's preaching: "I usually met with a suitable searching word, and one that warmed my heart." There is surely nothing in all this to justify the assertion that the Puritans made Cambridge a very Münster. What the universities might have become under Puritan rule it may seem vain now to conjecture. Their rule lasted too short a time to allow their system to have a trial; but those who imagine that university studies must necessarily languish under the guidance of men holding such views as the Puritans, may be referred to the case of the university of Halle, which, founded under the auspices of the Pietists of Germany, became in a short time one of the most renowned seminaries of learning in the north of Europe. Opportunity was not granted, however, to the Puritans either to fail or to succeed in the experiment which they had commenced. The Restoration brought

ships. The young candidate for academical honours was no longer required to write Ovidian epistles or Virgilian pastorals, but was strictly interrogated by a synod of lowering supralapsarians as to the day and hour when he experienced the new birth."-Macaulay's History of England.

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back Charles II., and the rule of the Puritans came to an end.

Mr Mullinger has devoted much less space to the latter part of the century, than to the more picturesque period which went before. It is, however, a time full of interest for the historian, and contained in it seeds of future change. Cambridge had not a little to boast of in this time likewise. Barrow was lecturing on Mathematics, and exhorting the students with all the force of his manly eloquence to pursue with diligence the "divine mathesis." Newton was bringing honour to his alma mater by his splendid discoveries, and exciting a wide spread interest in pursuits which had formerly been almost unknown in universities. Towards the close of the century, the students of Cambridge, as well as every one else, were beginning to read the works of a certain Mr John Locke, who wrote of the human understanding, of the nature of government, and of toleration, in a manner which would probably have been equally distasteful to Puritan, Platonist, and High Churchman, but from which they all might have learned something. The philosophy of Locke, and the theology of Paley, which was its offspring, are by no means the noblest and highest efforts of the human mind; and it is not to the century which was ruled by their spirit that we look for the saints and heroes of European history. Nevertheless, we do owe to that period, and to its philosophy, certain homely and useful services, to which it is unjust to deny due acknowledgment. Yet we do not wonder that it is with a certain feeling of regret, that men come to the conclusion that the spread, if not the origin, of just views on the nature of government and the duty of toleration, is to be traced in no small measure to the decay of ancient loyalty and the cooling of religious zeal.

ART. III.-The Present and Future Position of the Church of England.*

BY A PRESBYTER OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

First Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Rubrics, Orders, and Directions for Regulating the Course and Conduct of Public Worship, &c., according to the Use of the United Church of England

We give this communication as it stands without pronouncing any opinion on the sentiments or the suggestions which it contains.-ED.

and Ireland: with Minutes of Evidence and Appendices. Presented to both Houses of Parliameut by command of Her Majesty. London; Printed by Geo. Edw. Eyre & W. Spottiswoode, 1867.

Second Report of the same. London. 1868.

THE attention of religious men in Great Britain and elsewhere is much occupied with the question, What is to be the future of the Church of England? What is to be the result of the remarkable movement which is now progressing within her pale? Is it destined to terminate in a secession to Rome, or in a secession to the ranks of the Nonconformists ? Or will Ritualist and Evangelical, those who are loudest in their assertion of priestly authority, and those who deny it altogether, continue to work as at present within the National Church of England.

It might, indeed, be gravely asked, In what sense the name of Church can be correctly applied to a body which contains within it such diverse elements as those found in the Church of England? According to the XIXth Article, a Church is defined to be "a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ's ordinance," &c. Can the Bishops of Salisbury and Carlisle, the Bishops of Natal and Oxford, Dr Rowland Williams and Archdeacon Denison, Dr Pusey and Mr Ryle, Mr Orby Shipley and Lord S. G. Osborne, be regarded in any intelligible sense as alike preachers of "the pure Word of God," and faithful dispensers of the Sacraments? It is a matter of notoriety that these men condemn one another as strongly as they do the members of other opposing Churches. On what principle, then, of reason or of common sense, should men be permitted to nestle safely under the shadow of the Church of England, enjoying in common her "loaves and fishes" (which is nearly all that they have in common), while Methodists, Presbyterians, Independents, &c., who are not a whit more separated in opinion from the members of the Established Church, than the above named individuals are from one another, are excluded from all her privileges and emoluments?

There are several courses open for adoption with respect to the Church, in the present state of affairs, all of which are, however, fraught with dangers, though of a very different kind.

1. The present status quo of the Church may be maintained. Low Churchmen, Broad Churchmen, and High Churchmen may each be permitted to develope, each in their own way, subject always as they are at present to the necessity of keeping within certain not well-ascertained legal bounds. The legal decisions which, after a protracted struggle, will be given in the case of the Ritualistic prosecutions, will

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probably restrain some of the more obnoxious outward features of the movement, but are pretty certain not to afford a decided victory to either side. Evangelical ministers are likely to be restrained by counter-prosecutions in the exercise of their long-permitted liberty in the matter of divers inconvenient rubrics and canons, while on the other hand excesses of ritual may be curtailed, although the doctrines of the Ritualists will be suffered, if thinly veiled ever, to be taught without let or hindrance.

The advantages to be gained from such a course of proceeding are clear. No secession from the church, except in a few individual instances, will take place. All will be permitted quietly to eat their own bread, and enjoy such a share of Church patronage as they can severally contrive to secure. Bishops, in a year or two, will triumphantly exclaim in their charges that the crisis of Ritualism has passed away and left the Church uninjured, as the wave of Tractarianism is said by some to have harmlessly swept over it. They may urge upon all parties, as some of them do now, the duty of moderation, and of regarding each other with brotherly affection and esteem. Thus wolf and lamb may lie down again in the same fold, and "our beloved church" be served alike by those who glory in the name of "parish priests," and those who prefer the more scriptural appellation of "ministers." The "thirty-nine stripes may be gently laid upon the back of "catholic priests," and the rubrics and canons mildly restrain evangelical pastors.

2. Or the present status quo may be "slightly" altered. Altered rubrics, and revised, and, therefore, binding canons, may restrain alike Ritualist and Evangelical. The one may be forced to lay aside his parti-coloured clothing, and conform to the Rubrics and the Rubrics only. The Directorium Anglicanum may be laid aside on the shelf, and labelled, "for internal use only"; processions with banners and crosses may be inhibited, unless when some "reverend Father in God" may happen to be present, and give his sanction; confessions may be relegated to the priest's parlour or study, instead of being performed at the rails of the "holy altar," or in some "box in the consecrated edifice. The evangelical minister may on his part be forced to give up his conventicle-like prayer-meetings, if he have such, and to read daily prayers and the Apocryphal lessons in due course, to notify duly the people of the saints' days and fast days, to go through verbatim the whole form for the celebration of matrimony, to use the Service for the visitation of the sick, with its popish form of absolution, and to instruct the young of his flock more diligently in the Church Catechism, and less diligently in the Bible.

A compromise of this kind will no doubt be acceptable to

many. There are bishops who have already signified their approval of it, who would desire to see Ritualist and Evangelical equally humbled. If the one must not be permitted to play at Popery, the other must not approach Puritanism. If the one must not near the rock of Rome, the other must not steer his craft towards the dangerous whirlpool of Geneva. Both parties may be satisfied if both are punished alike, and neither gets off scot free. As for the Broad Churchman, he does not care for either, if only he be left the liberty of unsettling the minds of his congregation. He for his part might not be disinclined to submit willingly to some such yoke of Erastianism as that which is borne by some Continental Churches, where liberty of speech and freedom in doctrinal matters is almost perfect, but where liberty of action is unknown; where both the Rationalist and the Orthodox must use the same "form of words," and sing from the same "Gesangbuch," but may almost believe or disbelieve at will the doctrine of the Trinity, and the inspiration of the Bible.

3. A bolder course might be adopted. High Churchmen might resolve to expel Evangelicals, or Evangelicals High Churchmen. It would be only politic to let Broad Churchmen alone for a while. The great contest at present is that between the High and the Low Church parties. Important as are the questions raised by Broad Churchmen, they are in general not so pressing, and some of them are not yet ripe for definite solution. But if the High Church doctrine of baptism or the Lord's Supper were recognised to be that of the Church, Evangelicals would have to secede, while, if the views held by the Evangelical party were to be authoritatively adopted, High Churchmen would have to withdraw from its communion. The contest might, too, be fought out on the question whether the clergy are to be regarded as sacrificing priests, or as preachers of the Word of God. If even the Ritualists, as a body, were forced to secede, alterations in the Prayer Book, in a Protestant sense, would be sure to follow; or if the bolder and more active part of the evangelical party were forced into secession, High Church views would soon attain such a development as would drive out the other members of the party.

This would be, indeed, the most honest course for either the Evangelicals on the one side, or the High Churchmen on the other, to pursue. Of course, the danger would be that a secession must follow on the one side or the other, and a secession of any considerable dimensions might ultimately lead to the dis-establishment of the Church. Despite this danger, there is scarcely any doubt but that such a secession would be the final result of the present struggle, if the Church of England had a similar representative Assembly as that which the Church of Scotland pos