"Our LORD was the example of mankind, and there can be no other example in the same sense. But the whole period from the closing of the Old Testament to the close of the New was the period of the world's youth-the age of examples; and our LORD's presence was not the only influence of that kind which has acted upon the human race. Three companions were appointed by Providence to give their society to this creature whom GOD was educating; Greece, Rome, and the Early Church. To these three mankind has ever since looked back, and will ever hereafter look back, with the same affection, the same lingering regret, with which age looks back to early manhood. In these three mankind remembers the brilliant social companion whose wit and fancy sharpened the intellect and refined the imagination; the bold and clever leader with whom to dare was to do, and whose very name was a signal of success; and the earnest, heavenly-minded friend, whose saintly aspect was a revelation in itself."

Some persons will be shocked at the idea of putting these three teachers alongside of our Blessed LORD as the associates and examples of the youth of the human race. Others will think the suggestions void of much meaning. We confess to sharing both feelings. We should be sorry to have to decide between the irreverence and the folly of the idea. To how small a part of the world are those three examples known? As small a part, we fear, is that also which has attained to the guidance of the spirit which marks maturity. The whole theory of this essay involves among other fallacies the substitution of the enlightened class for mankind at large. It may be that now National school children of twelve know as much as they did at fourteen when we were boys. It may be that certain general principles of science, moral, political, and physical, are known to the upper classes now by intuition as it were, which formerly were but roughly apprehended, if at all, even by the wisest and best, but society at large has not made an advance proportionate to this. The masses of the people are in no way bettered. Probably the only power which is really benefiting them by its awakening energy is the Church. There are few There are few persons who would think the lower classes to have made much progress in developement, though they may have got an increase of knowledge. The spirit which is in them at any rate does not convince them commonly of the mischief of the beer house. We are, however, now supposed to be enjoying the rule of the Spirit, not of course the Personal HOLY SPIRIT teaching us in the Church, but a faculty of enlightenment to govern us from within.

"Now the education by no means ceases when the Spirit thus begins to lead the soul; the office of the Spirit is in fact to guide us into truth, not to give truth. The youth who has settled down to his life's work makes a great mistake if he fancies that because he is no more under teachers and governors his education is therefore at an end. It

is only changed in form. He has much, very much, to learn, more perhaps than all which he has yet learned; and his new teacher will not give it to him all at once. The lesson of life is in this respect like the lessons whereby we learn any ordinary business. The barrister, who has filled his memory with legal forms and imbued his mind with their spirit, knows that the most valuable part of his education is yet to be obtained in attending the courts of law. The physician is not content with the theories of the lecture-room, nor with the experiments of the laboratory, nor even with the attendance at the hospitals; he knows that independent practice, when he will be thrown upon his own resources, will open his eyes to much which at present he sees through a glass darkly. In every profession, after the principles are apparently mastered, there yet remains much to be learnt from the application of those principles to practice, the only means by which we ever understand principles to the bottom. So too with the lesson which includes all others, the lesson of life."

This spirit has been at work in various degrees from the Apostolic time. With what effect we shall find by the following extract, which brings home painfully the feeling of confusion which exists in the writer's mind between the spirit of man in its enlightenment and the Spirit of GOD in His Power. The progress of enlightenment is one thing, and the gift of the Spirit of GOD is another. One may be elevating the world; the other sustains the Church. Civilization is the Child of Christianity, and so there may be a certain influence of one upon the other, but the two must not be confounded. One deals with human things, for it is human; the other with divine things, being divine:

"From the very first, the Church commenced the task by determining her leading doctrines and the principles of her conduct. These were evolved, as principles usually are, partly by reflection on past experience, and by formularizing the thoughts embodied in the record of the Church of the Apostles, partly by perpetual collision with every variety of opinion. This career of dogmatism in the Church was, in many ways, similar to the hasty generalizations of early manhood. The principle on which the controversies of those days were conducted is that of giving an answer to every imaginable question. It rarely seems to occur to the early controversialists that there are questions which even the Church cannot solve problems which not even revelation has brought within the reach of human faculties. That the decisions were right, on the whole-that is, that they always embodied, if they did not always rightly define, the truth-is proved by the permanent vitality of the Church as compared with the various heretical bodies that broke from her. But the fact that so vast a number of the early decisions are practically obsolete, and that even many of the doctrinal statements are plainly unfitted for permanent use, is a proof that the Church was not capable, any more than a man is capable, of extracting, at once, all the truth and wisdom contained in the teaching of the earlier periods.

In fact, the Church of the Fathers claimed to do what not even the Apostles had claimed-namely, not only to teach the truth, but to clothe it in logical statements, and that not merely as opposed to then prevailing heresies (which was justifiable), but for all succeeding time. Yet this was, after all, only an exaggeration of the proper function of the time. Those logical statements were necessary. And it belongs to a later epoch to see the law within the law' which absorbs such statements into something higher than themselves."

By the power of the Spirit it seems that we at this enlightened age are quite capable of determining with certainty how far our predecessors were right or wrong. It is manifest, however, that we are ushered into a region of considerable uncertainty. We are to decide upon the decisions of bygone days. The Spirit was promised to the Apostles to call to their remembrance what CHRIST had said to them. With us, it seems, the Spirit is rather a guide into unknown truth. The Bible must be our stay. However, the following extract will not satisfy "nothing but the Bible Christians. Dr. Temple does not take the Bible and tradition, but myself and the Bible. It is Wolsey's ego et rex meus over again. The Bible is to play second fiddle to human fancy. It may after all be that the rex meus will turn out the stronger of the two, as he did in Wolsey's case :—

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"In learning this new lesson, Christendom needed a firm spot on which she might stand, and has found it in the Bible. Had the Bible been drawn up in precise statements of faith, or detailed precepts of conduct, we should have no alternative but either permanent subjection to an outer law, or loss of the highest instrument of self-education. But the Bible, from its very form, is exactly adapted to our present want. It is a history; even the doctrinal parts of it are cast in an historical form, and are best studied by considering them as records of the time at which they were written, and as conveying to us the highest and greatest religious life of that time. Hence we use the Bible-some consciously, some unconsciously-not to override, but to evoke the voice of conscience. When conscience and the Bible appear to differ, the pious Christian immediately concludes that he has not really understood the Bible. Hence, too, while the interpretation of the Bible varies slightly from age to age, it varies always in one direction. The schoolmen found purgatory in it. Later students found enough to condemn Galileo. Not long ago it would have been held to condemn geology, and there are still many who so interpret it. The current is all one way-it evidently points to the identification of the Bible with the voice of conscience. The Bible, in fact, is hindered by its form from exercising a despotism over the human spirit; if it could do that, it would become an outer law at once; but its form is so admirably adapted to our need, that it wins from us all the reverence of a supreme authority, and yet imposes on us no yoke of subjection. This it does by virtue of the principle of private judgment, which puts conscience between us and the Bible, making conscience the supreme interpreter,

whom it may be a duty to enlighten, but whom it can never be a duty to disobey."

Dr. Temple, who writes this article, is at the head of one of our large schools. It is therefore of no light importance to know what his views respecting Christianity and the Bible are. The importance which he professes to attach to the Bible does not diminish, but rather increase the danger of false opinions which he may hold respecting it. He certainly reduces it to a miserable Lesbian rule. In fact, to take the Word of GOD, and determine how far it is true, and how far false, according to the dictates of one's own conscience, what is it but to sit in the Temple of GOD, and to proclaim oneself there as GOD? Professions of homage to the Bible as a moral guide must not blind men to the utter rejection of its moral guidance involved in the assertion of human insight as a sufficient criterion. People may mean what they say, and yet be deluding themselves by a double-minded handling of a subject. Those however who are to form the minds of the rising generation ought to know their own. The following extract will scarcely leave us with the hope that the Head Master of Rugby does. Perhaps one may better say, it gives one the hope that he does not. In fact the attempt to work out so foolish an idea as he started with, was enough to bewilder even a keener and stronger intellect :

"Even the perverted use of the Bible," says Dr. Temple, " has not been without certain great advantages. And meanwhile how utterly impossible it would be in the manhood of the world to imagine any other instructor of mankind. And for that reason, every day makes it more and more evident that the thorough study of the Bible, the investigation of what it teaches and what it does not teach, the determination of the limits of what we mean by its inspiration, the determination of the degree of authority to be ascribed to the different books, if any degrees are to be admitted, must take the lead of all other studies. He is guilty of high treason against the faith who fears the result of any investigation, whether philosophical, or scientific, or historical. And therefore nothing should be more welcome than the extension of knowledge of any and every kind-for every increase in our accumulations of knowledge throws fresh light upon these the real problems of our day. If geology proves to us that we must not interpret the first chapters of Genesis literally; if historical investigations shall show us that inspiration, however it may protect the doctrine, yet was not empowered to protect the narrative of the inspired writers from occasional inaccuracy; if careful criticism shall prove that there have been occasionally interpolations and forgeries in that Book, as in many others; the results should still be welcome. Even the mistakes of careful and reverent students are more valuable now than truth held in unthinking acquiescence. The substance of the teaching which we derive from the Bible will not really be affected by anything of this

sort.

While its hold upon the minds of believers, and its power to stir the depths of the spirit of man, however much weakened at first, must be immeasurably strengthened in the end, by clearing away any blunders which may have been fastened on it by human interpretation.

"The immediate work of our day is the study of the Bible. Other studies will act upon the progress of mankind by acting through and upon this. For while a few highly educated men here and there who have given their minds to special pursuits may think the study of the Bible a thing of the past, yet assuredly, if their science is to have its effect upon men in the mass, it must be by affecting their moral and religious convictions-in no other way have men been, or can men be, deeply and permanently changed."

The substance of Dr. Temple's essay is just to announce a NEW REVELATION or DISPENSATION, different from that of Pentecost.

We simply ask, Does the Bible, which he professes to study, give us any indication, that such was to take place in this nineteenth, or any other century?

We must reserve the remainder of our review till the next number.

REVIEWS AND NOTICES.

The Bishop of London's Letter to the Laity.

If we are at liberty to regard the Bishop of London's "Letter to the Laity" of his Diocese as the indication of a change effected in his views upon ecclesiastical polity, we should indeed rejoice in it. Hitherto his administration has had the effect of stopping all Church extension in London, and has been "a heavy blow and discouragement" to the parochial system. In the first year of his episcopate one single church only was commenced in his vast diocese, which, be it remembered, he has distinctly refused to have divided; and all that we have heard since has been his contentions with such zealous church-builders as Mr. Hubbard and Mr. Cotton, his actual refusal of benefactions offered, unless the worst corruptions of modern times, as the pew-system, and the parson and clerk system, were perpetuated in the churches to be built, and his ungenerous treatment of Incumbents (such as Mr. Edouart and Mr. King) who have had occasion to appeal to him. City Missionaries, Exeter Hall and Theatre Preachings, and such irregular machinery have alone enjoyed episcopal favour. No wonder that the Laity have ceased to support Diocesan Societies, when the Bishop himself has repudiated the Church system. Whether they will be won back by this tardy acknowledgment, that the Parochial system is after all the only effectual way of evangelizing London and preserving the true Church-spirit in the Church's members remains to be seen.