side of the British territory, and the important movements of the Greek Church. which cannot possibly escape much longer a dissolution into a number of independent Episcopalian bodies, are well calculated to foster the hopes of the English Churchman. During the past three months the Convocation of Canterbury, for the first time, completed the synodical action on the change of one of the canons, while that of York raised its voice for the increase of bishoprics in England, and for the abolition of the pew system. It is felt on all sides that the Convocations are, almost imperceptibly, reassuming in the minds of the people the authority of the highest ecciesiastical tribunal, and it was in conformity with this transformation of national opinion that Lord Ebury declined this year to bring in a motion for the revision of the Book of Common Prayer. He said he would wait for the action of Convocation on the subject, but in case Convocation should not take in hand the subject he would renew his motion for "revision," which had the sympathy of one English bishop and the two Irish archbishops.

The Lower House of the Convocation of Canterbury took an important and decided step with regard to the "Essays and Reviews." Archdeacon Denison, as chairman of the committee appointed the previous session, moved a series of resolutions condemnatory of the volume, and as constituting sufficient grounds for proceeding to a synodical judgment upon it. These resolutions were carried by a very large majority, and, together with the report of the committee, communicated to the Upper House. Contrary to general expectation, the bishops did not resolve to proceed at once to synodical judgment, but, in consideration that a suit had already been commenced by one of the bishops against one of the essayists, by a unanimous vote declared it expedient to adjourn the further consideration of the subject, pending the course of the suit. In the meanwhile the Essays" controversy continues to overflood the book-market with controversial books, large and small, learned and popular, profound and trashy. Every number of the Publishers' Circular still teems with new announcements. The vast majority of them strongly condemn the book, which finds, however, some influential defenders, as, for example, Professor Stanley, who, in his new

work on the History of the Eastern Church, does not conceal his sympathy with the principles of the Essays.

Two important decisions have been made during the past three months in questions concerning the relation between Church and State. In Parliament a very keen contest took place on the subject of Church rates. The Conserva tive party put forth its full strength to defeat the third reading of the Church Rate Abolition bill, and had the gratification-unexpected to themselves-to see the vote equally divided and the motion lost by the casting vote of the Speaker. The friends of religious liberty have been disagreeably surprised by this result, but by no means discouraged; the agitation has been commenced anew, and will not cease until the principle of voluntaryism will have triumphed. In Scotland the celebrated Cardross case has been decided in the Court of Session against the claims of the Free Church. It will be remembered that the latter refused to submit the forms of its procedure, by which the plaintiff maintained to be impaired in his civil rights, to the supervision of the civil courts. The judgment of the court was unanimous. The case will be appealed to the House of Lords. As the question involves the possession of a disciplinary power in all unestablished bodies, the final decision is awaited with deep and general in

terest.

A very remarkable letter has been written by a well-known deist of England, F. W. Newman, to a Bengali periodical of Calcutta, which is the organ of an association of Indian deists. The latter appear to be desirous to establish a closer union with the deists of Christian countries, and have sent to Mr. Newman their periodical, together with several deistical tracts published by them. Mr. Newman's letter gives an account of the present condition and the prospects of the deists in England, which expresses but little hopes for the rise of a Theistic Church.

The Baptists of England are at present divided into three distinct bodies: the Particular Baptists, who are Calvinists; the General Baptists, who are Unitarians; and the New Connection of General Baptists, who are Evangelical Arminians. The latter, at their late annual meeting, adopted a resolution in favor of a closer union with the Particular Baptists.

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.-The religious statistics published in the Irish census disappoint the expectations of those who had hoped to find the Protestant population almost as large as the Roman Catholic. This hope had been, of late, generally indulged in by the Protestant Press of Great Britain, although it was irreconcilable with the official marriage and educational statistics of the country, which fully agree with the ecclesiastical statistics, as now ascertained. This coincidence leaves no doubt as to the correctness of the official account, at least as far as the number of Roman Catholics is concerned. The following are the most important points of the census: Roman Catholics, 4,490,583; members of the Established Church, 678,661; Presbyterians, 598,992; Methodists, 44,532; all other persuasions, 8,414; Jews, 322. The total number of Irish Protestants is 1,273,960, giving the Roman Catholics a majority of 3,216,623, or about 3 Roman Catholics to one Protestant. Each of the four provinces shows a Roman Catholic majority, and of the thirty-two counties in Ireland only four, Antrim, Down, Armagh, and Londonderry, (all in the province of Ulster,) show a Protestant preponderance. The county of Down contains the largest number of Presbyterians, 136,013; county Antrim ranks next with 133,440; county Londonderry, 66,014; Armagh has 40,000, Tyrone 46,000, and Donegal 26,000, while in Fermanagh it appears there are only 1,857 Presbyterians. The county of Down also contains the largest number of Episcopalians, 60,516; next in order follow Armagh, Antrim, Tyrone, and Fermanagh, while the smallest number in any county is 3,371 in Clare. Cork is the premier Roman Catholic county in Ireland, there being 424,589 Roman Catholics, the smallest number of that, body in any county being in Carlow, 50,613. Since 1834 the population of Ireland is diminished by 2,190,217; the Roman Catholic population by 1,945,477, the Church of England population (including the Methodists) by 129,967, the Presbyterians by 114,666. By comparing the statistics of 1834 with those of 1861, it will be seen that as to the total population a change has taken place in favor of Protestantism, for while formerly there were about six Roman Catholics to one Protestant, there are now only three and a half. On the other hand, the pouring of Roman Catholic

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masses into the former Protestant province of Ulster has increased the number of predominantly Roman Catholic counties, and will be a political advantage to the Roman Catholics, in proportion as the general suffrage is extended.

GERMANY.

THE PROTESTANT CHURCHES.-The movement of the German State Churches toward ecclesiastical self-government is progressing with increasing rapidity. The meeting of delegates of the several German Church governments, which this year met again at Eisenach, has by a unanimous vote passed an important resolution in favor of it. Though not yet declaring for an entire separation be tween Church and State, they strongly condemned the system of territorialism, which claims for the secular government an absolute right to govern the Church, and insisted on having the administration of ecclesiastical affairs confided to an ecclesiastical board, which should be entirely independent of the State Government, and in direct communication with the people. In most German States this principle has already been established, and the influence of this conference of the German Churches is probably sufficient to cause its adoption by all the other States. The Church of Baden has already gone farther, and adopted a new constitution which greatly diminishes the ecclesiastical right of the Grand Duke in appointing Church officers, and concentrates almost the entire government of the Church in the hands of an elective General Synod, one half of whose members are ministers and one half laymen. In one of the Prussian provinces, which were hitherto without a regular system of Church synods, diocesan synods have been every where organized. In the Prussian Parliament a majority of the Protestant deputies was in favor of asking the ministry to carry through the independence of the Church, as promised in the constitution; and among those who voted against the motion, some, as the distinguished leader of the Liberal Party in Parliament, Baron Von Vincke, did it only on the ground that the Parlia ment is incompetent to pass resolutions on ecclesiastical questions.

In connection with the question of Church constitution, the progress of the Rationalistic controversy keeps up in the German Churches a great excite

ment. For the present the Rationalists seem to have completely carried their point in the grandduchy of Baden, where they claim all the lay representatives at the General Synod, and one half of the clerical, as members of their party; and in the United Evangelical Church of the Palatinate, where all congregations, except about ten, have obtained permission from the secular government to retain or to reintroduce the old Rationalistic hymn book. The party organs feel confident that by means of synods, one half of whose members will consist of chosen representatives of the laity, they will get control of the majority of the German Churches.

Among the peculiar institutions of the old Protestant Churches of Germany, which have been of late revived, the parochial visitations have attracted more than common attention. At the time of the Reformation they were frequently held by Luther, Melancthon, Bugenhagen, and the other reform

ers.

For a long time they were entirely discontinued, till the late king of Prussia called them again into existence. Such a parochial visitation is held by a committee composed of clerical and respectable temporal members, the former being chosen by the Superior Ecclesiastical Council, which also elect a member as a leader of the committee. The revival of this arrangement has the warm approval of the High Church Lutheran and the Evangelical parties. Under the present king there arose at first a fear that it would be discontinued, but of late another parochial visitation has been held by the Superintendent-General, Dr. Koffmann, in Silesia. Wherever the committee goes preaching is carried on, (first the pastor of the community visited preaches, then members of the committee,) after which the youth are examined, also partly by their own teacher, partly by a member of the committee. After the examination the pastor and teacher receive suggestions in private from the committee upon points in which advice is needed. After this the fathers of families belonging to the community, and the youth of both sexes, are brought up and questioned. The visitations are said to have hitherto been followed in almost every instance by a perceptible awakening to Christian life, although frequently the opponents of the visitation had succeeded in arousing against it a powerful commotion.

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.Germany is beginning to furnish a large contingent to the number of Roman Catholic writers who admit that the abolition of the temporal power, whether in itself right or wrong, has become an inevitable necessity. But it has taken both Roman Catholics and Protestants by surprise that even Dr. Döllinger, the greatest Roman Catholic scholar now living, has expressed himself in this way. In a public lecture he has taken the ground that the temporal power had not only become an impossibility, but that its abolition would redound to the greater glory of the Church. The declaration made a deep sensation throughout the Catholic world, and the majority of the ultramontane papers violently assailed it. Somewhat intimidated by the great agitation thus provoked, Dr. Döllinger has since issued another declaration-that he did not mean to justify the insurrection of the papal subjects and the annexation of papal territory to Sardinia; but he has never recanted his main position, that the abolition of the temporal power would be a blessing for the Church, and not as the bishops and most of the Roman Catholic papers have commonly represented it, a great blow to her best interests. There the controversy now rests. Dr. Döllinger has been as violently assailed after his explanatory declaration as before, and the papers are still discussing the good or bad results of the downfall of the temporal power. Three of the most influential Roman Catholic papers of Germany have taken side with Dr. Döllinger.

The Diets of the German States continue to protest against the large concessions which some of the Protestant powers have been prevailed upon to make the pope. The Second Chamber of Wurtemberg has declared its determination to refuse its consent to the levy of taxes unless the government respects the resolutions of the Legislature and the will of the people respecting the nonexecution of the concordat. In the Duchy of Nassau the Second Chamber has also declared itself against a convention which the duke had concluded with the Roman Catholic bishop of the country, and in which, likewise, undue concessions had been made to the Roman hierarchy.

Protestants, which after having been long confined to South Africa were last year extended to China and Hayti, are likely now to find another important field in Tahiti. The French protectorate which was imposed on the island under Louis Philippe has not had the expected

The Rationalistic party in the State Churches have lost of late so much ground in the Churches and societies of Protestant France that it has been considered necessary to make another great effort to rally the scattered forces. They have therefore formed a so-called "Liberal Protestant Union," which demands absolute freedom of preaching for every pulpit, and will, in particular, endeavor to secure the election of Rationalists into the Presbyteries. Their manifesto has been felt by the evangelical portion of the Church as a call to renewed energy, and the result of the next election is therefore awaited with unusual interest as a test of the comparative strength of the two parties.

The evangelical portion of the Reformed Church are becoming more and more unanimous in demanding from the French government the re-establishment of the General Synod as the supreme board of the Church. The question came up for discussion at the late National Conferences at Paris, a gathering of ministers of the Reformed and the Lutheran State Churches, and after a thorough debate the unanimous vote of the assembly was affirmative; of eighty-seven members only one, a leading Rationalist, abstained. A letter to the Minister of Public Worship was voted paragraph by paragraph. A zealous layman, M. de Coninck, who has unceasingly by his pen called attention to the necessity of restoring the National Synod, has brought out a new pamphlet on the subject, which is liberally distributed throughout the Churches. He takes the ground that when once the National Synod is formed and properly constituted it must clearly define the doctrinal basis of the Church; and that if ever the views of the Rationalistic "Protestant Union," referred to above, should be adopted by it, the orthodox should form themselves into a free Church.

The missionary labors of the French

Roman Catholic Church; but Protestantism, organized throughout the island under native evangelists, is still considered the National Church, and the Tahitian Legislature, in consideration of the now existing political connection with France, has expressed a wish that two Protestant French pastors may be sent to them, offering them at the same time a suitable salary.

ITALY.

THE PROTESTANT CHURCHES.-The Waldensian Seminary,, whose transfer from the retired valleys of Piedmont to Florence, the Italian Athens, raised in all parts of the Protestant world so great expectations for the future of Italian Protestantism, closed about the middle of July its first session at its new seat. There were ten students on the roll, one of whom had returned to the valleys for ordination, and another was in bad health. All of the eight who presented themselves for examination acquitted themselves with great credit. Five English ministers were present, who declared themselves highly gratified with the result.

By the appointment of Baron Ricasoli as Prime Minister of Italy, the Protestants have received an even more decided advocate of their political and civil rights than Cavour. He checks the intrigues of the Ultramontane party, who, unfortunately, find still too many of the subaltern officers willing to lend the aid of the secular arm for the annoyance and oppression of Protestant congregations. This continuance of toleration has enabled the Protestants to strengthen their establishments in a number of the principal cities of the peninsula. In Leghorn their place of worship, after the most bitter and obstinate opposition on the part of the priests, was opened for public service on June 19, and has since then been crowded with attentive and most respectable audiences without any opposition. One of the most intelligent and devoted Waldensian ministers has been detailed to the city of Milan, where he is making efforts for the establish