we are considering did not produce, to some extent, feelings and sentiments not partaking largely of personal humility, or the most comprehensive Christian charity. It is It is the National church. That is its main idea, the pillar and ground of its very being as a system. It is the church of the nobility, the government, and the reigning sovereign of the empire and not less of the merchant, the farmer and the poor peasant. It is the Church of England. Such is the theory. Is it at all strange that members of the Establishment cling tenaciously to whatever remaining provision seems to recognize the idea of its nationality, albeit, in point of fact, it is the church of less than half the people of England and Wales.

Some such provisions there are. The tithe, which makes up the larger part of the enormous aggregate of her annual income, is levied on the landed estate of churchman and dissenter alike. We have seen the man-servant of a clergyman sent to collect from his neighbor the dissenting minister the tithe levied on his very small garden, the amount being just half a crown “magna pars quorum fui." The repairs of the church edifice, and all the ordinary incidental expenses of public worship are provided for by a rate, which is assessed on all householders of the parish indiscriminately. The poor dissenting minister, whose little garden has been tithed to help make up the clergyman's stipend, is assessed upon his rental for the expenses of washing the surplice in which he reads prayers, lighting the pulpit in which he preaches, and blowing the organ which discourses sweet music in the service of song. If he refuses on conscientious grounds, when called upon to pay the rate, as is sometimes the case, his books or chairs are forthwith seized and sold at auction; and so it comes about that, what with law expenses and loss upon the articles sold, it costs him twenty dollars to pay a rate of three dollars. This impost is so exceedingly odious to the dissenters, and awakens so much bad feeling, that the most bitter enemy of the church could hardly desire a greater injury to her than its continuance. So many of her own true sons believe; and labor earnestly year after year in Parliament and elsewhere, for the abolition of church-rates. Others see, or think they see, in such a concession, the entering of a wedge which would ultimately work the overthrow of the Estab

lishment. This party has now been gaining strength for several years, until, in the session of Parliament which has recently closed, it commanded a clear majority in the House of Commons. In 1859, the bill for the abolition of the rate passed the Commons, by a majority of seventy-four, being defeated, of course, in the Lords. In 1861 Mr. Disraeli made an appeal to the country in behalf of the church and the rate, which produced a reaction that brought the majority down to a tie; and that reaction has continued and increased till 1863, when the bill was defeated in the Commons by a majority of ten in a house of five hundred and sixty votes.

The feeling of caste which prevails in England amounts, as a general rule, almost to entire non-intercourse between churchmen and dissenters. Whatever may be a man's character for intelligence, education, taste, refinement, the mere fact of his attending the dissenting chapel, places him under a very decided social disability. It excludes him from the social intercourse of men far inferior to himself; it excludes him from political office; it deprives him of the custom of churchmen, if he is in business, and causes him to be despised as vulgar.

We have seen the pastor of a dissenting congregation in a large and fashionable city, from strong sympathy in literary tastes, forming the intimate acquaintance of a gentleman who went to church; and this churchman being extensively connected with the gentry and nobility of the neighborhood in the way of his profession, did not dare enter the "chapel" to hear his friend preach. It is still fresh in the memory of Englishmen — of low and high degree that the Rev. Dr. Vaughan, the able editor of the British Quarterly Review, who takes honorable rank among the scholars and literary men of Great Britain, a man withal of courtly manners, and a very eloquent preacher, was the minister, not many years ago, of a dissenting chapel at the fashionable West End of London. The beautiful and accomplished Duchess of Sutherland, being a serious Christian woman, was drawn to hear him preach, and was so deeply interested that she became a regular attendant on his ministry, and was accompanied frequently by her brother, Earl Carlisle, and other noble relations. The thing was speedily bruited all over England. It was a very daring act for even a Viscount and a

Duchess to do, (Earl Carlisle was Viscount Morpeth then,) and so great was the opposition excited in high quarters, that Horndon chapel ceased to be honored with the presence of the illustrious strangers.

The clergy take the lead in this matter of non-intercourse, and what may be thought singular, the so-called evangelical clergy are preeminent among all their clerical brethren on this account, in many instances refusing to speak to a dissenting minister when they meet him in the street, although a neighbor, and their equal in all that should command respect, and preaching the self-same things that they do every Sabbath. They are excellent, conscientious, Christian men, and mean to act in most religious and honest accordance with their system-in other words with the customs and spirit of their church.

How much of honest religious belief and actual uniformity a rich and powerful state church is likely to produce, may be gathered from occurrences which now and then startle the community, if they do not disturb the dignified repose of the Lords Bishops. Two brothers, clergymen, both standing, as is supposed, on the strong ground of Calvinistic protestantism, suddenly strike out into paths diametrically opposite, and are discerned anon at absolute antipodes the one a professed doubter, and the author of "The Soul and her Aspirations"; and the other finding a summary solution of all doubt in the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church. Neither are these isolated cases, but samples of what is working, as a powerful leaven, in the heart of the Establishment. And the thing continues, in spite of the thirty-nine articles, and all the authority of the courts, till "perverts" to Rome are counted by hundreds, both lay and clerical, and still larger numbers in secret sympathy with the Papacy remain in the Establishment, and, with jesuitical cunning and dishonesty, employ all their influence to disseminate the heresy. Among them are commoners and nobles, editors, lawyers, professors and statesmen. One of the great universities - Oxford-wheels into the ranks of the anti-protestant crusade, and finds aid and encouragement in its bishop, Samuelson of the good and great William Wilberforce-scholar, preacher, statesman, courtier, orator, ecclesiastic, a consummate master in all: and it is confidently asserted

that the very highest posts of influence in politics, literature, education, journalism, are filled by concealed jesuits. In the same halls and under the same cool shades the spirit of rationalism wraps itself proudly in its robes of office, and walks at liberty, uttering itself without fear in the professor's chair, and the pulpit, or, as it may elect and judge expedient, with more fulness and wider aim, in the " Essays and Reviews." If Colenso had not been clothed with the dignity of a Bishop, his unscholarly and feeble criticisms would hardly deserve to be men-. tioned in this enumeration.

That the Church of England should now and then be the theatre of religious manifestations in which fanaticism bears a prominent part, is not a matter to occasion surprise. A captain in the army, who is also a zealous churchman, becomes scandalized with what he conceives to be the strange anomalies and inconsistencies of the Establishment, and forthwith starts up in the character of a religious reformer, and the originator of a new sect which imagines the work especially committed to its hands to be, the separating of the wheat from the chaff before the time of harvest in other words to gather the elect into one visible body, out of all the churches of Christendom. To this end they glide in unawares, and make all the havoc they can in every existing religious communion; yet no where else half so much as in the Church of England which they have quitted. These are the "Plymouth Brethren." They repudiate the Christian ministry as an order; and their theology is that of the Higher Christian Life," or perfectionism.

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We will refer to another instance, partly because we knew personally the principal actors — many of their most characteristic doings having passed under our own observation. A young clergyman named Prince, who has solemnly professed his assent and consent, ex animo, to every thing contained in the Book of Common Prayer, does, nevertheless take along with him some peculiar notions which he has adopted at college; and with which he has diligently inoculated a party of his fellow students. He becomes the curate of a clergyman at Charlincha village in Somersetshire whom he soon converts to his own singular views, the most singular of which is that he is directed in all his minutest actions of every day by a conscious impulse

as he

from heaven; and he will not decide between tea and coffee at a fashionable evening party till he has asked the Lord,” and got his answer. On the Sabbath he enters the pulpit avers, though it be the crowded church of a fashionable watering place not knowing what he will say; and receives both text and sermon direct from God. Yet he is a man of fine intellect and accurate scholarship; and a very eloquent preacher, insomuch that he draws after him a multitude, including families of wealth, fashion, and high social position. And when, not so much for the fact of their strange belief, as for their zeal in its propagation, his Bishop deprives him of his gown, and his rector of a living of eight hundred pounds a year, they bear it in the true martyr spirit, and calling to them some three or four of Prince's college converts, they hire a large hall in the aforesaid fashionable watering place, and preach the speedy coming of Christ to judgment with such appalling emphasis, that the vilest men and most hardened, are drawn by curiosity to hear them, and terrified into a new course of life. Being themselves not wholly unmindful of the body, they find in the city of Bath a bevy of sisters, with very homely faces and very heavy purses, whom the bachelors among them marry; and all live together in unusual luxury; still advancing step by step, in their fanatical career, until, at length, Prince avows himself to be the Holy Ghost incarnate, and receives the implicit homage of his followMounted on magnificent horses, splendidly caparisoned, they ride at midnight- men and women - through the streets of Weymouth, singing the Hallelujah Chorus; in return for which they are pelted by boys with pebbles, and mobbed by lewd fellows of the baser sort, with old tin kettles, and horns and other kindred music: so that they resolve to shake off the dust of their feet and depart out of the city. Not however till they have borrowed all the money they can, from every man, woman, and poor servant girl whom they have succeeded in duping. And now they proclaim that the day of grace is past, cease preaching, and return to Charlinch, where they build a grand mansion, with pleasure-grounds and high walls all around, which they call " Agapemone," or the abode of love, and guard the stately entrance with blood-hounds. There for years they have lived, and are living still, in regal splendor; the world shut

ers.