Volume 54 — THE BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW. JULY, 1871. (continued 6)

What appears to have struck Plato most strongly in considering the doctrine of Protagoras was this—that if everybody is right, or as right as any other, all reasoning, argument, persuasion, in fine, the whole science of dialectics, becomes ipso facto useless and absurd (p. 161, E.) There are no such characters as wise and foolish. Protagoras himself felt the difficulty, but evaded it thus: the wise man is not one who tries to argue a person out of his convictions, e.g., that justice is only tyranny, or that sweet is bitter, but who so trains and educates the mind or appetite that the sounder and better view will spontaneously present itself. Thus a good sophist or a wise legislator will endeavour so to educate and so to govern, that right and reasonable views will approve themselves to the people. Again, in judging of what will be good or useful in the end, sagacity is needed, which clearly is not the property of everyone alike. A thing is right or wrong only as individual conviction or the law of a State makes it so for the time being; but in advising a certain course of action, where result, and therefore, forethought are involved, one counsellor may be greatly superior to another (p. 172). Hence, as legislation is prospective, it is not true that one man's opinion as to the wisdom or expediency of a measure is as good as another's; but there are some things at least in which one man's must be better than another's judgment.

It was thus that Protagoras endeavoured to reconcile the obvious fact that some men were more clever than others, with the theory that all morality is based on mere human opinion. And those persons would take a very shallow view who think that all this is merely an ingenious quibbling. The difficulties which Protagoras attempted to solve are real ones, and only thinkers know to what extent all questions, both of religion and casuistry, are bound up with them.

We proceed to perform, somewhat in brief, the less agreeable task of showing that Mr. Jowett's version of the Theætetus, though always fluent and pleasant to read, is not always as accurate as might have been desired.

In p. 149, A., Socrates playfully asks Theætetus if he has never heard that he, Socrates, is the son of a midwife, by name, Phænaretè, μάλα γενναίας τε καὶ βλοσυρᾶς, 'a sour-faced old lady,' we should say. Mr. Jowett somewhat oddly renders this phrase, a 'midwife, brave and burly.' The epithets mean something very different. The first is an ironical allusion to the humble station of the professional midwife, the latter to the alarm which her presence might inspire in the timid.... For βλοσυρὸν is something that shocks and causes terror, as in Æschylus, Suppl. 813; Eumen. 161. To this real or supposed parentage of the philosopher, a joke is directed by Aristophanes in the Nubes, 137—

καὶ φροντίδ' ἐξήμβλωκας έξευρημένην.

Perhaps also the Φαιναρέτη in Acharn. 49, may have reference to this person. In p. 151, B., προσφέρου πρὸς ἐμὲ is not 'come to me,' but 'behave towards me,' 'deal with me.' And in p. 156, A., ἀντίτυποι ἄνθρωποι are not 'repulsive' mortals (at least, according to our established use of the word), but 'refractory,' 'men on whom one can make no impression,' but from whom a blow rebounds as a hammer does from an anvil. Antisthenes and the cynical party seem to be meant. In p. 156, D., we come to a very obscure passage. Mr. Jowett's version is, 'And the slower elements have their motions in the same place and about things near them, and thus beget; but the things begotten are quicker, for their motions are from place to place.' This is not very intelligible. For ἡ κίνησις, it seems to us that we should read ἡ γένεσις. The figure of speech is taken from the notion of sexual contact, and by πρὸς τὰ πλησιάζοντα τὴν κίνησιν ἴσχει, Socrates seems to mean that certain impressions or objects meet certain senses, e.g., sounds the ear, scents the nose, objects the eye, but severally 'have their rate of motion according to the speed of those faculties with which they naturally unite;' but, he adds, the sensations of hearing, smelling, seeing are more instantaneously perceived, when once produced, because the γένεσις or production of such sensation takes place ἐν φορᾷ, while the αἴσθησις and the αἰσθητὸν are moving in space towards each other, and thus, as it were, the offspring partakes of the speed of the parents. In plain words, sight and sound and smell are produced at very different intervals of time, but are equally sudden sensations when produced; and even those which are more slowly generated are as quickly felt. (Compare Aristot., Eth. x. ch. iii. s. 4. πάσῃ (κινήσει) γὰρ οἰκεῖον εἶναι δοκεῖ τὰχος καὶ βραδυτής .) In p. 159, D., ἡ γλυκύτης πρὸς τοῦ οἴνου περὶ αὐτὸν φερομένη seems to us to mean, the sense of sweetness from the wine moving to and coming upon the patient,' τὸν πάσχοντα (unless, indeed, we should read περὶ αὐτὴν, i.e., γλῶσσαν, which would render the meaning rather clearer). Mr. Jowett's version is, 'the quality of sweetness which arises out of, and is moving about the wine.' Just below, περὶ δὲ τὸν οἶνον γιγνομένην καὶ φερομένην πικρότητα, the words καὶ φερομένην read very like an interpolation, as an attentive consideration of the passage, we think, will show.

In p. 161, A., we come upon some rather loose rendering. Theætetus asks Socrates whether he has not been all along speaking in irony, and whether, having proved that black is white, he is not prepared equally to prove that white is black. This, of course, is a playful satire on his skill in dialectics. The words ἀλλὰ πρὸς θεῶν εἰπὲ, ἦ αὖ οὐχ οὕτως ἔχει, literally mean, 'But tell me in heaven's name, is not all this, on the other hand, not so?' And so just below, Socrates says, 'You are, indeed, a lover of arguments and a worthy good soul, my Theodorus, for thinking that I am a mere bag of words, and can easily bring them out when wanted, and prove that, on the other hand, these things are not so.' In the very next words, τὸ δὲ γιγνόμενον οὐκ ἐννοεῖς, there is a joke, and not a bad one, on the doctrine, οὐδὲν ἔστιν ἀλλὰ πάντα γίγνεται. Mr. Jowett's version of the whole passage seems rather careless: 'But I should like to know, Socrates, by heaven I should, whether you mean to say that all this is untrue? Socrates: You are fond of argument, Theodorus, and now you innocently fancy that I am a bag full of arguments, and can easily pull one out which will prove the reverse of all this. But you do not see that in reality none of these arguments come from me. They all come from him who talks with me. I only know just enough to extract them from the wisdom of another, and to receive them in a spirit of fairness.' The last words, ἀποδέξασθαι μετρίως, more accurately mean, 'to take it from its parent fairly well,' i.e., as a theme for discussion. The phrase μητρόθεν δέχεσθαι, said of the nurse taking a newly-born infant, is playfully alluded to.

In p. 161, c., Mr. Jowett's version but poorly represents the real sense of a keenly ironical passage:—'Then, when we were reverencing him as a god, he might have condescended to inform us that he was no wiser than a tadpole, and did not even aspire to be a man: would not this have produced an overpowering effect?' The exact words of Plato are these: 'In which case he would have commenced his address to us in grand style, and very contemptuously, by letting us see that we have been looking up to him, as to a god, for his wisdom, while he all the time was in no degree superior, in respect of intelligence, to a tadpole, not to say to any other man.' The point is, that if Protagoras had commenced his work entitled 'Truth,' with the proposition, 'A pig is the measure of all things' (i.e., the standard by which feelings and notions are to be tested), 'he would have well shown his contempt of men who foolishly took him for an authority.' Of course the very object and heart's desire of Protagoras in writing such a book was to be thought supremely clever. Hence the irony is apparent.

Again, in p. 160, B., Socrates says to Theodorus:—

'You have capitally expressed my weakness by your simile (τὴν νόσον μου ἀπείκασας). I, however, am stouter (ἰσχυρικώτερος) than they; for before now many and many a Hercules and Theseus' (meaning, of course, many Sophists), 'on meeting me, men brave at talk, have pounded me right well; but I don't give it up for all that, so strong a passion has taken possession of my soul for this kind of exercise. Therefore, do not refuse on your part to prepare for a contest with me, and so to benefit yourself and me alike.'

We see no reason whatever why the above should have been diluted down to such a version as this:—

'I see, Theodorus, that you perfectly apprehend the nature of my complaint; but I am even more pugnacious than the giants of old, for I have met with no end of heroes. Many a Hercules, many a Theseus, mighty in words, have broken my head; nevertheless, I am always at this rough game, which inspires me like a passion. Please, then, to indulge me with a trial, for your own edification as well as mine.'

The following (p. 175, A.) is not satisfactory:—

'And when some one boasts of a catalogue of twenty-five ancestors, and goes back to Heracles, the son of Amphitryon, he cannot understand his poverty of ideas. Why is he unable to calculate that Amphitryon had a twenty-fifth ancestor, who might have been anybody, and was such as fortune made him, and he had a fiftieth, and so on? He is amused at the notion that he cannot do a sum, and thinks that a little arithmetic would have got rid of his senseless vanity.'

What Plato really says is this:—

'But, when men pride themselves on a list of five-and-twenty ancestors, and trace them back to Heracles, the son of Amphitryon, it seems to him surprising that they should make these trumpery reckonings; and they should not be able (further) to calculate that the twenty-fifth from Amphitryon backwards was just such a person as fortune chanced to make him, or at least the fiftieth from him, and thus to get rid of the vanity of a senseless mind,—at this he cannot suppress a smile.'

In p. 194, C., the words τὰ ἰόντα διὰ τῶν αἰσθήσεων, ἐνσημαινόμενα εἰς τοῦτ τὸ τῆς ψυχῆς κέαρ, ὃ ἔφη Ὅμηρος, &c., should be rendered, 'the impressions entering us through our senses, leaving their marks on this heart's core, as Homer called it, intending to express in allegory the resemblance between κῆρ and κηρός,' &c. Mr. Jowett rather loosely turns it,—'the impressions which pass through the senses and sink into the [waxen] heart of the soul, as Homer says in a parable,' &c. And just below, the words εἶτα οὐ παραλλάττουσι τῶν αἰσθήσεων τὰ σημεῖα, which he renders 'and are not liable to confusion,' might just as well have been brought out in their true sense, 'and further, they do not misapply the impressions of (or left by) the senses;' for παραλλάσσειν is 'to change wrongly,' and is a word selected as exactly and most happily representing the idea Plato wished to convey, that confused memories owe their confusion to not keeping distinctly apart the impressions formerly received. A few lines further on, ὅταν λάσιόν του τὸ κέαρ ᾖ, ὃ δὴ ἐπῄνεσεν ὁ πάντα σοφὸς ποιητὴς, ἢ ὅταν κοπρῶδες &c., there are some points which only a careful rendering will bring out. In taking a delicate impression of a seal or gem on clarified wax, a hair left in it would mar the impression. And the dark yellow colour of natural wax was thought by the Greeks to be made foul by the dirt of the insects; clarifying it, in fact, was 'defæcation.' So we render it thus:—'When, then, a man's heart has hairs in it, which is the state the all-wise poet referred to [in calling it λάσιον κῆρ ], or when it has dirt left in it, or is made of wax that is not pure [but adulterated], or too soft or too hard, then,' &c. Now this hardly appears in Mr. Jowett's version, 'But when the heart of any one is shaggy, as the poet who knew everything says, or muddy and of impure wax, or very soft, or very hard, then,' &c.

Of the Phædrus, as a whole, Mr. Jowett appears to us to give a correct account, in saying (Introd., p. 552) that

'the continuous thread which appears and reappears throughout is rhetoric. This is the ground into which the rest of the dialogue is inlaid, in parts embroidered with fine words, "in order to please Phædrus." The speech of Lysias and the first speech of Socrates are examples of the false rhetoric, as the second speech of Socrates is adduced as an instance of the true. But the true rhetoric is based upon dialectic, and dialectic is a sort of inspiration akin to love; they are two aspects of philosophy in which the technicalities of rhetoric are absorbed. The true knowledge of things in heaven and earth is based upon enthusiasm or love of the ideas; and the true order of speech or writing proceeds according to them.'

With regard to the first speech of Socrates on Love (p. 237, C., to 241, D.) it appears to us that it is not so much 'an example of the false rhetoric,' as a proof how much better and more logically even a paradoxical subject can be treated by a dialectician than by a mere rhetorician. The hit at Phædrus for having given no definition whatever of his subject (p. 237, C.) is one of the points of contrast which is very significant; and there is this subtle irony underlying the whole speech, that whereas Socrates undertook to prove that χαρίζεσθαι μὴ ἐρῶντι was better than χαρίζεσθαι ἐρῶντι, his essay is made to turn, in fact, simply on the latter point, μὴ χαρίζεσθαι ἐρῶντι, so as to be a diatribe against vicious παιδεραστία; only a word or two at the end being added in apparent sanction of the other, and by way of verbally fulfilling the engagement he had made: λέγω οὖν ἑνι λόγῳ, ὅτι ὅσα τὸν ἕτερον λελοιδορήκαμεν, τῷ ἑτέρῳ τἀναντία τούτων ἀγαθὰ πρόσεστι (p. 341, fin.) And the palinodia, or pretended recantation (p. 244, seq.), cleverly pursues the same theme, by showing that love, in its philosophical and nonsensual phase, is a divine emotion, and the source of every blessing to man. The famous allegory that follows, which means that Reason should control Passion, gives a sketch of the orderly and well-trained man, gradually recovering, even as the depraved mind gradually loses, the impressions and memories of the god-like existence men enjoyed in a previous state. The latter part of the dialogue hangs on to the allegory, not indeed very directly; rather, we should say, it reverts to the former part, and is intended to show, by a critique of the two essays, that no essayist or speech-maker can hope to succeed, who derives all his art from rules and treatises and the pedantic phraseology of the teachers. He must trust to dialectic, i.e., the science of hard and close reasoning, if he would rise above mere δημηγορία, or clap-trap; and psychology itself must form the basis of dialectic.

Mr. Jowett's version of this dialogue is fully as lax as that of the Symposium. Still it reads pleasantly, and if one could forget the incomparable and often so much more expressive Greek, one would be fairly content with the general correctness of the paraphrase. Almost at the outset, he renders εἴ σοι σχολὴ προϊόντι ἀκούειν, 'if you have leisure to stay and listen,' instead of 'to walk on and listen,' where a slight satire is intended on the 'constitutional' and prescribed exercise of the effeminate youth. And γέγραφε γὰρ δὴ ὁ Λυσίας πειρώμενόν τινα τῶν καλῶν, οὐχ ὑπ' ἐραστοῦ δὲ, ἀλλ' αὐτὸ τοῦτο καὶ κεκόμψευται means, 'Lysias, you must know, has written about one of the handsome youths having proposals made to him, not, however, by a lover; but this is the very point he has put in a new and quaint light.' (Of course, κεκόμψευται, to which we have given a medial sense, may also be taken as a passive.) Mr. Jowett gives us nothing nearer to the above than 'Lysias imagined a fair youth who was being tempted, but not by a lover; and this was the point; he ingeniously proved that,' &c. In p. 229, A., κατὰ τὸν Ἰλισσὸν ἵωμεν should be rendered, 'let us go along or down the Ilissus,' i.e., in the bed or channel, or even along the bank; certainly not, 'let us go to the Ilissus.' Nor is ἀγροίκῳ τινὶ σοφίᾳ (p. 329, fin.), this sort of 'crude philosophy,' but 'an uncourteous (or uncivil) kind of philosophy,' viz., that which employs itself in giving the lie to received traditions.

The charming and justly celebrated passage in p. 230, B.—one of the few in Greek literature that indicate intense feeling for the beauties of nature—we propose to render as follows, nearly every word being a close representative of the equivalent Greek:—

'Upon my word, the retreat is a charming one; for not only is this plane-tree of ample size and height, but the dense shade of this tall agnus is quite beautiful to behold; in full flower too, so as to make the place most fragrant! Yon spring, also, is most grateful, that flows from under the plane-tree with a stream of very cold water, as one may judge by the feeling to the foot. Moreover, there appears, from the images and ornaments, to be a shrine here to certain Nymphs and to the Achelöus. Pray notice, also, the balmy air of the place, how delightful and exceeding sweet, and how it rings with the shrill summer chirp of the chorus of cicadas! But the quaintest thing of all is the growth of the grass, which on this gentle slope springs up in just enough abundance for one to recline one's head and be quite comfortable. So that you have proved a most excellent guide for a strange visitor, my dear Phædrus.'

Some extra pains might have been fairly bestowed on a passage almost without rival in Greek literature. But Mr. Jowett gives us the following bare and clipped paraphrase of it:—

'Yes, indeed, and a fair and shady resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents. There is the lofty and spreading plane-tree, and the agnus castus, high and clustering, in the fullest blossom and the greatest fragrance; and the stream which flows beneath the plane-tree is deliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and images, this must be a spot sacred to Achelöus and the Nymphs; moreover, there is a sweet breeze, and the grasshoppers chirrup; and the greatest charm of all is the grass like a pillow gently sloping to the head. My dear Phædrus, you have been an admirable guide.'

In p. 248, C., θεσμὸς Ἀδραστείας is not 'a law of the goddess Retribution,' but simply 'a law of necessity.' Had we space, we could point out not a few very inadequate, not to say inaccurate, renderings in the grand and mystical passage about the ἰδέα of beauty, p. 250. For instance, Mr. Jowett does not see that we should construe κατειλήφαμεν αὐτὸ (viz., κάλλος) διὰ τῆς ἐναργεστάτης αἰσυήσεως τῶν ἡμετέρων, 'we realize it (here on earth) by the clearest of all our senses,' viz., the sight of the eye. The whole translation of the great allegory, in fact, reads as if it came from one who had never taken the trouble to make out exactly what the Greek meant; and, as it is very difficult, and the passage itself very sublime, the student ought to have found in Professor Jowett a safe and cautious and accurate guide to the language as well as to the mind of Plato.

We are compelled to pass on, rapidly and very briefly, to that most difficult of Platonic dialogues, the Philebus. This treats of a life made up of pleasure and intellectuality, φρόνησις, combined in certain proportions, a μικτός βίος, as the best and happiest. And the doctrine of πέρας and ἄπειρον, the Finite and the Infinite, which Aristotle (Eth., ii. 5) attributes to Protagoras, τὸ κακὸν τοῦ ἀπείρου, ὡς οἱ Πυθαγόρειοι εἴκαζον, τὸ δ' ἀγαθὸν τοῦ πεπερασμένου, is so applied as to show that mere pleasure carried to excess is self-destroying. This also is touched upon in the Tenth Book of the Ethics, ch. ii., where the μικτὸς βίος of ἡδονὴ and φρόνησις combined is preferred to either alone. It has sometimes occurred to us, that in this dialogue Plato has purposely used involved constructions and an affected obscurity of style, as if to satirize Heraclitus, or some sophist of the Ephesian school. The scholastic formulæ ἓν καὶ πολλὰ, implying synthesis and analysis, and μᾶλλον καὶ ἧττον, 'the more or less,' to denote the ἄπειρον, which can always be carried forward or backward, as in 'hot and cold,' till πέρας, or definite quantity, is brought to limit them,—these and other subtleties give to the Philebus, besides its linguistic difficulties, which are great, an aspect which is seldom inviting to younger students.

In the difficult passage (p. 15, B.), about ἰδέαι, Mr. Jowett has again failed to give the exact sense. Plato says, one difficulty about them is, 'whether we must assume that the abstract principle of each quality (e.g., abstract beauty) pervades concretes and infinites, dispersed and separated in each, or exists as a whole outside of itself.' That is to say, if an abstract or ἰδέα is one thing indivisible, which yet exists in different objects, it must reside outside itself, and apart from the centre of its own οὐσία,, or essence. The words εἴθ' ὅλην αὐτὴν αὑτῆς χωρὶς, Mr. Jowett oddly translates, 'or as still entire, and yet contained in others.' In p. 15, D., ταὐτὸν ἓν καὶ πολλὰ ὑπὸ λόγων γιγνόμενα is, 'this doctrine of "one and many" being the same, brought into existence (or, as we say, brought before our notice) by discussions,' not 'the one and many are identified by the reasoning power;' nor is ἄγηρων πάθος τῶν λόγων αὐτῶν, just below, 'a quality of reason, as such, which never grows old,' but 'a conditions of discussion themselves,' &c. Surely, to render the plural λόγοι by 'reason,' is a singular error. In p. 23, D., by not noticing the emphatic ἐγὼ the author has failed to see that there is a reference to the clumsy attempts of tiros at synthesis and analysis, p. 15. fin.; so that Socrates intends to say that he fears he is not much more skilful. A few lines below, where the doctrine of causation is introduced, the words τῆς ξυμμίξεως τούτων πρὸς ἄλληλα τὴν αἰτίαν ὅρα, 'consider now the cause of the union of these conditions (the finite and the infinite) with each other,' is poorly rendered by 'find the cause of the third or compound.' In p. 24, D., Socrates argues that, if the principle of limitation (πέρας) were admissible in, or could co-exist with, 'more or less,' i.e. progressive degree, the infinite would cease, by ipso facto becoming finite. And he concludes,κατὰ δὴ τοῦτον τὸν λόγον ἄπειρον γίγνοιτ' ἂν τὸ θερμότερον καὶ τοὐναντίον ἅμα, 'according to this way of putting it, the "hotter" would become at the same time infinite and finite.' Surely Mr. Jowett quite misses the sense in rendering it, 'which proves that comparatives, such as the hotter and the colder, are to be ranked in the class of the infinite.' In p. 26, B., Socrates says that 'the goddess Harmony, perceiving the general lewdness and badness of men, and that there was no limiting principle in them, either of pleasures or of satisfying them, introduced law and order, containing in themselves the finite. And you, Protarchus (he adds), say that she thereby spoiled our pleasures; whereas I say, on the contrary, that she saved them.' If the text is right, πέρας οὐδὲν ἐνὸν is the accusative absolute; but we propose to read καὶ πέρας, &c., so that the accusative will depend on κατιδοῦσα. Mr. Jowett's version is—'Methinks that the goddess saw the universal wantonness and wickedness of all things, having no limit of pleasure or satiety, and she devised the limit of the law and order, tormenting the soul, as you say, Philebus, or, as I affirm, saving the soul.'

It is no disparagement to the best of scholars to say that a perfect translation of the whole of Plato is too great a task for any one person to perform. It would be hardly possible to have the same knowledge of every dialogue, and those less familiar to the translator would not be wholly free from some mistakes. The scholarship that can grapple with and gain a perfect mastery over the Greek of Plato, to say nothing of his philosophy, must be of a very high order. No man, perhaps, could have done the task better than Professor Jowett; and no man, probably, is more fully aware that it might have been a good deal better even than it is.

Art. VII.—Mr. Miall's Motion on Disestablishment.

Debate on the Motion of Edward Miall, Esq., M.P., May 9th, 1871. Reprinted from the Nonconformist.

We doubt whether when the opponents of Mr. Gladstone's Irish Church policy, during the electoral campaign of 1868, insisted that disestablishment in Ireland would inevitably be followed by disestablishment in England, they expected that such a debate as that which took place in the House of Commons on the 9th of May last would furnish a seeming justification of their prediction. The prediction, however, was one which tended to fulfil itself; for, if it did not suggest, it encouraged the movement which has followed it. The plea—in the mouths of English Episcopalians, at least—was an essentially selfish one, and has brought with it its own punishment. Mr. Gladstone has reminded us that he did his best to convince the electors of Lancashire that, neither on logical, nor on practical grounds, did his proposal necessarily involve the sweeping away of all the Established churches; and he has also said, and, no doubt, with truth, that while Mr. Miall and his supporters may be entitled to speak of the Irish Church Act of 1869 as the initiation of a policy, that was not the intention of its authors, who regarded it simply as a measure of justice to the Irish people. The upholders of Establishment, however, were too heated and unreflecting to see that, in refusing to allow Mr. Gladstone and the Liberal party to escape by this flying bridge, they were virtually bringing down the enemy on a portion of their territory hitherto comparatively secure. The less, they insisted, involved the greater, and the public at large, taking them at their word, was prepared for an advance movement on the part of the opponents of all national religious establishments which a few years ago would have been regarded as the blunder of a party altogether bereft of political prudence.

It nevertheless required no small degree of courage on the part of Mr. Miall to give notice so soon as a year after the passing of the Irish Church Act that he would, in the following session, ask Parliament to apply the principle of that measure to the other Established Churches of the kingdom, and we are not surprised to know that the time selected was, in part, determined by accidental circumstances, as much as by deliberate choice. It is true that the honourable member was not a novice in the matter; seeing that in 1856 he had submitted a motion which similarly aimed at the extinction of the Irish Establishment. But the Irish question, even in 1856, was, so far as public sentiment was concerned, more advanced than the English Church question is now; for Protestant ascendancy in Ireland had long been condemned by English Liberalism, though the mode of bringing it to an end occasioned a wide divergence of opinion. Nobody could and nobody did, then deny Mr. Miall's facts, however much they dissented from his practical conclusions; while the absence of concurring circumstances gave to the debate an air of languor strangely in contrast with the excitement occasioned by the same topic in after years. It is true that the recent disestablishment motion is not the first which has been submitted to the House of Commons, even in regard to the Church of England. For nearly forty years ago—on the 16th of April, 1833—Mr. Faithfull, the member for Brighton—a borough then, as now, intrepidly represented in Parliament—moved: 'That the Church of England, as by law established, is not recommended by practical utility: that its resources have always been subjected to parliamentary enactments, and that the greater part, if not the whole, of those resources ought to be appropriated to the relief of the nation;' but on this occasion the question excited too little interest to subject the mover to any sharp antagonism; Lord Althorpe declining to reply to Mr. Faithfull's speech, and moving the previous question, while the motion was negatived without a division. Mr. Gladstone's memorable declaration, in 1868, that 'in the settlement of the Irish Church that Church, as a State-Church, must cease to exist,' required high moral courage; but the speaker knew that he was the mouthpiece of a party powerful within, as well as without, the walls of Parliament, and that he was sounding the tocsin for an immediate, and a comparatively brief struggle, in which success was already assured. Mr. Miall, on the contrary, knew that he would have no powerful backing in the House of Commons, however great the moral strength which he represented, and he knew also that he headed a skirmishing party, rather than led a final attack; while he must also have been conscious that the wisdom of his procedure would, by friendly, as well as hostile, critics, be judged by the measure of success.

That the success was great, few persons who combine intelligence with candour will be likely to deny, and probably it was greater than either Mr. Miall, or the most sanguine of his friends, had ventured to expect. Success, of course, has relation to the objects aimed at, and these were well defined, and such as can be readily compared with the actual results. We assume that Mr. Miall wished, by means of his motion, to give a practical direction to the out-door agitation with which he has been so many years identified; to put the subject in the category of practical political questions, by forcing it on the notice of politicians by the ordinary political methods; to place before the greatest legislative assembly in the world, with something like completeness, views held by a large and growing party in the country, but never before directly and fully advocated in Parliament; to draw out the forces enlisted on the side of establishments, and to put them on the defensive, at a time when the difficulties in the way of defence were by no means inconsiderable; and, finally, to secure such a thorough discussion of the whole subject by the country as would hasten the time when it must be dealt with with a view to a practical settlement. If this is an accurate description of Mr. Miall's aims, can it be said of any one of them that there has been even an approach to failure? Could any parliamentary question, in the hands of an independent member, have been launched with greater éclat, or with more hopeful presages, than characterized the discussion in the House of Commons on the 9th of May last? A large house—a speech which the most competent critics in England have pronounced to be of the highest class—a seven hours' debate sustained, for the most part, by members of the greatest mark—a weakness of argument and of tone on the part of the opponents of the motion which has excited general surprise—a division almost exactly tallying with the calculations of those at whose instance it was taken—leading articles and correspondence on the subject in every journal in the kingdom, and an almost universal impression that disestablishment is nearer at hand than it was thought to be before the motion was submitted—if these do not satisfy the most ardent of 'Liberationists,' the patience which has hitherto distinguished them must have given way to unreasoning haste.

On one point, at least, in regard to which there was, at one time, room for reasonable doubt, Mr. Miall's triumph must be considered complete. Although it would have been difficult for any Nonconformist member to have successfully vindicated a refusal to support the motion, on the plea that it was 'premature,' yet there was something to be urged in support of the plea itself, and it required a recognition of some facts scarcely known to the public at large to decide unhesitatingly in favour of the course actually adopted. But, now that the motion has been made, the plea of prematureness can scarcely be repeated. Even Sir Roundell Palmer frankly admitted that, having regard to the feeling excited by the subject, both in the house and in the country, it was one which was rightly brought under discussion, and, notwithstanding the embarrassment which it was likely to occasion the ministry, Mr. Gladstone tendered his thanks to Mr. Miall for initiating the discussion, since, 'by introducing this question, he has absorbed minor matters, which really involve his motion as an ulterior consequence, but which do not fully express it,' and has 'raised the question in a clear, comprehensive, and manly manner, calculated to keep it from all debasing contact, and to raise a fair trial of the great national question involved in the motion.' These admissions are in singular contrast to the reception given to Mr. Miall's Irish Church motion in 1856, when a Conservative member actually tried to avert discussion by moving the adjournment of the house, and Lord Palmerston, the then Premier, though he did not venture to sanction the attempt, deprecated as 'unfortunate' the enforced consideration of the subject.

If Mr. Miall has not acquired fame as a parliamentary debater, he has made two speeches which will live in the political history of this half century. Of that of 1856 it may, perhaps, be said that its influence was greatest in the effect which it produced on the minds of Liberal politicians whose minds were made up in condemnation of the Irish Establishment, but whose notions in regard to remedial measures were confused and undecided, or were radically unsound. The principle which he then affirmed was as bread cast upon waters seen after many days; and seen in the unequivocal shape of a statute of the realm giving practical effect to the views enunciated thirteen years ago. But the task undertaken then was far less difficult than that of 1871, the area of discussion was much narrower, and the issues raised much less complicated. Of Mr. Miall's recent speech, Mr. Leatham happily said that it seemed to him 'as though it were the condensation of the thought of a life-time;' but, in truth, the speaker had to disengage his mind from many thoughts which had for years engaged the highest powers of his intellect and the warmest sympathies of his heart. He had to remember that he was standing, not on a Liberation platform, but on the floor of the House of Commons, and that he was addressing not the eagerly responsive readers of the Nonconformist, but the cold and critical readers of journals of a very different type. And, further, while avowing that the religious side of the question was that which most powerfully affected his own mind, and conscious that the most potent arguments which he could employ were those which derive their force from religious considerations, he had to leave that vantage ground, from the admitted unwillingness and unfitness of the House of Commons to deal with the subject in its spiritual aspects, and to take the lower ground involved in objections of an exclusively political and social character. It required no small degree of self-restraint, and of practical skill, for a speaker of such antecedents as those of Mr. Miall to keep strictly within the lines which he had laid down for himself; and the unstinted admiration expressed by all the subsequent speakers and especially by public journals, which—within a week of his Metropolitan Tabernacle speech—were little likely to be biased in his favour, have shown conclusively the completeness of his success. When the usually moderate Guardian affirms that Mr. Miall's speech was a signal example of dissenting exaggeration, dissenting narrowness of view, and dissenting shortness of thought and inability to comprehend the higher aspects of a great religious and national question; and the Record asserts that 'never was a speech delivered on a great question more damaging to the cause it was intended to support:' the very recklessness of the misrepresentations indicate a consciousness that the impression produced was of a kind which has given great uneasiness to the supporters of the Establishment. We expect, moreover, that the reading of the speech, in the complete form in which it has since been published and widely circulated, will be found to have deepened the impression produced by its delivery, and by a first hasty perusal. Its calm yet forcible statements—its close reasoning—its apt and pungent illustrations—its incontrovertible facts, and its elevation of tone and style will, we are confident, perceptibly affect the minds of thoughtful men on whom, for some time past, the truth has been dawning that there must be something radically wrong in the existing relations between the State and the several religious bodies of the country. By a process of filtration, the truths enunciated by Mr. Miall in this speech will, aided by other influences, find their way into quarters into which none of his previous utterances on the same subject have penetrated, and, unless the tendency of ecclesiastical events greatly changes, it may be expected that the seed now sown will germinate, and produce its fruits, with a degree of rapidity for which previous efforts furnish no precedent.

Nor would justice be done to others were there no recognition of the valuable aid given to the mover of the resolution by those who supported him in the debate. It was fitting that a proposal so deeply affecting the welfare of the Church of England should be seconded by a member of that body, and the duty which Mr. J. D. Lewis voluntarily undertook was discharged with both ability and courage. The facts and figures supplied by Mr. Richard admirably supplemented Mr. Miall's exposition of principle; while, so far as the Principality is concerned, they demolished some of the boldest allegations of the advocates of the existing system. If Mr. Leatham's speech must be spoken of in terms of qualified praise—and notably in regard to his insinuation respecting the views previously expressed by Mr. Winterbotham—it must be admitted that he blurted out some truths which were required to be told, however roughly, and presented with admirable force, as well as vivacity, some aspects of the question which ought not to have been neglected in such a discussion, and which will tell upon minds but little affected by the less graphic method of the philosophical and unrhetorical member for Bradford.

We do not wonder that the Dean of Norwich has expressed dissatisfaction with the apologetic and low-toned character of the replies given by the upholders of the Establishment; for an ecclesiastic who holds it to be the duty of the State to find out which is Christ's Church, and, having found it, to uphold and extend it to the utmost, must have heard, or read, the debate with downright dismay. The proverb that 'one story's good till another's told' does not apply in this case; for strong as was Mr. Miall's case when he had concluded his speech, it was stronger still after the weakness of the other side had been shown by the reply. 'Is that all?' might have been asked by any one conversant with all the traditionary arguments used in defence of Church Establishments, after hearing Mr. Bruce, Sir Roundell Palmer, Dr. Ball, Mr. Disraeli, and Mr. Gladstone. Of the 'national conscience' which enjoins the provision by the State of the means of grace for the nation, or of the 'national atheism' involved in the absence of such provision; or, in fact, of any theory whatever on which it may be supposed to be possible to base an Establishment, there was heard nothing. The friends of the Church, indeed, so far abandoned theory, that Sir Roundell Palmer reproached Mr. Miall with the theoretical character of his arguments, and was himself forced to fall back on statements of the most prosaic and practical character; while Mr. Disraeli, though vaguely asserting that 'the State ought to recognise and support some religious expression in the community,' was content to rest the case of the Establishment chiefly on 'the manifold and ineffable blessings it bestows.'

It was perhaps a misfortune for that establishment that its defence was mainly undertaken by official and ex-official advocates. They, it is clear, were more concerned for their own position, in relation to the question, now or hereafter—and especially hereafter—than affected by a noble zeal on behalf of Church Establishments. Of course, if it had been felt that the foundations of those institutions were firm as the everlasting hills, that fact would have given firmness of tone, if not vigour of expression, to those who were under the necessity of doing battle on their behalf. But the insecurity of the position renders necessary a system of Parliamentary 'hedging'—to use sporting phraseology—on the part of those who wish to continue to be, or to become, the depositaries of political power; and that, perhaps, is the most alarming fact which the late debate has forced on the notice of those who once thought that Church and State never could be separated.

The Home Secretary, in particular, described the ministerial policy in this matter with a frankness which revealed in an almost amusing way the embarrassment of official Liberalism. He admitted that 'the question of an Established Church was seriously occupying the minds of the people of Scotland,' but added that 'nothing, he was assured, would be done in the matter until the great majority of the people were in favour of disestablishment.' With respect, however, to England, 'the question was far less mature.' No fair-minded man, he added, could deny 'that there was a great deal of truth in many of the statements' made by Mr. Miall, in regard to the shortcomings of the Establishment, and the extent to which the spiritual necessities of the people had been met by Nonconformists. But, he continued:—

'The practical question for the House to consider was whether they were for those reasons prepared to pass a resolution which would bind them at once to legislate on the subject. No Government would, he thought, be justified in undertaking such a task in the present state of public opinion. The calmness of his hon. friend in dealing with the question would, he was afraid, not be imitated by the country at large, and its discussion must lead to great dissension and controversy, although in the end the result might tend to promote peace and harmony. It was a subject on which no Government should attempt to legislate without the assurance of success. (Ironical cheers.) He was speaking without reference to the present or any other Government, and he must repeat that no Ministry would be justified in proceeding to deal with a question of such great importance without some assurance of success. ("Hear, hear," and a laugh.) It was the business of private members to ventilate such questions, and the duty of the Government to take them up only when public opinion declared it to be expedient.'

And then, as a solatium to those whom these ominous statements were calculated to disturb, he proceeded to say a few civil words about the great work which is being done by the Church of England, and the deep root she has taken in the affections of the people; returning, however, to the official line on which he started, by admitting that he 'was not prepared to defend the Established Church with any abstract arguments,' and insisting that, as prudent men, they must see their way more clearly before adopting such a motion. 'Call you that backing your friends?' was the indignant, and not unnatural reply of the fervent Dr. Ball, who declared that 'the Church would be defended as long as it did not imperil the interests of the Government, and no longer.'

Mr. Disraeli's milder expression of the opinion that 'when it comes to a question of maintaining the union between Church and State, I think your adhesion to the proposal, or your objection to it, should be founded on some principle which cannot be disputed, and guided by some policy which the country can comprehend,' did elicit from the Prime Minister 'very different sounds'—to use the language of Mr. Disraeli—but the substance was substantially the same. He could remind the Opposition leader that, notwithstanding his appreciation of principles, he himself was content to rest his defence of the Establishment, 'not so much upon adhesion to any abstract theory, or principle, as upon the fact that the convictions of the nation are in its favour, or, in other words, that public opinion is adverse to the motion of my honourable friend.' And it was, practically, upon this proposition Mr. Gladstone took his stand; while he, at the same time, strengthened his position by descriptions of the 'vastness of the operation' pointed at in the motion, and the immense difficulties which it would involve, and also dilated, with characteristic grace and copiousness, on the pre-eminent advantages resulting from the manner in which the Church of England discharges its practical duties. And his closing declaration went no further, and rose no higher, than this:—

'I cannot but stand upon the firm conviction that the nation which sent us here does not wish us to adopt the motion of the hon. member.... I do not think that it is necessary for us—indeed, I don't think the hon. gentleman expects that we should do so—to vote for a motion which we are firmly convinced is at variance with the established convictions of the country, and I shall venture to say to my hon. friend, what I am sure he will not resent, that if he seeks to convert the majority of the House of Commons to his opinions, he must begin by undertaking the preliminary work of converting to those opinions the majority of the people of England.'

When Mr. Miall led the attack on the Irish Establishment, in 1856, it was stated that the task of replying to him was assigned to Mr. Whiteside, but that the vehement representative of Dublin University was quite unprepared to deal with a case so dispassionately put as it was by Mr. Miall; while it is certain that he found his physical force oratory—as Mr. Bright once described it—much more available in a subsequent session, in denouncing the anticipated betrayal of the Church by Mr. Gladstone. Sir Roundell Palmer, however, did not shrink from fulfilling the intention which had been ascribed to him previous to the debate, and, perhaps, no fitter representative man could have been chosen for the purpose. Certainly no one could have succeeded more fully in keeping the discussion up to the high level to which its originator had sought to raise it. No one could be more candid in his recognition of the ability, and the admirable spirit, with which Mr. Miall had placed the subject before the House.[40] No one could be more discriminating in choosing the grounds on which his resistance was offered to the motion; and no one could put the case of the Church more suavely, or more willingly. But, notwithstanding all these high recommendations, the speech was a singularly weak one, in regard to both its reasoning and its facts. The latter, indeed, constituted the weakest part of his case—though, in some quarters, they are relied upon with a confidence which seems to us to be attributable either to imperfect knowledge, or to mistaken views of their bearing on the question in dispute.

The two main facts urged by Sir Roundell Palmer were these—first, that the existence of an Established Church no longer involves injustice to Nonconformists; second, that 'this great institution does a work of inestimable value over the whole land, and in every part of society,' and, more especially, that, to the poor, and in the rural parishes, it is of 'priceless value.'

If the first of these propositions can be sustained, the most effective weapon at their command will be taken out of the hands of the assailants of the Establishment. Mr. Miall, of course, insisted on the converse of that proposition with the utmost emphasis—denouncing, as he did, 'the essential and inseparable injustice involved in lifting one Church from among many into political ascendancy, and endowing it with property belonging to the people in their corporate capacity;' and affirming that 'the inmost principle of a Church Establishment is necessarily unjust in its operation,' and that 'man suffers injustice at the hands of the State when the State places him in a position of exceptional disadvantage on account of his religious faith, or his ecclesiastical associations.' Sir Roundell Palmer has two replies to this, viz., that what Dissenters 'call ascendancy' is 'no longer an ascendancy involving any civil rights, privileges, or advantage whatever,' and that those who do not participate in the benefit derived from the property in the hands of the Establishment 'fail to do so from simple choice.' He further asserts that the idea 'that no State institution intended for the public good can be just which everybody does not equally participate in,' would 'lead us into communism, or some other system of the kind.'

The plea that, the Establishment being open to all, no injustice is done to these who stay outside, is one which it is difficult to discuss with patience, even when seriously urged, as it seems to have been, by an opponent like Sir Roundell Palmer. We saw nothing of the inadequacy, as regards quantity, of that which the Establishment offers to all—an inadequacy so great that the offer becomes a mockery: it is enough to point out that that offer is one which, from the necessity of the case, cannot possibly be accepted. The well-known saying of Horne Tooke's that the London Tavern was open to every man—who could afford to pay the bill, suggests the answer to the shallow averment that the injustice endured by Nonconformists is, after all, self-inflicted. If they are ready to pay the price at which the advantages of the Establishment are offered to them, to sin against their convictions, and to swallow their conscientious scruples, they may enjoy religious equality within its pale, instead of struggling for it without. It is a new use of the old defence of the Irish Establishment so happily ridiculed by Thomas Moore, in his 'Dream of Hindostan:'—

Sir Roundell Palmer thinks that he has conceded everything which equity requires when he expresses entire agreement with Mr. Miall that 'no State authority ought to interfere with any man's religious belief,' and he clenches that admission by the bold assertion, that the ascendancy of the Church of England no longer involves 'any civil rights, privileges, or advantages whatever.' It might have occurred to him that, even if his statement were strictly accurate, the words 'no longer' pointed to a history of suffering and of struggle which resulted from the existence of an Establishment, and in which Nonconformists have figured as the victims. But is it accurate? Why at the moment the statement was made there was before Parliament—as there is likely to be for some time to come—a measure for extinguishing the clerical monopoly in parochial churchyards; the disabilities of Dissenters at Oxford and Cambridge had not been removed,[41] and there had just been published the new Statutes of Winchester and Harrow schools, which expressly insist that none but members of the Church shall be qualified to act as members of the governing bodies of those institutions! And, even when these grounds of just complaint have been removed, there will still exist in numerous Statutes, or Trusts, or Schemes, or Regulations, affecting matters of parochial, educational, or charitable administration, provisions which, directly or indirectly, exclude Dissenters from the national Church from the enjoyment of rights, privileges, and advantages, which Sir Roundell Palmer would have us believe are as much within the reach of Nonconformists as of Conformists.

That, however, is a very limited view of the subject which supposes that the principle of religious equality is violated only by means of Statutes of the realm which, in so many words, place the members of unestablished bodies on a different footing, as regards civil rights, from that occupied by members of the Establishment. For it may be safely asserted that for every act of exclusion, and every violation of the principle of equity, for which the legislature is responsible, in connection with an Established system, there are twenty others which are the indirect, though inevitable, result of that system. Establishment is a name for more than a collection of Statutes, and a particular mode of appropriating national property: it represents a powerful source of influence—a spring the force of which is felt throughout all the ramifications of society, and is often experienced by those who are unconsciously affected by it. Notwithstanding the lip-homage now paid to the principle of religious equality, even by politicians who once persistently fought against it, the ascendancy of the Church Establishment is sought to be upheld by public functionaries, by corporate bodies, and by individuals, organized and unorganized, in a hundred ways which are independent of legislation, but which, nevertheless, inflict, whether intentionally or not, great injustice on those who are attached to other religious communities.

No one would now venture to declare, as a Conservative journal did years ago, that a 'Dissenter is only half an Englishman,' but, so far as a right to share in all the advantages afforded by civilized society is concerned, that is the position in which he is, or is sought to be placed, even now. The question with which Mr. Leatham fairly startled Mr. Gladstone, 'How long are we, a party of Dissenters, to be led by a cabinet of Churchmen?' suggests other inquiries, of a more searching kind, which are even more strictly relevant to the point we are now considering. Take the public functionaries throughout the kingdom—the Commissioners who administer the affairs of important departments, some of which decide matters vitally affecting the interests of Nonconformists—the occupants of the magisterial bench—the trustees of public charities—the holders of municipal and parochial offices, great and small, and it will be seen that the large majority are connected with the State-favoured Church, and that offices of responsibility and influence, as well as of emolument, are filled by Dissenters in an inverse proportion to their numbers, their intelligence, and their energetic devotion to public duty.

These are some of the allegations with which we meet Sir Roundell Palmer's assertion that the Establishment no longer inflicts wrong on those who think it right to dissent; but there are others, the aptness of which will be still more apparent, because the facts come within the knowledge of a far larger class. Whatever may be the case in the great centres of population, it is certain that in the small towns, and especially in those rural districts, in which, we are told, the Establishment is so great a blessing, petty persecution, aiming at the repression of dissent, is as rife as when that Establishment could persecute by law. Is the dissenter a farmer? He is kept by Church landlords and landladies out of a whole district, as carefully as the rinderpest itself; or if he happens to be already in it, he is deported as quickly as lease, or agreement, will allow. Is he a shopkeeper? He must hold his head low, and consent to sell his principles with his wares, or he loses half his customers. Does he require education for his children? The day-school is, indeed, open to them, but attendance at the Sunday-school and the church is insisted upon, as part of the price to be paid for the education for which he, in common with other tax-payers, largely pays. Is he poor? So much the worse for him, when coals, blankets, and soup are distributed at Christmas; when parochial charities, intended to be unsectarian, are dispensed, or when misfortune makes him a fitting object for the help and sympathy of all his neighbours. Nay! he may be wholly independent of all around in regard to pecuniary circumstances—may have fortune, culture, and all the gifts and graces of refined and of Christian life; yet, if in the matter of the Lord his God he differs from those who worship at the altars of the Establishment, he, too, pays the penalty for conscientious Nonconformity, in the social exclusion, and the haughty contempt, which to certain minds make country life one of the hardest things to bear, and strongly tempt the children of wealthy Nonconformists to desert, and ultimately to despise, the communities to which they were once attached.

To these representations, as well as to others relating to the social discord created by an Establishment, it has been replied that they describe as much the result of the caste-feeling, which, rightly or wrongly, exists among us, as the result of the Church being established; that hard and fast lines will be drawn by individuals even when State-made distinctions have ceased; that we 'shall not get rid of the Church of England by disestablishing it;' and that 'so far from being less energetic in the assertion of its claims,' it will be 'more energetic than ever.' The rejoinder is, that the existence of a state-maintained Church aggravates social tendencies sufficiently bad enough in themselves to require no encouragement—that, when the possessors of invidious privileges find their privileges endangered, they think themselves justified in doing what they would otherwise condemn—that acts such as we have indicated are committed to a far greater extent by the members of established than of unestablished bodies, and that Episcopalianism in America, and in our own colonies, does not adopt the repressive, and the oppressive, policy to which it resorts at home. Sir Roundell Palmer's dictum that 'One of the advantages of a union which subsists between Church and State is, that it gives to the former an inducement to act in a more liberal and conciliatory spirit than can be relied upon if the relations between the two were different,' is, in our judgment, contrary to the facts of history; and if the Church is, at the present time, 'bound over to keep the peace' as it has not been before, it is just because the ties between Church and State are loosened, and liberality and moderation are necessary to prevent their being quickly severed.

There is one other aspect of the case to which, perhaps, full justice was not done by any of the speakers in the late debate, and that is the influence exerted by the Establishment, in regard to opinion, as affecting both theological belief and ecclesiastical practice. The Nonconformist objection to an Establishment, as popularly put, is, that it appropriates public property to the maintenance of a Church, the advantages of which cannot be shared by large sections of the community. That is true, but it is not the whole truth; for even if the Church found its own capital, and the State gave nothing but authority and privilege, the Nonconformist would still have ground to complain of the injustice done to him by the junction of the two bodies. The pocket objection, strong as it is, is, after all, neither the strongest nor the highest. To the man who, in these days of shifting and uncertain belief, holds definite views of truth, and especially of the highest forms of truth, it is less a grievance that the State should deprive him of his share of public property than that it should exert its influence on behalf of what he believes to be mischievous error—error, possibly, dishonouring to God, as well as detrimental to men. The member for Richmond says that he is at one with the member for Bradford in thinking that 'no State authority ought to interfere with any man's religious belief;' but what is interference with man's religious belief? Is no one's belief interfered with when the Canons of a national Church excommunicate ipso facto all impugners of the Articles, the worship, or the government of that Church, until they have repented, and publicly revoked, their 'wicked errors?' Is the Unitarian belief not interfered with by the state-sanctioned Athanasian creed? Or the Baptist belief by the baptismal service? Or the Quaker belief by the eucharistic doctrines of the Church? Or, to put the question in the broadest form, is the Roman Catholic's belief not interfered with when there is established a Protestant Church, which asserts that the leading tenets, or practices, of the Romish Church are damnable and idolatrous?

It is true that everybody in the country is free to protest against the creed and practices of the Establishment, but why should anyone have to protest at all? The Nonconformist may enforce his own views of truth and religious duty, but why should the State, which is invested with authority derived from him, in common with his fellow-citizens, not only compel him to become a Nonconformist, but put a heavy premium on the acceptance of that which he feels it to be his duty to denounce? This is a question, the force of which increases in proportion as the Established clergy assert their right to set at defiance authorized doctrinal standards and rubrics, as well as to disregard the most solemn judicial decisions; for the points of theological antagonism between their teaching and the views of Nonconformists will multiply as confusion grows within the Church. But we are content to enforce our present point by an illustration drawn from a state of things with which we have long been familiar, rather than from any new development of clerical extravagance. Here, for instance, are specimens of the teaching of one of the authorized instructors of the people, taken from a twopenny catechism, entitled Some questions of the Church Catechism, and doctrines involved, briefly explained, for the use of families and parochial schools; by the Rev. J. A. Gace, M.A., Vicar of Great Barling, Essex,[42] and which, we understand, is circulated widely in many parishes far distant from the author's.

'85. Q. We have amongst us various Sects and Denominations who go by the general name of Dissenters. In what light are we to consider them? A. As heretics; and in our Litany we expressly pray to be delivered from the sins of "false doctrine, heresy, and schism."

'86. Q. Is then their worship a laudable service? A. No; because they worship God according to their own evil and corrupt imaginations, and not according to His revealed will, and therefore their worship is idolatrous.

'87. Q. Is Dissent a great sin? A. Yes; it is in direct opposition to our duty towards God.

'94. Q. But why have not Dissenters been excommunicated? A. Because the law of the land does not allow the wholesome law of the Church to be acted upon; but Dissenters have virtually excommunicated themselves by setting up a religion of their own, and leaving the ark of God's Church.

'98. Q. Is it wicked then to enter a meeting-house at all? A. Most assuredly; because, as was said above, it is a house where God is worshipped otherwise than He has commanded, and therefore it is not dedicated to His honour and glory; and besides this, we run the risk of being led away by wicked enticing words; at the same time, by our presence we are witnessing our approval of their heresy, wounding the consciences of our weaker brethren, and by our example teaching others to go astray.

'99. Q. But is language such as this consistent with charity? A. Quite so: for when there is danger of the true worshippers of God falling into error we cannot speak too plainly, or warn them too strongly of their perilous state; at the same time that it is our duty to declare in express terms to those who are without, that they are living separate from Christ's body, and consequently out of the pale of salvation, so far, at least, as God has thought fit to reveal.'

Assuming, as we may fairly do, that the author of all this—well! we need not describe it—preaches as he publishes, have the heretics and sinners whom he thus consigns to perdition no right to complain that, besides receiving—according to the 'Clergy List'—£230 a year of public money, he should also be invested with authority by the State? It is idle to say that truth is truth, and falsehood falsehood, and that the one will prevail, and the other perish, no matter whether he who utters it is an established clergyman, or a dissenting preacher. In the long run it will be so, but the struggle between truth and falsehood is prolonged when, instead of the two being left fairly to grapple with each other, the weight of State-influence, as well as of State-gold, is thrown into the wrong scale. To speak plainly, the establishment of a Church is an organized system of bribery in favour of that Church. It may fail to buy the adherence of strong and independent minds, but the minds of the majority are neither the one nor the other. It appeals successfully to the self-seeking, the timid, the conventional, the fashion-loving, and they are to be found among every class of the community. And, in doing so, it inflicts injustice—injustice to those who reject the established doctrines, even though they may be in possession of every civil right.

'The Established Church will certainly not be weakened by the debate of Tuesday,' was the final conclusion of the Times, in the three fluctuating leaders devoted to the subject, and that is true in the sense in which it is true that an army hard pressed by an enemy is not weakened by abandoning an untenable position, and by retreating within its inner line of defence. And that is just what the English Establishment has done, so far as its present position is indicated by the late debate. Almost everything in the shape of à priori argument on its behalf has been given up, and it has fallen back on the plea of utility alone. In doing so, it has adapted itself to a characteristic of Englishmen, of whom Emerson has smartly said that, while there is nothing which they hate so much as a theory, they will bow down and worship a fact. It does not, however, follow that objectors to the Establishment are bound to confine themselves to the same weapons as those selected for the defence. The reasoning based on religious principle which—strange anomaly! seeing that Parliament charges itself with responsibility for the religious concerns of the nation—is thought to be unfit for the House of Commons, may still be employed with effect in influencing pious and thoughtful minds elsewhere. Nor can the reasoning which appeals to men's sense of equity be disposed of in the summary fashion adopted by Sir Roundell Palmer. An institution based on principles which are radically unsound cannot long be vindicated solely with reference to its alleged usefulness. That which is unjust cannot be permanently upheld, because it is seemingly successful. The painted sepulchre is a sepulchre, though painted; and if an establishment really contravenes the rules of right, its most brilliant, and even its most solid achievements, will ultimately fail to prolong its existence.

When the Church of England, put upon its defence as a Church established by law, insists that it is the source of blessings to the community, amply worth the price which the community is required to pay for them, it indicates no lack of Christian or of generous feeling to examine these claims in the same practical way in which they are put forward. Especially is it necessary to discriminate between the action of the Church simply as such, and its action as a Church specially favoured by the State, as well as to see that, while acknowledging all its deeds of goodness, we do not draw from them a totally erroneous inference. It does not seem to us that very much is conceded, if we admit the correctness of Sir Roundell Palmer's assertion that the Church of England is exerting more influence over the country than all the other religious bodies put together. Why—to quote the language of the Times, used for an opposite purpose—'a man of education might be expected to remember that modern Dissent can only boast a history of a hundred and fifty years, and that before it arose the whole system of the Church of England was firmly consolidated.' And, besides the advantage of a long start, she has had wealth, power, and prestige—all three being enjoyed at the expense of Nonconformity, and yet the nett result is, that she only does more than all the unestablished bodies, and in doing so, leaves masses of the people almost untouched by her ministrations! Let it be remembered also, that these descriptions of the Establishment, which are intended to reconcile us to its existence, are descriptions which, to a large extent, have been applicable only during the last fifty years. No one would speak of the Church in the days of the Georges as he may rightly speak of her in the days of Victoria; for one of her own clergy—the Rev. Sydney Smith—has characteristically declared that during the former period 'the clergy of England had no more influence over the people than the cheesemongers of England.' And whence the change? Is it attributable to the action of the Establishment principle—to the retention of Parliamentary grants, or to the multiplication of political privileges? On the contrary, not until voluntaryism had to so great an extent supplied the deficiency existing in connection with State-endowments and compulsory exactions, and not until the process of disestablishment had, in principle, been commenced, has the Church of England earned the eulogiums of which she is now deservedly the subject. Sir Roundell Palmer asks for the gratitude of Dissenters because the zeal and energy of the Church have given to them a powerful stimulus, and reminds us that, in regard to architecture, to music, and to modes of worship, they have not hesitated to copy the Church from which they dissent. Well! we are as thankful as he is for that 'community of feeling between the most enlightened and best of men on both sides,' which not only brings them together, but leads them to select for imitation each other's wisest and best methods. But is the obligation all on one side? Does the Church owe nothing to Nonconformity, in regard to zeal, to organization, to education, to hymnology, to preaching, and, above all, to the pecuniary aspects of voluntaryism? She is welcome to all she has borrowed, and we hope that it may be possible to import into her own system other admitted excellencies, to be found in those of Nonconformists; but does this interchange of influence between different Churches justify the placing of one in an exceptional position, to the prejudice of the rest; and is Nonconformity,

to have an Establishment foisted upon it in perpetuity, because it has done so much to make such institution more tolerable than in days of yore? And what authority had Sir Roundell Palmer for the assertion that Mr. Miall wished, 'for certain theoretical reasons, to destroy the whole of the immense machinery by which all this good is done?' If by this it was intended to suggest that all the good effected by the Church of England comes out of its legal position, Mr. Miall would deny the correctness of the suggestion; while, on the other hand, if no inconsiderable portion of that good be the result of the piety and devotedness of Churchmen—manifested in spite, rather than as the result, of Establishment—he would repudiate any intention to destroy, or in any way to hinder their work.

We have said that the case of the Establishment has been made to rest solely on the utilitarian argument; and we now add that the range of that argument is practically limited to the rural parishes. Sir Roundell Palmer admits that in the large towns the Church of England is not overtaking the spiritual wants of the population; though he thinks that its efforts to do so are greater than those of Dissenters. That is to say, the influence of the Establishment is smallest where the intellectual and moral forces which ultimately decide the country's destinies exist—a large admission, and one which will have cumulative weight as time progresses. Mr. Miall, he complained, 'did not sufficiently distinguish between the position of the working classes in the towns and the working classes in the country,' and, with regard to the last, he affirmed that, 'speaking generally, they are members of the Church, and through the Church they are partakers of benefits of every description, spiritual, moral, and even temporal.' 'Those,' he added, 'who know the rural districts of this country, will bear testimony to the existence of multitudes upon multitudes of poor people who have in them both "sweetness and light."' And then—utterly ignoring the influence exercised by all other agencies—he stated that he could not 'imagine any institution to which this character of the labouring poor is due more than to that which has placed in the centre of the population of every part of the country a man educated and intelligent, whose business it is to do them good, whose whole and sole business is to take care of their souls as far as by God's help he is enabled to do so, in every way and in all circumstances of life to be their friend and counsellor.'

We assume that Scotland is not included in the sphere within which the Established system has wrought thus beneficently. We assume also that, after the facts and figures for which the House and country are indebted to Mr. Richard, M.P., the Principality of Wales also may be excluded from the map of the territory over which the sun of the Establishment sheds these blessings, and, probably, a candid Episcopalian would hesitate to claim for his Church credit for all the civilization and Christianity to be found in Cornwall, and some other districts. So that, tried by a geographical test, the argument may be pared down even yet lower than it has been by the speaker himself.

But are we to be satisfied with Arcadian pictures, or to seek to build on solid fact? We repeat Mr. Miall's question—what is the condition of the rural parishes? and for an answer refer, not to Blue Books alone, but to the knowledge of living men. How are 'the men whose whole and sole business it is to take care of the souls' of our villagers discharging their high function? Are they feeding them with the bread of life, or with 'the husks which the swine do eat,' in the shape of superstitious teaching, or of vapid formalism? Is it not in our village parishes that there are to be found the most stolid ignorance and the grossest superstition? Can there not be reckoned up by hundreds parishes in which spiritual deadness and intellectual stagnation are the prevailing characteristics of the population—or where the only ray of light issues from the mission-station of the despised itinerant preacher, and the only mental activity is due to the self-sacrificing efforts of a handful of, perhaps, persecuted Dissenters? These are the kind of questions which will be stirred up by Sir Roundell Palmer's statements, and other recent utterances of the like kind. Those statements are, no doubt, true of certain parishes, and the number of those parishes is, we are glad to believe, increasing; but that they accurately describe the majority of rural parishes we utterly disbelieve, and surprise must not be felt if, henceforth, there is less reticence than there has been in regard to the real working of the Establishment in those districts in which it is now alleged to be the greatest blessing.

We have heard of those who represent the world as resting upon the back of a tortoise; and now the case of the English Establishment is based upon the agricultural labourer. Even a journal having so unclerical a bias as the Pall Mall Gazette gravely declares that

'Without the parson of the parish the English parish itself would revert to that barbarism from which it is, even under existing circumstances, not so very distantly removed. The agricultural labourers of this country have been not altogether unjustly described as a class without hope; but whatever chance of kindness or consolation they may have in need, sickness, or the approach of death, depends in the main on the presence and the comparative affluence of the parish clergyman.'

Thus, as Earl Russell once vindicated the Irish Establishment by alleging that it gave the farmer in every parish a customer for his eggs and butter, so in England it has now become the fashion to look upon the Established clergy as auxiliary relieving officers, or as a supplementary county police. It is not a high conception of their functions; while it indicates the kind of impression which the Church, as a spiritual institution, has made upon the political and religiously-indifferent class. Nor will it reconcile good men, whether in the Church of England or out of it, to a continuance of the evils, the anomalies and the perplexities which are now admitted to be inseparably connected with its position as an establishment. The eggs and butter argument did not save the Irish Establishment; and neither will the resident gentlemen theory save that of England. An institution is, in fact, doomed when its advocates are thus obliged to descend from the higher ground which they previously occupied, to one—comparatively speaking—so miserably low. The question 'what will become of the rural parishes if the Church be disestablished?' is one which should be and can be answered; but, even if no satisfactory answer were forthcoming, it would not be practicable to maintain intact all the elaborate and costly machinery which goes by the name of an establishment.

It is not our purpose to deduce from the debate on which we have been commenting any practical lessons for the guidance of those whose principles and aims it was the object of Mr. Miall to advance. The leaders of the movement are not likely to be led by any elation of feeling, resulting from the recent rapidity of their progress, to relax the exertions needed to overcome the difficulties still awaiting them; while they are acute enough to perceive the direction in which they must in future work. If the passing of the Irish Church Act demonstrated the possibility of disuniting Church and State by peaceful, legal, and constitutional means, it has now been made equally evident that, whenever public opinion calls for a similar measure for England and for Scotland, our statesmen will be prepared to comply with the demand. And, although we are not sanguine enough to expect that the remaining stages of the controversy will be passed through with the placidity which characterized the recent debate, we yet hope that the fairness of spirit, and the generosity of feeling, which were conspicuous from its commencement to its close, will exert a perceptible influence on disputants in a less elevated arena. The issue to be tried is one which, from its very nature, should restrain, rather than excite evil passions, and which pre-eminently calls for the manifestation of a broad and catholic feeling, instead of a narrow and acrid sectarianism. If it be useless to cry 'Peace—peace!' amid the din of conflict, that conflict may yet be carried on in a spirit which will make it easy for victor and vanquished presently to rejoice together, in what will be ultimately felt to be a gain for interests which are equally precious to both.

Contemporary Literature.

HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, AND TRAVELS.

The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. By J. P. Prendergast, Barrister-at-law. Second Edition. Enlarged. With a Facsimile of a Cromwellian Debenture. Longmans. 1870.

It is the tritest of common places to deplore the persistency with which the Irish will go back to early times, and explain the failure of the well-meant attempts of modern legislation by narrating old persecutions. They will do it; and the practical effect of their doing so is seen, in the agitation for 'home government' among the wilder spirits in Fenianism, among men like Mr. Butt and Mr. J. Martin. But, though we regret the 'over-long memory' of the Irish, we cannot but feel that Englishmen have never paid attention enough to the history of the sister island. To most English readers everything beyond what it suited the purpose of Macaulay and Carlyle and Froude to tell them, is a mere blank. Educated men read with surprise in Mr. Hill-Burton's Scotland, the statement that Ireland was the old Scotia, the Scotia major when it becomes necessary to make a distinction, and that the perfervidum ingenium which carried four Scotia missionaries over the whole continent, is that very temperament which makes the Irish of to-day so impatient of English rule. Mr. Reichel's lectures, again (chiefly known, we fear, only through the appreciative notices of them in the Saturday Review) have been a sort of new revelation of the way in which Popery was forced upon Ireland by the English invaders, and of the general state of the country in Plantagenet times. Even Mr. Froude continually overthrows preconceived opinions—as when he proves that in Elizabeth's time the only part of Ireland where there was anything like peace and security was that which was still ruled by native princes; 'the pale' being ground down by taxation and ravaged by an unpaid soldiery, the successors of those 'paddy persons' who under Leicester had made England despicable in the Netherlands, whilst Ulster, under Shane O'Neil, was quiet and prosperous. What Englishman, again, had anything like a true notion of the disgraceful horrors of '98, till he read Massey's George the Third? Yet Irishmen know and ponder over all these things. A whole library of cheap historical monographs has for many years spread the knowledge of them broadcast; and to this reading, unhappily so one-sided, is due that stubborn 'ingratitude' as we call it, which even the Disestablishment and the Land Bill fail to satisfy.

Mr. Prendergast's book (which we see has reached a second edition) is perhaps the very best that an Englishman could read in order to master the causes of Irish discontent. It is well written in every sense; full of minute research, which the author's office as cataloguer of the Carte papers in the Bodleian enabled him to make; graphic in its descriptions, and abounding in a kind of grim humour which suits the story well. It is the work, in fact, of an educated Irishman.

Its object is to show how the Long Parliament, taking occasion from the massacre of 1641, declared the whole of Ireland forfeited, and, assigning Connaught as a home for the native population, divided the rest into lots, which were given, partly to those who advanced money to raise the Parliamentary army, partly in lieu of pay to the officers and soldiers of that army. Mr. Prendergast does not give many details of Cromwell's conquest—sufficiently known from Carlyle's Letters; but he traces narrowly the history of the deportation, and shows how, after causing incredible misery, it failed in 'thoroughness.'

The only doubtful portion of the book is the preliminary attempt to explain away what our author styles 'the so-called massacre of 1641.' The attempt will hardly satisfy anyone, and in some it may awaken an unfair prejudice against the rest of the work. No doubt as to this 'massacre' there was immense exaggeration. It gave occasion for just the sort of cry which the Parliament wanted to strengthen their hands against Charles. He and Strafford, tolerant for their own ends, had no prejudice against the use of those Irish Papists whom the great majority of the King's party looked on much as Chatham in the American war looked on our Red Indian allies. He therefore encouraged the Irish of the North, smarting under the sense of James's confiscations and Strafford's oppression, to arm with the view of helping him against the Scots. They were to have come over and joined the Highlanders in crushing the army of the Covenant. There is no doubt about it: since Mr. Prendergast wrote, facts cited by Mr. Burton in his recent history, prove that O'Neil's commission was not (as one historian after another has repeated) 'a forgery with an old seal torn off an abbey charter stuck upon it,' it was a bonâ fide document sealed with the Great Seal of Scotland—a bit of that clumsy 'statecraft' which the Stuarts learned from Elizabeth, for the Scotch seal had, of course, no real power in Ireland.

Unfortunately for Charles both Irish and Scotch went to work more quickly than he had expected. The first thought was naturally enough that to recover their own lands was at least as important as to aid Charles; so Sir Phelim O'Neil began his rising by driving out all the English settlers instead of waiting till Ormonde was ready to seize the strong places, and above all to get possession of Dublin. The Scots, again, did not stop till Charles, who knew well enough that he could not trust his English troops, had brought over his Irish forces against them. They crossed the border, and the fight at Newburn and the capture of Newcastle were the results. The actual killing done by the rebels in 1641 has (we have said) been vastly exaggerated; the mischief was that thousands were turned out of house and home and driven off Dublin-wards in very inclement weather. Mr. Prendergast stoutly asserts that it was the English and Scotch who began the killing: their reprisals were certainly fearfully severe. Even Sir J. Turner, seasoned as he had been to cruelty in the thirty years' war, shuddered at the work which he was expected to do in Ireland: his description of the massacre at Newry-bridge, where priests ('popish pedlars'), merchants who had taken no share in the defence of the town, and women were flung into the river and then fired at like drowning-rats, is very shocking (Hill-Burton, vol. vii. 154). The fact is that the report of Irish atrocities, industriously magnified by the Parliament, had maddened the other side; and the Indian Mutiny, and the Jamaica trouble, show what the Anglo-Saxon is capable of when he is excited by garbled reports. Along with this feeling of race was mixed that religious rancour which led the 'new English' to include the 'old English' (mostly Papists) in the same category as the aborigines. Parliament fostered—conscientiously, but still in opposition to all sound toleration principles—this religious hatred, in order to alarm the Cavaliers, who were mostly as anti-Romanist as their opponents, and so to deprive Charles of any advantage from the Irish Romanists. Parliament, moreover, knew that the 'massacre' was exaggerated; else they would not have been content to levy troops for the Irish war, and then to employ them in England instead, quietly leaving Ireland to itself till Cromwell had leisure to conquer it.

Mr. Prendergast's strong points are, first, the silence of all records—a silence which is complete (he says) till the Commission, sent over five years after, begins to get up evidence. Second, the certainty (in his eyes) that the English began the murderings: on this we have the counter-evidence of Sir Charles Coote, in the trial of Maguire; but Coote was emphatically a man of blood even in that bloody age; he had made a great part of Connaught a desert; and as a witness he is worthless. Third, the assertion that nearly all such killing as there was, was in the way of ordinary war, as war then and there was carried on.

But whether the reader is persuaded or not that our author has proved his point as to 1641, there is unfortunately no doubt at all as to what follows. The transplantation was an attempt to exile a whole nation; and it failed as it deserved to fail. No doubt there was plenty of justification for such a deed. The Jesuits and the house of Austria had already done something of the kind on a small scale in several parts of Germany; the St. Bartholomew had shown how impossible it is for Rome to keep politics and religion apart. And the theory of a compact Protestant Saxondom with the Shannon for its western boundary was just what would commend itself to the most earnest minds of the time. When even M. Guizot nowadays doubts whether we can extend to Rome the same measures of toleration to which other sects have an undoubted right, we can well understand how the men of that day, fresh from the smart of Rome's blows, should have felt all pact with her to be impossible. The priest was one of the 'three burdensome beasts'—the others being the wolf (whose numbers had vastly increased during this time of misery) and the 'Tory' i.e., the dispossessed landowner who refused to go into Connaught, and lived as a freebooter till he was shot down or hanged. For all these three, as we have said, rewards were offered, and for the 'sport' of hunting them we refer the reader to our author's pages. The anti-Popish feeling was equally strong in the king's party. Hyde (afterwards Lord Clarendon) writes in 1654, 'Fiennes is made Chancellor of Ireland. And they doubt not to plant that kingdom without opposition. And truly if we can get it again, we shall find difficulties removed which a virtuous prince and more quiet times could never have compassed.' The plan was not original: in Henry VIII.'s time it was regularly systematized (State Papers, vol. i. 177); and Cowley's treatise in the State Papers (i. 323) is in this respect but an anticipation of Spenser's well-known State of Ireland.

Of the misery which was caused by this wholesale eviction—after the work had been facilitated by the banishment to Spanish service of 40,000 fighting men and the transportation of crowds more to Barbadoes and elsewhere—some idea may be formed from the following picture. 'A party of horse (Prendergast, p. 308), Tory-hunting on a dark night, saw a light in the distance, which they found to proceed from a ruined cabin, wherein was a great fire of wood, and sitting round about it a company of miserable old women and children, and betwixt them and the fire a dead corpse lay broiling, which as the fire roasted they cut off collops and ate.' This is the record of Colonel Richard Lawrence, an eye-witness. No wonder the wolves multiplied so that even the environs of Dublin became unsafe.

That part of the Parliament's doings which grates most on modern ears is their abundant use of Old Testament passages to enforce their edicts. The Irish had such 'an evil witchery,' as Mr. Froude calls it, that even the incoming Puritans got on friendly terms with them. The most stringent orders were therefore issued to keep the two asunder. The Irish are 'a people of God's wrath,' and to intermarry with them is forbidden in the language used by Ezra to forbid the mixed marriages of the Jews. Officers guilty of such a crime are cashiered; dragoons are reduced to common soldiers; soldiers are flogged and made pioneers. 'The moderate Cavalier,' 1675, says that he and his fellows

Of course the mode of paying troops with patches of land was wholly delusive, as the history of the Roman Cæsars might have warned those who adopted it that it would be. Instead of getting a compact body of settlers forming a sort of 'military frontier,' the Parliament unwittingly created vast estates and introduced absenteeism. The soldiers did not care to stay in a poor wasted country where native labour was scarcely to be had: they sold their 'lots' to their officers or others for a horse, a barrel of beer, a little ready money, &c. Thus was laid the foundation of colossal estates like that of the Pettys. It was the same with the small debenture holders; a London vintner or cook who had contributed £25 to the good cause, and held a debenture to that amount for land in Kerry, was not likely to go out and turn backwoodsman. He sold to one of the larger holders; and these larger holders were soon obliged to connive at the gradual return of the dispossessed Irish, who were content (except the Tories) to till as cottiers and hinds the lands which they had lately owned. Thus it was that, despite such a mixture of zeal and cruelty as that to which the book bears witness, the Puritan idea was never realized.

We shall not be suspected of undervaluing our Puritan forefathers: they were the salt of the earth in their day; they did the Lord's work right well in many ways. But in Ireland they failed because, while taking Scripture for their guide, they forgot the truth that 'the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.'

The English Colonization of America during the Seventeenth Century. By Edward D. Neill. Strahan and Co.

Mr. Neill is one of those inconvenient persons who will permit no romance of story-telling to condone falsehood or exaggeration. He would have been a terrible bore to Hume, who is said to have deprecated fresh materials from the State Paper Office, lest they should disturb his conclusions. He would spoil the best anecdote in the world by asking, 'Is it true?' His book is written avowedly to rectify historical fictions respecting the English colonization of America; and it certainly does destroy some very pretty stories, which have furnished themes for both romance and poetry. His book, however, is in itself a history, as well as a correction; and although it can boast no glowing narrative or artistic skill, it reads very pleasantly. One of the romances that he entirely destroys is that of 'Pocahontas and John Rolfe.' Even Bancroft speaks of Rolfe as a young, amiable, enthusiastic Englishman, who, even in his dreams, heard 'a voice crying in his ears that he should strive to make Pocahontas, a young Indian maiden, a Christian, and constrained by the love of Christ, uniting her to himself by the holy bonds of matrimony.' Mr. Neill conclusively proves, by documentary evidence, drawn from the records of the London Company's Transactions, that Rolfe had been for some years previously a married man, and that at his death he left a white widow and some children, beside his son by Pocahontas; and that Pocahontas herself, instead of a romantic Indian maiden, was a bit of an intriguer—with a slightly disreputable character.