Editorial note — From The Month. DR. PUSEY ON THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[Footnote 75: We are not, of course, answering Dr. Pusey's book; but we cannot help quoting a single passage from the treatise "On the Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost," lately published by his grace the Archbishop of Westminster, which simply destroys the whole theory on which Dr. Pusey reasons. Few things of the kind can be more refreshing than to turn from the pages of Dr. Pusey to the clear, bright, simple, and precise statements of Dr. Manning. It is like breathing pure country air after groping about in a London fog; and the fanciful and unsubstantial images that bewilder the readers of the Eirenicon vanish like so much mist and vapor as the majestic outlines of the Church, as sketched by the archbishop, take possession of the mind. No one who reads this book will need any other answer to that of Dr. Pusey. On the point before us the archbishop says: "There are some who appeal from the voice of the living Church to antiquity, professing to believe that while the Church was united was infallible; that when it became divided it ceased to speak infallibly; and that the only certain rule or faith is to believe that which the Church held and taught while yet it was united, and therefore infallible. Such reasoners fail to observe that since the supposed division and cessation of the infallible voice there remains no divine certainty as to what was then infallibly taught. To affirm that this or that doctrine was taught then where it is now disputed, is to beg the question. The infallible Church of the first six centuries—that is, before the division—was infallible to those who lived in those ages, but is not infallible to us. It spoke to them; to us it is silent. The infallibility does not reach to us; for the Church of the last twelve hundred years is by the hypothesis fallible, and may therefore err in delivering to us what was taught before the division. And it is certain that either the East or the West, as it is called, must err in this, for they contradict each other as to the faith before the division. I do not speak of the protests of later separations, because no one can invest them with an infallibility which they not only disclaim for themselves, but deny anywhere to exists" (pp. 74, 75).]