having got rid of God, the Church, and the Bible, have dwarfed all three to their own dimensions, and made heaven and earth, the Law and the Gospel, the present and the future, a grotesque reflection and miniature presentment-of themselves!

We have a more reverent estimate of the Bible, as of other sacred things, than Dr. Barker. It is not for us the echo of all the diseased fancies of human conceit, impiety, and wilfulness. It is the Word of God, not of man, and bears one interpretation, not a hundred. But this is not the only reproach which Christians have to address to Dr. Barker. Like all other Protestants, in his hot haste to defame the Church, he is willing to make the Bible only a collection of human opinions, and Christianity a tissue of senseless contradictions. And even this does not content him. While he lives only to dishonour the Bible, he impudently accuses the Church of the Most High God of striving to suppress it! With the profane levity of a self-sufficient sectary," blaspheming the things that he knows not," he passes from the odious to the absurd, and dares to accuse the Church of a crime only less frightful than that which he gaily commits himself; for it would be a more tolerable impiety to suppress the Bible altogether than to make of it what he does. Even Neander would tell him, at least by implication, that his leading tenet is sheer Paganism. The old Pagans thought, like Dr. Barker, that " with the diversity of nations and the varieties of the human race was necessarily connected the diversity of religions."* But they attributed this diversity to the will of God, which Dr. Barker attributes to the character of His revelation. Themistius applauded, as Protestants do, "the rivalship of the different religions," and Heraclitus said of the Unknown God: "It is his will that the Syrians should worship him in one way, the Greeks in another, and the Egyptians in still another." Absolute truth was as inconceivable by the heathen as by Dr. Barker, and they argued, just as he does, that "differences can never cease." "The Syrians," continues Heraclitus, "are not agreed among themselves, but are subdivided into different minor sects. None have precisely the same notions with the others," which Dr. Barker considers a beautiful result of what he calls "honesty" and "freedom of inquiry." "Why, then," was the Pagan conclusion, which exactly coincides with the Protestant-Australian, "should we try to force that which is impossible in the nature of things?" They would evidently have hailed Dr. Barker as one of themselves, and with good

* Neander, “Church History,” vol. ii. p. 127, ed. Torrey.

reason; but Neander, in spite of his Protestantism, justly replies, and condemns his own religion in doing so: "Christianity substituted an objective, firm, and steadfast word of God," and was accused of intolerance for doing so―"in place of the impure and barely subjective presentment, feeling, and opinion of men, which confounded godlike with ungodlike" (p. 127). If Neander had proposed to refute Dr. Barker, his language need not have varied by so much as a single word.

It is no marvel if a man who makes God's holy revelation "barely subjective," and a mere reflection of the shifting "opinion of men," should speak as ignorantly of the Church as he does of the Bible, and consistently hold up both to the contempt of mankind. His only excuse is that he knows not what he is doing, the only attenuation of his crime that he probably would not commit it, if he had intelligence enough to understand its enormity. His random words are not the conscious utterance of intellectual impiety, but only the weak reverberation of ignorant nonsense. Hallam was candid enough to admit that "the Reformation appealed to the ignorant," and it does not seem to have changed its character by migrating to the Antipodes. Dr. Barker gravely informed his hearers that the Middle Ages "were times of ignorance of the Scriptures," and no doubt they believed him. "The night of darkness," said this unconscious defamer of Christianity, "was indeed long; the truth had been fettered and thrust into the inner prison, and its feet made fast in the stocks." Yet the guilty men who thus put truth in manacles, and neither knew nor wished to know anything of the Scriptures, were themselves for long ages the light of the world, and of thousands of them it might be said, as William of Malmesbury says of S. Wulstan, lying, standing, walking, sitting, he had always a psalm on his lips, always Christ in his heart." They literally lived on the Holy Scriptures, large portions of which they knew by heart, as a well-known Protestant writer will tell us presently. Dr. Barker knows no more how they lived and what they were than a Figi islander does, and only displays in discussing them and their times what Aristotle pleasantly called "all-daring ignorance." We will not quote Catholic authorities against him, since the best and wisest of men, whom the grace of God raised to the stature of angels, are precisely those whom he esteems least. He has sense enough to perceive that if his religion is true, theirs was a lie, and entertains the droll persuasion that the Master whom they loved so well, and who repaid them with greater love, abandoned them all for a thou

sand years to a "night of darkness," even while He lavished on them every supreme grace, with the purpose of one day correcting their errors by the incomparable wisdom and virtue of the Protestant reformer. But even he will perhaps admit that other Protestants, who share with him the valuable right of "freedom of inquiry," may possibly make as good a use of it as he does, though they come to totally opposite conclusions; unless, indeed, he is of opinion, like others of his class, that they have only a right to think for themselves, provided they think as he does.

Milman was as robust a Protestant as Dr. Barker himself, but a trifle more learned and critical. He had heard of the Vulgate, which apparently Dr. Barker has not, perhaps because it appeared about eleven hundred years before what the latter calls the "earthquake" of the Reformation. "Jerome's Bible," says Milman, " is a wonderful work, still more as achieved by one man." After observing that "it almost created a new language," he adds, that it was this marvellous translation which "fixed for centuries the dominion of Latin Christianity over the mind of man."* Dr. Barker, who makes his own facts as he makes his own Bible, attributes that dominion to "forgeries sanctioned by infallible Popes." Milman refers it to the labour of S. Jerome, and the gift of the Vulgate with which he enriched Christendom; and though Milman errs in that statement, his error is venial compared with that of Dr. Barker. We shall find him contradicting Dr. Barker still more emphatically on other subjects. Meanwhile, as the supposed attitude of the Church towards the Holy Scriptures, of which our Divine Lord made her the sole guardian and interpreter, is the main topic of Dr. Barker's indictment against her, we invite the attention of this prodigiously inaccurate Australian to another Protestant writer, who has examined the whole question with patient toil, and comes to conclusions which might be advantageously recorded on marble tablets-any other durable substance would do as well-on the inner and outer walls of the "Protestant Hall" of Sydney. Dr. Barker has probably heard of Maitland's "Dark Ages," though it may be doubted whether his peculiar view of "freedom of inquiry" would encourage him to make acquaintance with a book in which his own nonsensical calumnies are so mercilessly exposed. The vigorous mind of the Lambeth librarian was clouded by the prejudices of heresy, which are always obstacles against a really independent use of natural reason; but we rejoice to indulge the hope that the

"Latin Christianity," vol. i. ch. 2, p. 95, 3rd edition.

service which he rendered to truth, in spite of his own errors, may have propitiated the compassionate favour of that merciful Judge who is never more generous and munificent in His rewards than in recompensing those who defend His Church from the slanders of ignorance and the reproaches of folly. Our space will only permit us to offer a very brief analysis of the celebrated work to which we are going to refer.

Dr. Barker has told us that the "unreformed" ages, when men were content with revelation as God gave it, and did not fancy they were qualified to make a better Church than He did, or to restore the pure doctrine which He had suffered to perish, "were times of ignorance of the Scriptures." Is Dr. Barker right or wrong? It is a grave question for his own soul. Here is the Protestant Maitland's answer to it, founded on a minute and diligent study of the generations of which Dr. Barker knows about as much as he does of the state of society in the moon. "The writings of the dark ages," says Maitland, who had pondered them with a severe and critical investigation, "are, if I may use the expression, made of the Scriptures. I do not merely mean that the writers constantly quoted the Scriptures, and appealed to them as authorities on all occasions, but I mean that they thought and spoke and wrote the thoughts and words and phrases of the Bible, and that they did this constantly and habitually as the natural mode of expressing themselves."* Unfortunate Dr. Barker! We are almost tempted to pity him. But he is in no worse case than thousands of others in all parts of the world, including the remote Australian territory, and perhaps his vexed spirit will find copious consolation in that cheerful fact. Indeed, he contrasts favourably with many adversaries of truth, for while he blunders chiefly through contented ignorance, they deliberately falsify historical documents, in order to construct a less precarious foundation for their impious theories. Maitland often catches them flagrante delicto, by simply comparing their dishonest citations with the actual writings which they pretend to quote. Thus, in proof of the unutterable mendacity of the great "Protestant tradition," he notices a pretended reference of Robertson to a certain work, in which, as Robertson alleges, it is stated that "the greater part of the clergy" in the Middle Ages, like the laity, were wholly without instruction. Maitland turns to the original, and in the very passage cited finds that "there is no mention of ecclesiastics" (p. 16). After showing, by a multitude of examples, including the canons of

"The Dark Ages," by Rev. S. R. Maitland, Librarian to the Archbishop of Canterbury, p. 470 (1844).

Synods and the official proclamations of bishops, what qualifications, moral and intellectual, were really required in the early ages for the priesthood, Maitland mildly adds: "I cannot help suspecting that if Robertson had gone to the Archbishop of Seville in the seventh century, the Archbishop of Mayence in the ninth, or the Bishop of Chartres in the eleventh, for holy orders, he would have found the examination rather more than he expected" (p. 25). We suspect, for our part, that if Dr. Barker had done the same thing in any of the so-called dark ages, he would have been dismissed, among other reasons, for crass ignorance of the Holy Scriptures, as well as for profane misinterpretation of them. "A monk," says Maitland in another place, "was expected to know the Psalter by heart" (p. 338). Does Dr. Barker? Yet he rashly sneers at men whose knowledge of the Word of God, and of spiritual things generally, compared with his own, was an ocean to a puddle. And he is not ashamed to wake the echoes of the "Protestant Hall" at Sydney with senseless calumnies against individuals and ages, of whose real character he knows nothing whatever, and to whom he would himself have appeared little better than a pagan. In such writers as Robertson, Mosheim, Jortin, White, Milner, D'Aubigné, and their fellows,-from whom Christians of the school of Dr. Barker derive their little all,"we find," says the accomplished Hugh James Rose, in a note on one of Maitland's chapters (p. 100), "not only an individual traduced, but, through him, the religious character of a whole age misrepresented, and this misrepresentation now generally believed." The italics are his own. The italics are his own. Such impudent writers, he adds, in whom heretical malice has destroyed all sense of honesty or regard for truth, "mangle, misuse, and traduce a writer whose works not one of them had ever seen." How many of them has Dr. Barker seen? We should like to examine him in the Protestant Hall at Sydney, or elsewhere, at his choice, as to his knowledge of such works, and of mediæval literature generally; and if he proved to know anything more about them than an Australian shepherd does, we would pay the costs of a voyage to Sydney with a cheerful mind. Maitland quotes the famous example of the sermon of S. Eloy, Bishop of Noyon in the seventh century, which Robertson and Mosheim pretend to quote as an evidence of the meagre and barren theology of that age; and pithily observes that to any one who has actually read the sermon, which S. Paul would not have disavowed, "it seems to have been written as if he had anticipated all and each of Mosheim's charges, and intended to furnish a pointed answer to almost every one" (p. 113).