Dr. Barker's eyes is, "that he believed the Church of Scotland to be as true a Protestant church as the Church of England," which no doubt it always was, and always will be. It is impossible for any controversialist to be more curiously infelicitous than this impetuous Australian. Tenison was a Christian of the same sort as Tillotson. They were both called "Archbishop of Canterbury," though neither of them was ever ordained. Tillotson was perhaps a trifle the worst of the two. His gross argument against the mystery of the Altar, which he said was sufficiently refuted "by the senses, shocked even Coleridge, who called it "sensual babble," and says: "I was half converted to transubstantiation by Tillotson's common senses against it; seeing clearly that the same grounds, totidem verbis et syllabis, would serve the Socinian against all the mysteries of Christianity."* For Dr. Barker, Tillotson's opinions, or anybody's opinions, however subversive of Christianity, are only different "interpretations of Scripture," which" can never cease," as long as men are honest and free. In spite of his chaotic theology, we can easily believe that he is an agreeable man, a model husband, and a tender father; our only complaint against him is, that he writes about things of which he knows nothing whatever. It is quite possible that there may be subjects which his intellect has mastered, but Christianity is not one of them. If he is wise, he will not write about it again, at least until he has acquired some faint perception of its true character, some tincture of the humility, sobriety, and obedience which it was designed to foster in the human soul, and, above all, some respect for the Bible and for positive truth. When he told his hearers in the Protestant Hall at Sydney, "the religion of England is Protestant, the Church of England is Protestant," he told them nothing; but when he added, with a needless sneer at "the Ritualists," that "Protestantism is a principle opposed to Sacerdotalism, and is a perpetual protest against the whole body of ritual doctrine, the avowed object of which is to transform the minister of the people into the priest of the sacrifice," he was no doubt a faithful exponent of Anglicanism, but an unconscious traducer of Christianity. Dr. Barker may fairly plead that the main purpose of the new Elizabethan religion, avowed with horrible imprecations by Jewel, Grindal, and the other Anglican reformers, was to destroy the Christian sacrifice; but he fails to see that, if they were right in doing so, two appalling conclusions, absolutely fatal to the divine character of the Christian * 66 Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," vol. iv. p. 104 (1839). religion, immediately follow. We fancy that even Dr. Barker would feel some difficulty in accepting them. Even his conscience, we gladly believe, would recoil from the monstrous supposition, that the religion of the Sanctuary is of a lower type than that of the Tabernacle, with its priesthood and sacrifice; that the last of the prophets erred in announcing the great sacrifice which was to be the most august rite of the Christian liturgy; and that S. Paul deceived himself in saying that every true Christian priest is "called by God as Aaron was," and that "we have an altar, whereof they who serve the tabernacle have no power to eat." * Even Dr. Barker, we are persuaded, in spite of his apology for "free inquiry" and "different interpretations," would shrink from asserting that the blessed saints of all ages only mocked God and their own souls in offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and were abandoned to a senseless delusion in exalting the priesthood and the sacrifice by Him for whom they lived and died, who filled them with all the riches of His grace, and whose loving alliance with these marvels of sanctity is proved not only by the gifts which He lavished upon them, but by that saying of His inspired apostle: "God is not unjust, that He should forget your work, and the love which you have shown in His name." If, as Anglicanism and Dr. Barker assume, the Most High raised to the dignity of angels, and to a likeness with Himself, such sublime spirits as a Leo, an Innocent, a Gregory, an Ambrose, a Jerome, a Boniface, an Anselm, a Bernard, and a Francis of Sales,-who would all have gladly died in confessing the Adorable Sacrifice of the Altar, the majesty of the Christian priesthood, and the supreme authority of the Roman Pontiff,-only to abandon them to "a long night of darkness," while He revealed the truth in the sixteenth century to sordid and sensual miscreants, who were a jest and a scandal even to one another, and models only of turpitude and cupidity, even Dr. Barker will begin to suspect that the Anglican theory is fatal to Christianity, and can only be true on the supposition that faith is a delusion, holiness a dream, and revelation a snare. "England's spiritual greatness," says Archbishop Vaughan, "began with the preaching of the Gospel,"-by apostles who all believed in the Mass and the Pope,-" and ended when the Voice of Authority had been gagged, and each man became an authority to himself. The glorious vision of an united people, worshipping before one altar, and reciting one harmonious creed, and ruled by one supreme Pastor of their Heb. xiii. 10. + Heb. vi. 10. souls, has given place, for the time, to jarring contentions without number, to altar set up against altar, or rather to the complete annihilation of the Holy Sacrifice, together with the Altar on which it once was immolated, to discordant rules of faith and contradictory systems of salvation, and to the rejection of the mastership of Peter for the assumed infallibility of each individual man."* Even in these touching and eloquent words the whole contrast is not expressed. There is not more difference between light and darkness, between the radiant glory of an exulting seraph and the shameful corpse of a dead felon "rotting in cold obstruction," than between the two epochs which the Archbishop thus compares. That men should be able to contemplate this terrible contrast unmoved, nay, even to rejoice in the malediction which has fallen upon England and all English-speaking communities-for we here speak only of them, and take it for a blessing; that they should deem ignoble chaos a profitable exchange for divine unity, natural virtues more manly and of tougher fibre than supernatural graces, religious strife more salutary than spiritual concord, and a thousand "different interpretations of a Revelation which bears only one, and is by its very nature incapable of two, an enlargement of human liberty; that they should blasphemously call the reign of Jesus Christ on earth during so many years "a long night of darkness," His holy Church a teacher of fables, His appointed Vicar an impostor, and His saints fellow-conspirators with such a traitor against the Divine Master whom they loved with a love only less perfect than that which He lavished upon them; that they should impudently assert that He abandoned to drivelling error elect souls which His gracious Spirit overshadowed, and in which He dwelt as in a sanctuary of delights, in order to reveal in the sixteenth century of the Christian era the truth which they knew not, to depraved rebels, and give their forfeited inheritance to dogs; finally, that they should see with jesting indifference the extinction of faith in kingdoms once united for long ages to God and the Church, the right of revolt proclaimed as the supreme conquest of human intelligence, authority despised or transferred to those who can only abuse it, gross materialism everywhere in arms against the supernatural, the revival of a bastard paganism without even its belief either in Tartarus or Olympus, and the dark shadow of the coming Antichrist resting on the hill-tops and descending into the valleys of a world which has forgotten God, and quenching with its foul mists both the lamp of reason and the light of * "Fourth Conference," p. 88. glory;-in these horrible features of an apostate generation, which glories in its shame, and is hurrying to perdition to the sound of fife and cymbal, Christians discern the judicial chastisement of that last insurrection of the creature against the Creator which some still call by an impious jest "the Reformation," and the preternatural darkness, like that of Egypt, the reprobate sense, like that of the Jews, which is the penalty of the unmatched and unrepented crimes of that disastrous sedition. It rests with Catholics, and with them alone, to close this era of avenging justice, and hasten that of reconciliation and mercy. If the advent of the latter is delayed, it is their fault. The very persecution of which they are now in so many lands the victims, and especially in Russia and Germany, is permitted, we may be sure, to rekindle the faith and reanimate the virtue upon which the recovery of fallen races depends. Every sin which a Catholic commits helps to postpone the conversion of heretics and the destined triumph of the Church. If we were what we should be, in all things worthy of our vocation, the oppressor would be disarmed and paralyzed, heresy scourged back into the abyss from which it came forth, and the gates of hell closed. It is the will of God to make His action depend upon ours. Pius IX., our beloved Father and Pontiff, is always reminding us of this truth. The very excess of the misery all around us is a new provocation both of zeal and hope. "Evils, when they have grown into certain proportions," says Archbishop Vaughan, "become unbearable, and cure themselves." He thinks it will prove to be so "in that England of ours which we love so well"; and, we may add, in that newer England which has risen up on the other side of the Atlantic, and whose vigorous sons, from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, are already the hope and the consolation of the Church. There, as elsewhere, "the signs of the times are warning men of seriousness," says the Archbishop, "to look about them and beyond them to that everlasting Rock upon which Peter still stands, ruling amid the tossing ocean of the world, the changeless Church of the Living God," and he encourages us to believe that as "many of the choicest minds and most heroic spirits of our race," both in England and America, "have already found repose in the bosom of the Mother Church," multitudes will be led by grace to follow their example, "and, finally, please God, to bring our country back within the great family of Christendom, under the gentle rule of the Prince of the Apostles, the Vicar of Jesus Christ." 400 ART. V.-CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE SONNET. The Sonnet: its Origin, Structure, and Place in Poetry. By CHARLES TOMLINSON, F.R.S. 8vo. London. 1874. English Sonnets. A Selection. Edited by JOHN DENNIS. 8vo. London. 1873. Light leading unto Light. A Series of Sonnets and Poems. By JOHN CHARLES EARLE. London. 1875. Sonnets. By Sir AUBREY DE VERE, Bart. A new Edition. 8vo. London. 1875. Monographie des Sonnets. Par M. LOUIS DE VEYRIERES. 2 vols. 8vo. Paris. 1869. Le Livre des Sonnets: Quatorze dizains de Sonnets choisis. Paris. 1875. Sonette der Deutschen herausgegeben von FRIEDRICH RASSMANN. 8vo. Braunschweig. 1817. "MILT 3 vols. ILTON, Madam," said Dr. Johnson to Hannah More, who had expressed wonder that the poet who had written "Paradise Lost" should write such poor sonnets ;"Milton was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones." The mot has all the wit and incisiveness of Johnson's very best sayings; but like many of his judgments, it is quite too broad and undiscriminating; and it is singularly unjust to Milton's merits, as well as strangely uncritical as an estimate of the true nature and import of the classic Sonnet. There are but too many specimens, it is true, of that celebrated form of poetical composition which might justify the comparison with "a head upon a cherry-stone"; but to the Sonnet generally such a comparison is flagrantly inappropriate. It is impossible to imagine a more utter and irreconcilable contrast than exists between the clever but trivial and purposeless ingenuity of the toy carving of Johnson's illustration and the solemn grandeur and high significance of the true Sonnet, such as it has been fashioned by the genius of the masters in this school of poetical composition. As well might we compare the sentimental graces of a French lithograph with the mysterious and impressive solemnity of the mosaic portraits in the apse of a Byzantine basilica ! The Sonnet never has been a popular form of poetry, and it is too complex and artificial in its structure ever to suit the taste of the multitude. In its best uses it has been cultivated |