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place in the proper relative position of the paramount importance of the one, and the complete subordination and indifference of the other. With this principle of Hooker, all the pretensions to exclusive perpetuity, whether Roman, Puritan, or Episcopal, go at once to the ground. The second position which true theology has effectually established is derived from the results of the discriminating scholarship of the last two hundred years, namely, that the apostolic traditions and the records of the New Testament contain no such fixed form as any of these theories would demand; that if here and there we find the germs of that which was developed in later centuries into gigantic proportions, yet in the apostolic age they co-existed in such a chaotic, uncertain, conflicting state, that any attempt to reproduce them now as they existed then, would be to evoke an apparition in this nineteenth century from which Roman and Presbyterian and Independent and Anglican would alike recoil with horror.

It might have been supposed that the fallacious positions taken up both by the original Puritans and their extreme opponents had been sufficiently dispelled by the action of the two principles just mentioned. But, although their form is in some degree modified, the likeness of their general attitude is still visible in the same distorted representations of Christian truth as appeared in other shapes two centuries ago. It may be that there are very few either in England or Scotland who would wish to impose Presbyterianism or Independency, as a matter of Divine right, upon the whole empire. But another claim, equally exclusive, and penetrated by

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the same fallacy, has entered into the place of the ancient demon which has long since been cast out. It is now urged, with a tenacity and a vehemence almost equal to that of the old Puritans, that another dogma no less vital to the interests of true religion than Presbyterianism, or Independency, or Anti-Pædobaptism in earlier times, has dawned upon the Nonconformist mind. This new dogma, which to the first Reformers and the first founders of Nonconformity was almost if not altogether unknown, is the unlawfulness of a National Church, the sinfulness of endowments, the abomination of any public recognition or control of religion and of the mixture of things secular with things spiritual, the contamination produced on any form of religion by its connection with government and law. This dogma is, like those earlier claims to which reference has been made, founded, first, on the supposition that such a complete separation is to be traced in the Church of the Apostolic age; and, secondly, on the inference that such a form of society, if it existed, was intended to be the universal expression of the Christian world.

It is certain that, as far as was possible in a state of things so entirely unlike our own, the Apostles and their first followers had not the slightest shrinking from contact with the great institutions of the Roman Empire; that there is not in their writings the slightest trace of that repugnance to the ordinances of law and government which in later days has come to be regarded by some persons as the chief article of religion.

It is certain also that even if such a repugnance had been manifest in the apostolic times, and granting what,

of course, is undeniable, the distinction which necessarily existed between the nascent Christian Church and the old heathen society in the midst of which it found itself, there is yet not the slightest reason to justify us in transferring from the primitive to a later age conditions which, by the nature of the case, cannot be equally applicable to both. St. Paul, it has been sometimes urged, knew nothing of Parliaments and parishes, nothing of bishops in the House of Lords, or of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. It is equally true, and equally relevant, to say that St. Paul knew nothing of the steam-engine or the electric light.

But it is not without its use to point out the analogy of the dogma of a separate religion with the more purely antiquarian dogmas of the older Puritan or sacerdotal parties. The present leaders of the Nonconformist body are, no doubt, perfectly justified, if they will, in maintaining for themselves this dogma and its consequences; but when it is found that, not content with having secured the most complete toleration of their own view in this matter, they endeavour to impose it on all the world-when it is found that their main object is to insist on a uniformity of the voluntary system with as much pertinacity as their fathers insisted on the uniformity of Presbyterianism, or as their adversaries in. sisted in the seventeenth century on the uniformity of Episcopacy-it is evident that we meet again the old foe whom Hooker opposed, and who seemed to have fallen at last under the hands of Locke, now reappearing with a new face, but almost with the same weapons. is at once disappointing to our best hopes, and unworthy

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of the age in which we live, that a fresh intolerance should thus be encouraged to take the place of the old intolerance which we trusted was dead and buried.

Thus much, when the question is regarded from a Nonconformist point of view. But it must not be dissembled that the tendency assumes a graver aspect when it is apparent that a counter form of exclusiveness has meanwhile developed itself among those who have been already designated as the Nonconformists, not without but within the Church of England-that party which, having been dormant almost from the time of the secession of the Non-jurors, revived in a spirit of extreme reaction against the Liberal progress of the age, with all the acrimony, and with much of the power, of the ancient Jacobites, in the movement known by the name of the Oxford or Tractarian school. Here it is not only the old enemy under a new form, but the old enemy itself, that has again reared its head. All the arguments in behalf of the exclusive right of Episcopacy, the exclusive virtue of the Sacraments, the indispensable necessity of an Episcopal succession, the contempt and hostility manifested towards all the more purely Protestant Churches, whether at home or abroad; all these, which marked the efforts first of Laud, and then of the chiefs of the Non-jurors, have now, during the last forty years, once more established a footing within the National Church. The National Church, after various struggles against this invasion, sometimes conducted by the lawful weapons of learning and argument, sometimes by the unlawful weapons of coercion and repression, has now for some time past acquiesced in the existence of this

sect within its bosom. This acquiescence is the inevitable consequence at once of the constitution of the English Church, and of the dictates of charity and reason. But within the last fifteen years this section of the Church, not content with toleration, has claimed an exclusive possession of the whole field, with as much vehemence and as much pretension as that with which their adversaries in the Puritan camp demand it for themselves. They correspond within the English Church to the Ultramontane school in the Roman Catholic Church, which Dr. Newman in his celebrated letter to Bishop Ullathorne described as an insolent and aggressive faction;' forming in reality a small, though energetic portion of the whole body, but claiming to represent the Church itself, and endeavouring to suppress all forms of belief but its own.

It is, however, a curious feature of the controversy, almost peculiar to our time, that the sacerdotal and the Puritan forms of intolerance have, by a natural affinity, formed what, in outward shape and at first sight, would have seemed the most unnatural alliance. The modern Non-jurors and Ultramontanes, like the modern Nonconformists, have conceived a mortal hostility to that large and more comprehensive view of Christian truth which is represented by the Established Church, and which, though not so persistently, yet in their occasional paroxysms of anger or fear, they, equally with the Puritan party, are bent, if possible, on levelling to the ground.

It is desirable that this combination of forces should be thoroughly understood. There is hardly a meeting

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