same end, and yet differ so widely in regard to the means they are willing to employ to compass it, as to thwart each other more than ordinary opponents would do. However, Mr. Murdoch had met with such fair success thus far, that he trusted to luck to prosper him a little further. and "M. Jacques," he said, brusquely, turning upon that personage, speaking with an air of impulsive candour, "let me tell you at once that I love the gentleman you refer to no more than you yourself do; and that I know-what you do not-the way to make him sensible of our reprobation. He has done me an inexcusable injury: I must call it so, although, as a clergyman, it is my duty to put as charitable a construction upon it as possible" Here the speaker was interrupted by a harsh, significant burst of laughter from his auditor. "Well," he continued-"well, M. Jacques, I will concede that I am but human, and that I cannot but feel my wrongs as keenly as any other man. He has injured me, then; and I presume I am not mistaken in assuming that he has injured you. Now, in a case like this, when our central common object is-shall I speak the word ?-revenge, it is plain that we can afford to respect one another's reasonable prejudices and reserves. I shall not inquire, my dear friend, what may be the particular circumstances of your case; I shall not ask who you are or how you have suffered ; it is enough for me to know that you desire-once more I say it—revenge, and that I am prepared to co-operate with you to that end to the extent of my ability. I concede this much to your sensibilities; and I am thereby justified-am I not?-in claiming as great, or nearly as great, an indulgence from you. Is it agreed?" “You are a man of many words, monsieur," said the old man, grimly. "For my own part, once I can see my way to strike my enemy where he may feel the agony of the thrust most poignantly, I shall care little for reserves or concealments of any kind. "I do not comprehend you, monsieur," said the other, dropping his arms to his sides, while a look of trouble began to relax the hard rigidity of his former expression. "A boy-a boy so young as that can have nothing to do with affairs like ours. It cannot be. You did not intend it so." "You will remember, my dear M. Jacques," returned the other, handling his whiskers and glancing aside, "that the boy Jack is the son of the man on whom you wish to be revenged." "He is not his son," exclaimed the Frenchman, with agitation; "not in the sense that you insinuate, monsieur. In the course of nature he is his son; but not by growth, not by education, not by sympathy or knowledge. And this father of his, who has never even seen him, who cannot even know whether he exists, and who, if he knew it, would gladly forget it again do you mean to tell me that this man is to be harmed by inflicting suffering upon an innocent boy? No, monsieur, I cannot agree with you; and I inform you that I desire no deputied revenge; it is my enemy in his own person with whom I would deal. If you have no better suggestion to offer than that, we have wasted one another's time to no purpose." "Stay one moment, my friend," said Murdoch, composedly, laying a finger upon the old man's arm as he was turning away. "I fancy you have not quite caught my meaning. There is no harm coming to the boy, in the first place; he may attain any height of happiness or prosperity that he pleases, for all that I should do to prevent him. But the case is this; his father is a man who owns vast estates and a great property in England. This property has been in the family for several centuries, in the direct male descent. But the conditions of its inheritance are a little peculiar. . . . It will be enough, for the moment, to tell you that it is of the last importance to the holder of the title to have a son. It is so important, my dear M. Jacques, that if no son born in wedlock survives, and there be a son born out of wedlock, then that son will be made legitimate, and the inheritance will be his. Well, then, the man we are speaking of, after he returned to England thirteen years ago, leaving this unhappy girl to die uncared for-he, I say, married a lady of his own rank in life; and three children were born; but they were all girls, and they all died in infancy; and about a year ago the mother died likewise. All that is very sad; she was a most estimable person, and incapable of harming any one; perhaps she was better in another world." The clergyman rolled these periods under his tongue with evident gusto; he was sailing with a fair wind, and was inclined to make a good run of it. The Frenchman, meanwhile, had seated himself upon a stone, with his head between his hands, and his eyes fixed in a point-blank gaze that seemed to see nothing. Murdoch continued"Now, here is this gentleman, left a widower, and childless; and, to make matters worse, he is afflicted with a disease which may carry him off at any moment. He is in no condition to marry again, and yet, for special reasons, he would sacrifice what remains to him of life, without hesitation or compunction, if by so doing he could secure a son of his own in the succession. I trust I am making myself understood, my dear M. Jacques; this man is so given up to worldly lusts and cares, that he accounts life itself as nothing in comparison with the gratification of seeing his own flesh and blood inherit his possessions. Now our point that we have been coming to is this; this man, recollecting the sins and wickedness of his youth, says to himself, ‘Perhaps out of that very sin I may raise up the means of realising my ambition. I will send and make investigations on the scene of my wickedness, and discover whether a child of my iniquity yet survives, to whom I may hand over this great legacy, and be at peace.' Such, my friend, is the language of the man whom we have determined to chastise; and I should like to know," added the reverend gentleman, dropping the pulpit vein, and relapsing into the colloquial, "I should like to know what better or fairer revenge we could take, than simply to remove that son of his out of the way; to destroy all proofs of his identity, if any exist; and so to see his lordship go down to his grave without one solitary gleam of hope or comfort. Upon my soul!" exclaimed this worthy person, rubbing his large hands together in the overflow of his enthusiasm, "it will be as poetical and complete a thing as ever I heard of; if it were only possible to let him know of the boy's existence, while for ever preventing him from getting hold of him . . . that would be perfect indeed!"' "You spoke of removing the boy out of the way," observed M. Jacques, raising his head from his hands at the conclusion of this oration. "What does that mean?" choose to name; it makes no difference to me; and if you contemplate enriching him with this world's goods-—” "I should not trouble you, monsieur, with any of those details," interposed the Frenchman, with sufficient dryness. After a short pause he rose to his feet, and added, "Have the kindness to follow me into the house, monsieur. I desire your opinion upon a matter which cannot be entered into here." They crossed the grass plot, passing round towards the front entrance of the house. Before reaching it, M. Jacques faced round towards his companion, and said— "You have not yet told me what you are to gain by depriving the boy of his inheritance. Does anything he loses go into your pockets? The clergyman jerked his head back and puffed out his cheeks. "You forget, monsieur," he said, with gravity, "that neither have I pried into the grounds of your hostility against his lordship." "Well-very well!" returned the other, with a movement of the mouth and eyebrows of no complimentary import. "Would it likewise incommode you to mention his lordship's title? He stopped short. M. Jacques looked at him. An extraordinary change had come over his countenance. Its rubicundity was gone, and the pallor revealed unpleasantly the unsightly roughness of the skin. His mouth was relaxed, while his eyes were strained and bloodshot, and the pupils distended. "What is the matter?" inquired M. Jacques. Mr. Murdoch, still with his strained stare, slowly lifted one arm and pointed down the lane. At the distance of some three hundred yards, two figures were approaching, hand in hand-a middle-aged man of slender build and rather feeble bearing, and a little black-haired girl of about ten years of age. There were only these two. Murdoch caught the Frenchman by the lappel of his coat, and moved backwards beneath the porch, pulling the other after him. "Did you know - know he was here?" The man spoke as if there were an obstruction in his throat. "What do you mean, monsieur ? Who is here? They? Who are they?" the Frenchman demanded curiously. "Let me get into the house," exclaimed Murdoch, his voice breaking out with a harsh note of panic in it. "Put me in some room-say nothing of my being here ! Let me in." He grasped the door handle and shook it. "Do you mean that this is?” began the other, in a strange tone. "Great God! don't waste any more time here; don't you see he will be here in another moment?" cried the clergyman, his ugly pallor deepening. "I tell you I must not be seen.' "It is he, then," said M. Jacques, very quietly, opening the door and allowing Murdoch to enter. "My faith, he comes in good season.' (To be continued.) CHURCH CONTROVERSIES DURING THE LAST FIFTY YEARS.' THE idea has probably prevailed in every century of Church history that the Church is at the moment in a state of unprecedented crisis. It certainly prevails now, and after making due allowance, no one can deny that the present century has witnessed, and is still witnessing, momentous changes of opinion and feeling within the National Church, as well as with respect to it from without. The controversies may not be fiercer, and certainly some of them are of far less importance than those of past years, but they are carried on under different conditions, in the presence of spectators, some hostile, some anxious, some neutral-men who bear no ill-will to the Established Church, but who will not feel called upon to preserve it unless it can show itself worth preserving. The crisis is The crisis is certainly serious if any of the parties in the Church continue in the conviction that it is necessary for its wellbeing that one or another must be driven out. It is in the strongest conviction that the downfall of the National Church would be a frightful calamity to the English nation that I have taken upon me to write this paper. There is no other society which could take the place of the Church, and an epoch of selfishness would follow. Apparent diræ facies. But with the vision of such an evil I see a better vision and hope of brighter issue. And I desire now to review the history of the Church during the last fifty years, with a view to chronicle the good which has been done, and also the warnings which are presented by the past errors. Fifty years ago, Charles Simeon was still at the height of his influence. He died in 1836. The Evangelical party 1 A paper read at a meeting of clergy, with additions. at the end of the last century had been denounced as enthusiastic and methodistical, as readers of Cowper's poems and Newton's letters know. But it was not so in Simeon's later years. Mainly, as it seems, through the influence of Bishop Heber, who died in 1826, there had been an approximation of Evangelicals and the old Church School. Old port-wine rectors looked out keenly for the young popular preachers, and the young men. used different language from what their teachers and masters had done about the State Church. The old Evangelicals had been violently AntiErastian; the new ones looked coldly on the Dissenters, met them once a year on the platform of the Bible Society, but otherwise reproved what they called "political dissent," and exalted the Establishment, perhaps, somewhat at the expense of the spirituality. This might have gone on, and Evangelical phrases would have dwindled down, like other phrases, into stock commonplaces with all force gone out of them, but for the menaces directed by the Whigs against the Establishment. Readers of Sydney Smith will remember how a worldly yet excellent and generous parson looked upon all this. Out of the terrors and heartburnings thus generated, the Tracts for the Times began in 1833. The writers, looking upon the possibility of an organised attempt to overthrow the Church as an Establishment, started the Tracts with a view of showing that ecclesiastical institutions do not depend upon the authority of kings and parliaments, and therefore should not be meddled with by them. That is, they took up the old Puritan ground as regards Erastianism, a ground now occupied by a large body of Scotch Presbyterians and English Dissenters, whilst in nearly all other respects they denounced Puritanism with passionate earnestness. The English Church, they declared, had suffered grievously from mixing with Puritanism; nevertheless the English ministry was apostolic, its doctrines identical with those of the Church before the separation of East and West; it renounced the Pope's authority because that authority interfered with the authority of the other bishops. The outcry with which the Tracts were received at their appearance came first from Dissenters, and from the most moderate of them. No wonder, since by the new teaching they seemed almost excluded from the pale of salvation. Then came a clamour from Conservative Churchmen because of the scorn displayed in the Tracts against the State and all Establishments, then also from Evangelical Churchmen, who were aroused out of their half sleepy state into the renewed conviction that inward faith and not outward institutions must be the groundwork of a spiritual society. Men, too, who were well read in history were terrified by the conviction that these Tracts were leading a movement which would land us in the Church of Rome. And they were met by a passionate denial by the chief writer. He has told us in his religious autobiography how he resented such an opinion himself, how he told those who expressed it to him that they were to go on boldly, for they would find a clear line of demarcation presently. But when in Tract XC. he laid down the principle that a man may hold all Roman doctrine, and yet remain in the Communion of the Church of England, four Oxford tutors became the utterers of this conviction, and, seeing what the result was likely to be among the young men of Oxford, made their famous protest. Hereupon the Tracts were stopped on the recommendation of the Bishop. That the result as regarded their chief author would have been the same in any case we know from himself. One might say it was a foregone conclusion with him, though he was hardly conscious of it, when he wrote "Lead, kindly Light," in 1833. His dearest friend has, indeed, by way of disproof of the Romanizing character of Tract XC., republished it within the last few years, and it is triumphantly said that "no fuss has been made against the republication." Exactly; nor is there if one republishes a polemical tract by Milton or Tom Paine. It is interesting as a literary curiosity; literary curiosity; no one adopts its principle, certainly not the editor— Clarum et venerabile nomen. The tide has swept by and he has clung to the bank, but he is left isolated. Yet all men love him, not only for his holy life, but for what out of his great learning he has given to the Church of the future in his Commentary on the Minor Prophets. But while the fears of the protesters were entirely justified by the action of the writer of the culminating Tract, the series had won hundreds of young men, disgusted with the heartless tone of statesmen who seemed to regard religion as a useful instrument for keeping the lower classes in due subordination to the upper, dissatisfied with the individualism and selfish teaching into which Evangelicalism was sinking, wearied of themselves and craving after new excitement. The Tract writers commended themselves to religious men, who tried to hold themselves above party and to look on the world with honest eyes, by their evident zeal and earnestness, by the craving which they displayed after unity as the means of strength, by their endeavours to make English clergymen more aware of their responsibilities to God, and of the powers which they might use for the good of their people, by their impatience of secularity, by their willingness to suffer obloquy and loss for the sake of their convictions. They were helping to break down the barriers between rich and poor, were awakening thoughts in the minds of |