There will always be, as there has always been, a sufficient force in the purely Celtic element in the Church of Ireland to give it a distinctive characrer, worthy of its name, however close its union, whether past or future, with the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman Church on this side of St. George's Channel.

We pass over the many particulars suggested by the formation of the new governing body. It is enough to indicate the necessity (if anything of the old spirit is to be preserved) of the largest scope for the independent action of the clergy; of providing room for official, as well as elective representation, so as to secure the influence of the true lay intelligence of the country, and the due preponderance of the great institution of Trinity College, which has long anticipated even the English Universities in its breadth and comprehensiveness of view, and which is the only ecclesiastical institution of Ireland that has come hitherto unscathed out of the furnace of the late revolution, and commands the respect of all that is most enlightened, both in the Catholic and Protestant communions of Ireland. It is needless to insist on the duty of securing for the Irish clergy the same privilege as is possessed by the English clergy of invoking the civil courts against the oppression of their own ecclesiastical rule. It is true that some of the Colonial Synods have attempted to insist, as a preliminary condition of membership and ministration, on renouncing the 'humiliating' right of appeal to an external tribunal. But we cannot believe that English or Irish clergymen, at home, will ever be found so rash or so subservient as to surrender their liberties after this fashion, even if it were legally possible.

It is to be hoped that the clergyman of the Church of Ireland may still retain the position which he now confessedly enjoys to the great advantage of his fellow-citizens, of standing above the factions and disputes of the other churches, and becoming their recognised leader and counsellor in all that relates to those great moral and physical wants which override the technical distinctions of sect and party. But we hardly believe that, after all which has been said in behalf of the advantages of such a position, the Irish clergy will voluntarily descend to the rank of mere polemics and proselytisers, and so justify not only all that has ever been said against them, but also all the most gloomy forebodings which friend or foe has expressed of the results of the Irish Church Act. Far better that resident laymen, if such there be, should undertake the religious ministrations in these outposts of Protestantism, than that there should

be inflicted on unhappy Ireland the new curse of a pauper Protestant clergy, or a numerous ill-educated episcopate, living on the passion and prejudice of the people."

In all these remarks it will be seen that when we speak of the benefits of retaining, as far as can be, the characteristics of the position of the old Established Church of Ireland, it must be borne in mind that we insist on the end and not on the particular means, on the object, and not on the machinery7 by which the object is attained. The end is that there shall be still an ecclesiastical body in Ireland, following the movement of the national mind, representing the cause of law and order, the destined instrument of religious progress and civilisation; not the slave of a tyrannical majority, or a despotic priesthood, or a party faction; a body capable of holding its own moderating, elevating course, without pandering to the passions or the prejudices of the people by whom it is maintained, or the clergy by whom it is ruled. We have always advocated-the Irish clergy have advocated-the supremacy of the English Crown, and the connexion with the law and civilisation of England, because these elements have hitherto contributed to produce, with whatever shortcomings, these results. If other elements can produce the same or like results, in Heaven's name try them: only do not abandon the hope of securing the results themselves, do not condemn as curses what have hitherto been valued as blessings. Its disestablishment in this sense, if it takes place at all, will be an act not of the Government or of the Bill, but of the Irish Church itself-an act not of murder, but of suicide.

If, on the other hand, the Irish clergy still endeavour under their altered circumstances to keep alive the traditions of the old Imperial Church from which they cannot be separated but by their own act and deed, then they will prove that the essential principle of national establishment can survive the shock of a nominal disestablishment and of an all but entire disendowment; they will do more to strengthen the cause which was supposed to be overthrown than could be done by any other body of persons.

• The various suggestions into which these remarks were originally expanded have been omitted-partly for the sake of avoiding detail, partly because they have since been forestalled or set aside by the course of events. In one particular, the Church of Ireland has attempted exactly that likeness of the English Constitution which is here indicated. Its proposed Court of Appeal is as near a copy of

the English Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as under the circumstances was possible.

On this whole line of argument we strongly recommend to our readers, both for instruction and amusement, the remarks of Mr. Matthew Arnold, in the most captivating of his somewhat eccentric Lectures, -Culture and Anarchy.

For this task they have the advantage of the 'education' (to use the words of the English Primate in what may be called his parting benediction to them) which they have 'received by their training under a nobler, better, and higher 'system' than that sectarian, aggressive, mendicant condition, to which their mistaken friends, as well as their avowed enemies, have sought to degrade them.

The Celtic ecclesiastic has already in former ages given much to Great Britain. Scotland owes her first dawn of religion to Columba. The English Church of later days has reckoned amongst its most brilliant orators and preachers the clergy who have visited us from its sister branch. But the Church of Ireland may still confer yet one more boon, by showing that it has not enjoyed three centuries of close union with England in vain; and that, even in this crisis of its fate, it has had the power of retaining under its new conditions at any rate some of those blessings which it justly feared to lose, and which need not, except through its own act, depart with the reduction of its exclusive privileges.

Whether this will be so or not, the next few years will

show.

350

THEOLOGY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.1

IT

It may be advisable to consider what is the peculiar position -what the vantage ground-occupied by the theology of the nineteenth century. Let us see what this theology is.

It must be borne in mind that I am not speaking of the Religion, but of the Theology, of our time. The religious feeling itself, no doubt, varies from age to age; but still it is much more nearly the same than is the case with the theories of thinking men, who, by their reasonings upon it, produce what is called Theology. Sometimes the Religion is behind the Theology of an agesometimes before it always more or less independent of it.

Difference between Religion and Theology.

Theology of the nineteenth

But that there is such a thing as the Theology of a particular age is obvious. The Theology of the Fathers was different from that of the Schoolmen-that of the sixteenth century from that of the seventeenth or eighteenth. Each of these systems has had its century. peculiar merits and demerits-its links of connexion with systems which preceded and succeeded, as also its marked differences. That such a special Theology exists in our own time is proved, if by nothing else, by the alarms and attacks which it excites, no less than by the hopes which it inspires. No theology has raised such alarms and such hopes since the beginning of the sixteenth century. There is a widespread belief or opinion expressed by many, and felt by more, that there have never been since the Reformation so many symptoms of a theological change; more gradual, perhaps, and less defined, but hardly less universal and important, than that involved in the Reformation itself.

It may be necessary to repeat what I have often said on other occasions, that in citing testimonies, ancient or modern, to the truth of the principles developed by the progress of Theology, I do not in the least infer any concurrence of such

'Printed in Fraser's Magazine for February 1865, from the substance of a paper read at a meeting of the London clergy.

writers beyond that contained in the particular passages to which reference is made. The whole of the rest of their works may be, often is, in direct contradiction to the valuable principles to which their assent is for the moment given. But I refer to them to show that in almost every age these principles have had some support, and that in our own this support is given even by the most reluctant witnesses and from the most opposite quarters. And I am led to do this from the natural wish to vindicate for the theology of which I am speaking its legitimate and ancient pedigree. Any additional confirmations of it in the first, fifth, fourteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries, will be doubly welcome both for their own sake, and as defences of doctrines which by many amongst us are fiercely and constantly attacked.

Still the theology of the nineteenth century' is properly so called, because it is in the close of the last century, and the first sixty years of this, that it has been gaining more or less force, and spreading right and left till it has penetrated all the Churches of Europe, except, perhaps, those of Spain and Sweden. It is from Germany, as is well known, that the main impulse has come. As at the time of the Reformation, so now, it is the German theologians who (to use the words of Latimer) have lighted the candle which, by God's grace, shall never be put out. But the effect of this teaching would not have been what it has been had it found a less ready reception in the general literature and in the religious instincts of all Christendom. The works of Goethe and Walter Scott are full

of its savour. It breathes through the whole of Coleridge, prose and verse. It is still more strongly marked in the poetry of Tennyson. It has lit up all the writings of men so different from each other, and yet so important each in his place, as Arnold, Robertson, and Milman. It is that which distinguished Edward Irving from the preaching and teaching of his day in the Church of Scotland, and accounts for the increasing estimate formed of his genius and character; and it has now incontestably influenced not only the most eminent divines of the Established Church of that country, but the writers even of the narrower communities of the Free Church and of the United Presbyterians. Its effects on the successors of the Puritans in England, both in the Church and amongst Nonconformists, if not equally capable of public proof, will not be denied by anyone. It has coloured very deeply Dr. Pusey's book on the Theology of Germany, and large parts of the 'Christian Year;' and though the actual Tracts for the