returned. The preacher had taken it up at the third verse, and his muse had forsaken him at the eighth. Give me the pen,' said the porter, and wrote off:—

They brought His chariot from above

To bear Him to His throne,

Clapped their triumphant wings, and cried,

"The glorious work is done."

But we must proceed. In the beginning of the present century the impetus of the Methodist revival had expended itself; there was a lull, and then another stirring of the waters, but this time chiefly within the Church of England, by Bishop Heber, Dean Milman, Sir Robert Grant, Lyte, and Bishop Mant. But to the last-named prelate we owe a change which has gone far to revolutionize our hymnology, though in a good direction. Here and there along the course we have been following since the Reformation we might have found isolated attempts to translate some choice Latin hymn; Crashaw, Drummond, Dryden, and Hickes had each contributed one or two; but Bishop Mant went a step further, and, taking the Roman Breviary, translated, with few exceptions, all that it contained. This leading was followed with such zeal by Mr. Williams (who did the same by the Paris Breviary), by Mr. Copeland, Mr. Chandler, Dr. Pusey, Mr. Caswall, Mr. Wackerbarth, Mr. Blew, Dr. Neale, and many more, that there have been produced almost as many Anglo-Latin as new and original English hymns during the last thirty years. And here several curious reflections arise. This resuscitation of the Latin hymns coincided in time with the remarkable Church movement at Oxford, identified with the Tracts for the Times.' As was the case with the Wesleyan revival in the last century, so with this Church revival, it gave an unusual impulse to hymnology, leading to the conclusion that there is a peculiar aptitude in hymns on the one hand for giving expression to the religious feelings of the writer, and on the other for the propagation of those feelings among others. Again, the Oxford movement was to a great extent a counter-movement, not in the sense of an opposition, but a reaction, or rather readjustment; therefore, whereas the Wesleyans, who sought new paths for themselves, sought also new hymns of a new character, the Church party, who aimed at recovering the old paths that had been lost, were naturally led to take up the ancient hymns. The Wesleyan, again, with a predilection for the experimental side of Christianity, found the spiritual food most congenial to him in the ecstatic raptures of the Methodist hymns; the Churchman, on the contrary, restoring, perhaps unconsciously, the balance, by

leaning

leaning more to the objective expression of truth, welcomed the calm narrative songs of primitive and mediaval times.

It is not meant by this that the productions of modern Church hymn-writers are exclusively translations; far from it: the names of Keble, Neale, Moultrie, Monsell, Alford, Archer Gurney, J. H. Gurney, are of themselves sufficient to vindicate the claim of the Church in these days to originality; but this may be said truly, that the study of the ancient models has had a marked influence on these modern hymns.

Our own space and our reader's patience would fail us if we attempted to push out now into the Atlantic, and follow our emigrant hymn-writers in the New World, or even to dive into the recesses of the Scotch and Welsh glens; yet there they are to be found. The late venerable Bishop Doane, of New Jersey ; the Rev. A. C. Coxe, of Baltimore; and Mr. Bullock, of Nova Scotia, are all claimants on our gratitude, for their hymns are found in several of our collections. From the Welsh Methodist, W. Williams, we have (a translation by him of his own Welsh original) the well-known missionary hymn, 'O'er the gloomy hills of darkness,' and 'Shepherd of Thine Israel, guide us.' From Scotland we have Logan's O God of Abraham, by whose hand,' and several others; and the Kirk is largely supplied with her vigorous paraphrases.

Our travels are over. We have spied out, not, we think, the nakedness, but the richness, of the lands. We have seen the works of the Anakim of sacred song; we have brought home of the grapes and pomegranates, not as thieves, but as having a right in them. Cut off though we be geographically from the rest of mankind, and separated, too, as to external communion, from the Churches of the Old World, still, we repeat, we must never surrender our claim as true Catholics to the common store of Christendom. Like Tennyson's Ulysses, we return home to our Ithaca to feel

I am a part of all that I have met.'

But with special reference to the practical purpose with which we set out-what is the conclusion to be drawn from all this as to the feasibility of some regulation and amendment of our present condition? Assuming that it must be brought about by the preparation of an approved and authorised hymn-book, there is little doubt that good as well as bad has come of past delay, if it is only that it has given us time and opportunity to look round us. But it is not less certain-as this hasty and superficial sketch will have shown-that our knowledge of the subject

is yet far from ripe; even the materials that now lie within reach are rough and unfit, without much more revision and rearrangement, to be worked up satisfactorily.

But let the English Church appreciate her position in this matter-a position such as no Church ever held before for undertaking this work; let her lay the whole world under tribute; let her rejoice in being able to take as she will of the soft utterances of Asia, and the deep teaching of the Greek odes, the terse diction and subdued fire of the Latins, and the bold energy of the Germans, and to weld them together with the fervent raptures of those at home who have wandered from her fold, and the chastened devotion of her more dutiful children. It is a great work; it is a great opportunity; we cannot but long for its accomplishment; yet we dread a failure. There is just so much already at hand as to tempt us into action; there is just that amount of half-preparedness to make us act in haste, and repent at leisure. There is a proverb-and we would write it over this subject-Wait a little, and make an end the sooner.' It is unbecoming the dignity and high character of our Church to be ever making and unmaking her formulas; let her bishops and doctors then begin, if they will, at once, but with the determination to spare neither labour nor time, even if years pass away before they can with confidence lay before us a 'Hymnarium' worthy of our history and our language; thoroughly consonant with the tone and teaching of our Prayer-book; and such that the Church of our time may set to it her seal, and hand it down to posterity, a ктîμа eis deì to future generations, and a lasting monument of the present.

ART. III.-1. Papers relating to Administrative and Financial Reforms in Turkey. 1858-61.

2. The Turkish Empire in its Relations with Christianity. By R. R. Madden. 2 Vols. London, 1862.

IN

N this nether world of ours it often happens that what is most talked of is least known. We like to have the sources of wonder well stirred within us. Life, in a physical point of view, is excitement. Emotions of wonder, by exciting our curiosity, quicken the consciousness of existence, and nothing is more productive of wonder than ignorance and mystery. Was ever country, for instance, more talked of, and written about, than Turkey? Yet in some respects, and those not the least important, Japan and New Zealand are better known to us than the Sultan's Empire. Geographically,

Geographically, we have a fair notion of its outline by sea and by land. Historically, we are not without the means of learning by what succession of events, and by what inspiration, the Turks acquired so immense an extent of dominion. Commercially, we are acquainted with the principal products of Turkey and with those foreign articles which enter most into the consumption of its inhabitants. We possess even a general idea of the religious tenets and national usages which give more or less a peculiar form and colour to that complicated texture of races, creeds, languages, and costumes, which is pictured on our mind's eye as often as we think of the Levant. But when some passing occurrence, some political movement, forces our attention into a closer examination of the actual state of Turkey-of the relations, for instance, in which the Sultan and his people, the several classes of society, the Government and foreign Powers stand, respectively, towards each other-we find it no easy matter to obtain a clear insight into these various departments of so extensive and complicated a subject. Have we occasion to appreciate with correctness the causes of weakness, disturbance, and decay, which operate so powerfully on the Ottoman Empire, or the character and extent of those undeveloped resources on which the advocates of Turkish regeneration rest their hopes, we are sadly at a loss for information sufficient to enlighten our minds and enable us to fix our opinion on solid and practical grounds.

Our marked deficiency in these respects can hardly fail to expose us to serious errors. We are liable in consequence to form a mistaken estimate of the great interests which may at any moment be irretrievably compromised by our ignorance; and we are led to neglect the timely adoption of measures which might avert, or at least indefinitely postpone, a dangerous and threatening contingency.

As a proof of the extreme need of better information and more patient thought upon this subject, we are tempted to adduce the following passages (which we quote with the brevity prescribed by our limits), as giving a fair specimen of the temper in which this subject has been treated by Mr. Madden, not a stray occasional writer upon Turkey, but one who professes to appreciate the importance of the questions connected with the Turkish Empire, and has dedicated to them a fresh offering of two highly fatted and garlanded volumes, in addition to sundry minor antecedent publications:

'It is indeed a terrible calamity for mankind that the most powerful nation of the world, the one that could exercise by far the greatest amount of influence in favour of the interests of humanity in every

quarter

quarter of the globe, should be disposed to adopt a policy, in its relations with Turkey, that its rulers dare not attempt to justify to themselves or to the world.

The cause of Turkey is, however, espoused, the character of its institutions vindicated, the tolerant spirit of its government extolled, the injured innocence of its religion in all its relations with the condition of rayahs strenuously contended for by Ministers of State -alas! for Christianity, even by ministers of religion, asserted in Parliament and in the Press, on the plea that British interests, which are those of civilization, are presumed to be indissolubly connected with those of the Turkish Empire. That maxim of haute politique was first propounded in the British Parliament by Mr. Pitt at the time of an apprehended rupture with the Empress Catherine; reduced to an official formula, in which all State wisdom devoted to our policy in the East is concentrated, it has been adopted ever since Mr. Pitt's administration by each successive government, to the great injury of the true interests of England and civilization.

'It is high time, I say, for the people of England to determine that they will no longer suffer their understanding to be imposed on and insulted by the miserable sophistry and unmeaning jargon of the policy which this formula professes to express; to resolve they will not approve, and can no longer acquiesce in, statements made even by the ablest veteran statesmen of our times-that it is necessary for Great Britain, for the sake of the interests of civilization, to defend and maintain-and in that just and necessary defence and maintenance to fight for the Turkish Empire.'

Now we are not disposed to quarrel with Mr. Madden for having brought into strong relief the antichristian tendencies of Islamism, the personal vices of its founder, and the corrupt oppression which it has practically engendered wherever it has become the law of the land. But still less are we inclined to delve with him into the accumulated rubbish, the testacean hill, of antiquated prejudices and barbarous atrocities, which, even when they raged, were by no means confined in practice to the followers of Mahomet, and which the progress of civilization, and sounder notions of international interest, have at least thrown into abeyance. We cannot close our understandings against the natural innovations of time. The Turkish Empire has freely and formally taken its place among the civilized nations of Europe. Can we then in reason deny it those means of improvement to which even the remote regions of China and India are becoming from year to year more evidently accessible? If it be true, as we believe, that Christianity is the religion of civilization, are not its doctrines more likely to obtain a footing amongst the Mahometans when friendly intercourse

* The Turkish Empire,' &c., vol. ii. pp. 17 et seqq.