of the Committee of the Jerusalem Diocesan Fund, on the 16th of June, a resolution was passed, complaining of the aspersions' cast, not by, but on, Bishop Gobat. Truly we may say,

'Dat veniam corvis, vexat censura columbas.'

The Committee further state that, after searching inquiry,' there is no foundation in the facts, when duly explained,' for those assertions; and conclude with a vote of undiminished confidence' in Bishop Gobat. They also promise a pamphlet, which has since come out, precisely in time to be too late for any notice here.

It may at once be said, that the mode of the 'inquiry' itself condemns the conclusions arrived at. Whatever the facts, assuming for the moment the doubt which the Committee affect, may prove to be, this was not the way to deal with them; nor was the Committee a tribunal antecedently unprejudiced, and sufficiently impartial to set at rest questions which seriously implicate the credit of every one of its members. It is as if the sitting members of constituencies charging them with bribery and corruption, should form themselves into a committee to consider the charge. To whatever the alleged 'inquiry-as clandestine as some of the nefarious acts which it had to consider may be found to amount, it has clearly been managed without seeking the evidence of those witnesses whose words have set the world in a blaze of indignation, Mr. Holman Hunt, Mr. Graham, Dr. Bonar, and Dr. Sim.

And now we have gone through the more public and crying facts of this complicated and distasteful affair; but there are various minor complementary scandals on which we have been unable to dilate, or even to touch. The examination of the whole is like nothing so much as that of a drop of dirty water by a microscope. There appears the Sandreczki scandal, the Crawford scandal, the Macgowan libel, the dragoman's corruption, the Rosenthals' persecution, and then emerges the great Gobat scandal itself, a strange creation, with many members, stomachs, and mouths, and,

'Like Aaron's serpent, swallows all the rest,' and becomes itself the envelope of all. Of the state of feeling in Jerusalem fewer traces reach us than if this tyranny were exercised in the meanest and remotest dependency of the British Crown; but those which transpire are painful enough. There, the facts, as we have set them forth, are known clearly enough, and that knowledge is embittered by the further consciousness that there is a clique of bigots at home bent on denying their truth, and industrious in suppressing the proof of them, of which we expect the pamphlet alluded to as too recently published for our notice, will furnish a conclusive example.

239

ART. VII.-Catholic Antidotes. By Rev. W. E. HEYGATE, M.A. London: Masters.

IN bygone days no subject was handled without an endeavour to exhaust it. Each chronicler of his monastery or of his country conscientiously began his history at the very beginning, i. e. with Adam. Each writer of a theological treatise felt it necessary to pass in review not a few of the first principles of theology. Every topic, in short, was deduced and developed usque ab ovo; because, when books were scarce, little knowledge could be taken for granted, and each book had to discharge many of the functions of a library. Our own age, with its teeming press, its rapid locomotion, its cheap post, its wide dissemination of fundamental ideas, is naturally impatient of unnecessary repetitions. The monograph, devoted to the elucidation of a particular point of doctrine or of criticism, and dismissing all antecedent or parallel matter, is a feature of modern, perhaps especially of German theological literature. Clearness and brevity are, or ought to be, its advantages; it is liable to the charge of onesidedness or superficiality.

'Presto è bene

Non si conviene.'

But in truth, whatever be its faults or its virtues, it is a creation of the age, and Mr. Heygate adopts it, not probably as thinking it the best for a very vast subject, but as wishing to be read by a generation which will only read on its own terms.

It is due to Mr. Heygate to bear this in mind. For the range of subjects to which he addresses himself within a somewhat narrow compass, is a little alarming. In our own days Mr. Goode has written three dreary volumes on the Rule of Faith; Mr. Macnaught, erroneously, and Mr. Lee, ably, but both at some length, on the subject of Inspiration; Mr. Mozley, with more grace and eloquence than orthodoxy, on the question of Baptismal Regeneration; writers whom it would be beyond our power to enumerate, on the Atonement; and Father Passaglia in true mediæval style upon the Immaculate Conception. The modern literature of the Sacraments would of itself fill a respectable library. Yet, in a volume of less than 200 pages, Mr. Heygate is discussing each of these very various points; but only to exhibit their relation to the premises by which the Creed of Christendom must be at present maintained. He is, perhaps,

a little dry-his arguments are elliptical, and his book wears the appearance, at places, of having tumbled out into life prematurely from the note-books in which it originally grew. But the book itself must have cost him considerable labour; and it is a real boon to the Church, as the subject to which it directs attention is of the greatest importance.

After remarking that other members of the Church of England besides those who cling peculiarly to her Catholic elements, are constantly pained and alarmed by the able promulgation and maintenance of some new and startling error within the communion of their Church, he proceeds :

'The following pages are an attempt to direct persons to a remedy for this evil, to an autidote which will either prevent error by anticipation, or remedy it subsequently by correction.'-P. xvi.

The existence of the evil does not admit of dispute. Some years since it might have been said that Rationalism, at least in England, was but a theological bugbear, and that the strong sense of the nation was more imperious than the logic which would deduce it irresistibly from the premises of ultra-Protestantism. But since the publication of Mr. Maurice's Theological Essays, of Mr. Macnaught's work on Inspiration, and specially of the Commentaries on S. Paul's Epistles, by Messrs. Jowett and Stanley,-Evangelicals themselves have been foremost to proclaim the energy and extent of an evil with which they are at the same time utterly unable to cope, except by weapons of denunciation and abuse. Mr. Heygate proposes to them a more excellent way :

This antidote [to rationalism] is partly a direct appeal to the Creed of the Primitive Church, and partly an exhibition of certain Catholic doctrines and actions, as irreconcilable with particular errors, and as an intended safeguard against them.'—P. xvi.

Any man does good service who insists upon the appeal to antiquity. Ultra-Protestantism, Rationalism, the intellectual Epicureanism of the day-and we must add, Roman Catholicism are against it. The labour of inquiry is doubtless distasteful to a large number of well-meaning persons; and we are familiar with stories of Exeter Hall orators, who have claimed and received applause on the ground of their ignorance of the Fathers. To elevate want of education into a principle and a virtue, is certainly an adroit proceeding for those who are uneducated, and who dread the loss of influence which may follow on the discovery. A more respectable objection is that which connects itself with a fear of putting a stop to the progress of theological science. But antiquity does not proscribe modern criticism. Provided only that no additions be made to the essentials of the

faith, as by modern Roman development, and nothing be taken from it, as by religionists of an opposite tendency, the principles of antiquity may be recognised side by side with the utmost activity of thought and investigation. Mr. Heygate discusses at length, and as we think successfully, the objection that antiquity, if resorted to, leads men to Rome (pp. xx-xxvi. Intr.), but he dismisses somewhat summarily the yet more usual fallacy,' that 'any man can prove anything out of the Fathers, and that they are too discordant to be of any service as witnesses.' Certainly this objection is most frequently urged by those who are entirely ignorant of the Fathers, or who know what they know of them at second hand. Thus, as our readers will recollect, it was brought forward somewhat conspicuously last year, during the course of the debate on the Divorce Bill, by a high authority in the House of Lords. Of course there are contradictory propositions to be found in so vast a literature as that of the ancient Church. Of course there are many propositions apparently, but not really, contradictory. The Fathers state both sides of truth, as a rule, very fearlessly, and by isolating their language from its context, you may represent as antagonistic, expressions which are in the highest degree harmonious. This is at least equally the case with Holy Scripture; and it cannot at any rate be denied, that the Fathers do, on the whole, represent one common atmosphere—almost one habit of thought on sacred subjectscommon, we mean, to Greeks and Latins, to the schools of Antioch and of Alexandria, to literal and mystical commentators, to writers so distant from each other in country and associations as, e. g. S. Chrysostom and Tertullian, or in the date of their appearance upon the arena of the Church, as the sub-apostolic S. Clement Romanus, and his successor, S. Gregory. The greatest dissimilarities between Fathers are surely less than those which separate the Old Testament from the New, or the Fathers from modern ultra-Protestants, or, much more, ultra-Protestants from each other. We say nothing of the possible application of the hasty dictum of the Bishop of London to the canon of the New Testament, or to the proof of the doctrine of the everblessed Trinity. It was uttered, perhaps, in the heat of debate; and might be passed over as what it is, an obiter dictum, did it not betray to our opponents a very fundamental principle not only of Anglicanism, but, as we submit, of Revelation itself, only to get rid of a troublesome argument, which could not otherwise have been met but by severe investigation.

We say a fundamental principle of Revelation.' For how can we prove the canon of the New Testament to be what it claims to be, if antiquity is to be thus contemptuously abandoned? No man in his senses would say that internal evidence

NO. CI.-N.S.

R

could suffice to prove the books of the New Testament to differ from the works of the Apostolic Fathers as inspired from uninspired compositions, or that each book of the New Testament carries within it palpable evidence of its inspiration.' But the express statements of the Fathers upon this subject will be easily disposed of by a resource peculiar, we believe, to controversialists of our own age. It is assumed, whenever the assumption is needed, that the Fathers used language on the most sacred subjects without restraint upon hyperbole or figure, without any adequate sense of the responsibilities of language, almost without any conscientiousness at all. They are said to speak rhetorically, whenever what they say goes beyond the purpose and tenets of those who desire to claim their names without submitting to their teaching. Doubtless, at times the Fathers are rhetorical; and it would be little less than dishonest to claim an apostrophe to a departed friend which might occur at the close of a funeral panegyric, as proving that the fervid orator habitually invoked the Saints. But when, in the midst of a grave doctrinal treatise, a writer uses strong language-which concentrates and reiterates what he had said before-the natural inference is, that he is calling attention to his real meaning, in a manner calculated to impress his readers, not with his volubility of language, but with the seriousness and substance of his teaching. It is possible to evade the adverse testimony of any writer, by describing as rhetoric or hypothetical language any body of phraseology which militates against what you wish to find in him. A recent Bampton lecturer had the boldness to apply this method of elimination to Hooker. An able writer on Baptism has recently employed it to get rid of the incubus of the vast body of ancient language on the subject of regeneration conveyed by that Sacrament. It is just as much, and just as little, applicable to what is said by the Fathers on the questions of inspiration of Scripture, or on the Deity of our Lord and Saviour. Their language will only appear rhetorical to those who, not possessing the gift of faith, cannot bring themselves to imagine that there is so much to be said about supernatural realities by those who see them. In any case, if their rhetorical tendency makes the ancients untrustworthy on such subjects as Baptism and the blessed Eucharist, they are equally unsafe guides when they speak, as they often do, with such force and beauty on the unity and inspiration of Holy Scripture.

And here it is that we complain, with Mr. Heygate, of the

1 Mr. Heygate seems a little to overstate his case in page 3. The obvious general use of paph in the New Testament must limit its meaning in 2 Tim. iii. 16. 2 Bode's Bampton Lectures, p. 173, note.

3 Cf. Mozley on Baptism. Introd. sub fin.