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forum of the State; but of lay authority to make them laws of the Church there is nothing."

Nor is there any reason why this should be changed to-day. Purely spiritual matters belong as clearly to the clergy as military matters to soldiers; but there are many points on which there is no hard line of division, and here the rights of the laity should be emphasised. A word of warning, however, seems urgently needed when it is proposed to restrict a right.

It is the more unnecessary here to suggest a scheme, because so many have been already suggested. The best, it would seem, is that developed by Mr. Justice Phillimore in his essay on "Legal and Parliamentary Possibilities" in Essays in Aid of the Reform of the Church, edited by Mr. Gore. This would give to reformed Convocations power to frame "schemes" (subject not only to the present final royal sanction, but also to a provision that the Houses of Parliament should not have prayed the Crown to withhold such sanction), dealing with "all matters of discipline, organisation, administration, and worship" in the Church of England. These schemes, when they had received, after the necessary safeguards, the royal assent, would have the force of law. A caution is added which certainly the Church would accept.

"The fullest protection will be wanted for three external interests: (1) Those who have civil rights in Church property, from the Crown itself down to the holder of a faculty pew; (2) incumbents of benefices with vested interests, from the bishop to the perpetual curate; (3) Nonconformists of all kinds."

It is difficult to see why, if these interests are protected and the temporal supremacy of the State be fully secured, the widest power of self-government should not be given in the Church of England.

VI.

Anglican Theology

By W. O. BURROWS, M.A.

UR national temperament is practical and not speculative, and England is a by-word among the nations for its illogical compromises and shameless lack of system, alike in politics, in education, and in philosophy. We are reckoned a "nation of shopkeepers," destitute of ideas. And in truth we mistrust all lofty aims and schemes and phrases. We dislike logical completeness. We mock at "paper constitutions." "Right in theory, wrong in practice," is a popular saying among us, and is used not to express the sad result of experience, but (in contradiction with itself) as the plain man's theory of the world; that is what he expects to find, and content with this one theory he scorns all others, except perchance those of his own making. And in consequence he is often the illustration of his own adage, wrong in theory, and yet right in practice.

But even England cannot after all get on without ideas and principles, and we have, and have always had, our thinkers. Only their education, their aims, their methods, have been governed by the national characteristics. They have not been trained to philosophise; like Darwin, they devise their own methods as they go. They may be almost said to live from hand to mouth, for they start with no

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idea of working out some all-embracing scheme, but follow the suggestions of the moment as they chance to arise. They are like pilots, who never look up to the stars, but are content to avoid the rocks and shoals that lie close to hand, and to make full use of the currents. And somehow they reach the port. After all, English statesmen and men of letters and naturalists do make their contribution to the progress of the world of thought and knowledge. It must be very provoking to the others when their magnificent schemes fail, and the English method or want of method succeeds. A garden thus left to run wild ought to produce only weeds and thorns, but sometimes it has the best flowers and fruit to show. And lookers-on can only offer their sympathy to the scientific gardeners.

As in other matters, so in theology. "Like people, like priest." We English are constitutionally averse to speculative thought. We are determined not to "exercise ourselves in great matters which are too high for us." We are always contrasting dogma and charity, orthodoxy and holiness, till we can hardly believe that a profound theologian can be a man of practical benevolence and have a tender, affectionate heart. What English artist, for instance, would ever have thought of painting S. Jerome with a tame lion and a tame partridge? And with these prejudices against abstract thought, it is no wonder that we create no systems of theology. The very idea seems ridiculous to us; we claim to have received a revelation, and we have no wish to invent anything new. We have therefore no Tübingen, no Ritschl. We have no schools of thought in divinity. At best we have a "movement," and what a dull, sordid, uninspiring word it is! Such is our present barrenness in speculative theology; and if we look back to the period of the Reformation we find there the same phenomenon. While “vast scientific systems of theology, like the great work of Suarez, unfolded and established

with philosophic calmness and strength the Roman doctrine," while the genius of Calvin elaborated a creed "stern, hard, positive, but thoroughly earnest and very mighty, and with a gloomy and savage grandeur and nobility, in its passionate, loyal assertions of the irresistible sovereignty of God, against the claims, the worthlessness, and the insignificance of man,"* what had England to show? A Church that put the Bible in her children's hands, and read it to them systematically from cover to cover, and taught them to read it for themselves. A Prayer-book rich in the inheritance of ages of devotion, and yet at every point explaining itself to the ignorant, sanctifying the trivial round, the common task, and following every crisis in life with divine sympathy, with its

"Touches of things common,

Till they rose to touch the spheres."

Sacraments and ministry that had lost none of the power of Christ's institution in being purged of mediæval abuses. Altogether an excellent outfit for all pastoral and practical purposes. But for abstract theology we had nothing to show but a makeshift collection of some thirty-nine Articles, dealing cursorily with most of the points at that time in dispute. And yet somehow or other good work has been done and is being done by English students and thinkers. And while in some quarters the mere mention of Anglican theology would raise a laugh, after all there is such a thing, and it has its own peculiar merits.

This distaste for speculation has not always characterised English thought. In the fourteenth century Oxford was coupled with Paris as a chief seat of the metaphysical philosophy of the Schoolmen. We had our Roger Bacon, our Alexander of Hales, our William of

Dean CHURCH'S Lecture on "Bishop Andrewes," in Masters in English Theology, pp. 85, 95.

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Ockham, and, if we may claim him too, Duns, the great "Scotchman." But those were in the Middle Ages, and for whatever reason things have been very different in English thought since the revival of learning and the development of natural science and the invention of printing, since the discovery of America and the beginnings of colonisation, since the great religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And just as the characteristic feature of the Reformation in England was the absence of great men, for we had no Luther, no Calvin, no Ignatius Loyola, not even a John Knox; so it has been the characteristic of Anglican theology ever since, that it has been humble, tentative, and if you will, timid; but for those very reasons more faithful, more truthful, more liberal, than the bolder systems of Scotland and of the Continent, which at first sight claim so much more distinguished a place. "Englishmen have always preferred the recognition of all the facts of any case, however irreconcilable they may seem, to the sacrifices which a perfect logical system invariably demands before it can square to its required limits the complex variety of nature and human life."* It is no doubt in consequence of this halting, nebulous indefiniteness of English theological thought, and the absence of great writers of world-wide fame, that our Church has so long been reckoned by continental writers among the Calvinistic bodies. Möhler, for instance, in his Symbolik, where he compares the tenets of various bodies of Christians, seems to show no consciousness of a distinctively Anglican position, neither Lutheran nor Calvinistic. To him our theology is but Calvinism and water.

It is not within the scope of this essay to lay down. the fundamental truths of Christianity, or even to set forth the teaching of our Church on points of dispute, * Masters in English Theology, Introduction, p. xvi., by Bishop BARRY.