Oliver lies wholly in this. He is not much else, but he is a pure heart.

Of the great tragic power of this work we could say much, had we room. It abounds in the finest tragic situations. The essence of the tragic is in the conflict of the individual with destiny. The highest form of it is where a man struggles not merely with an overruling destiny from without, but with a destiny that works from within and through his own character, as in Hamlet. Our author is not subjective enough for this. His attention is more given to the outward. Yet he rises above the vulgar, merely physical tragedy. The "Flight of Sykes " in this book can hardly be matched for moral power. The old Greek "Furies" of Orestes were not more tragic, than the horrors of conscience which here. hunt down the desperate murderer. This scene is worth all the sermons about retribution ever preached.

And this leads us to speak of the moral tone and tendency of the book. Though a cool and impartial observer, this writer sees things from no centre of indifference. His pictures of society judge society. He delights in exposing all that is false, conventional, and hollow in common life; the lies, which we are living, high and low; the imitation of one another's respectable vices. This he does without levity or malice, with no sneer, and in no morbid spirit. What charms us most is the healthy tone of this writer, as far from indifference, on the one hand, as from any idiosyncratic exaggeration on the other. Deeply as he goes into disgusting details, mortifying to the pride of human nature as are his sly winks at all our little vanities; much as he dwells among the most revolting scenes of a corrupt society, showing at what an expense of loathsome realities all this decency of appearance is kept up; openly as he paints us the worst, which hitherto only sneering skeptics have dared to do; - yet he does it in faith and cheerfulness. We see that he still loves man, and hopes for man. There is, in spite of all these sickening details, a something corrective in the general atmosphere of his pictures; he never lets us forget that poured round all is the blithe air of the Universe still, that up above us there the sky is clear, and smiles down upon our scene of misery as if it knew, but forbore to tell, the solution of the riddle which torments us, that the stars are there, that God is alive, and that this world is good. We have said that this work is modern in its ideas. This writer

connects himself with the movement tendency of the age. The love of man shines on his pages. He is a reformer, and believes in making society better. The inference from his story is inevitable. It shows us how much crime in England. is a direct and necessary product of their oppressive PoorLaw system, and how crime and depravity everywhere come, more than we think, from our want of sympathy with the poor, our small respect for man as man, our violation of the natural pledge of brotherhood. This drives men into iniquity. Beware how thou judgest the depraved, whom thou perchance hast helped to make!

J. S. D.

ART. III. Tracts for the Times. By Members of the University of Oxford. Four vols. 8vo. 1833-1838. London Rivingtons.

But

EZRA tells us with what parade and joy the captive Israelites returned by the decree of Cyrus to their desolate cities. As was natural, sorrow at the devastation and pollution of their sacred places, filled their breasts when they again beheld them; but this soon gave way to the labor of renovation. When the work was accomplished the prophet says, "All the people shouted with a great shout, when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the House of the Lord was laid. many of the Priests and Levites, and chief of the Fathers, who were ancient men that had seen the first House, when the foundation of this House was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice." The ark, the schechinah, the tables of the covenant, Aaron's rod, and the manna, the riches and the boast of the former temple, were gone, and only their holy associations remained. It has often occurred to us that the fathers and ancient men of the English hierarchy must have experienced something of the same feeling, when they compared the latter temple of their land with the former. The unity of doctrine, truth and discipline, the unyielding and all pervading authority, and the august ceremonies of Catholicism, have left merely

their shadows in the Protestant Episcopacy of England. These were the symbols and the facts which made the former Church a reality, putting it above the arguments of heretics, and attaching to it the unquestioning faith of its disciples. It seemed indeed to be built upon a rock. Its priests gave titles to kings, its revenues drained and then beautified the land, and its offices were associated with every event and hour of life. The perfect consistency which then existed between the theory and the practice of Catholicism, is the basis of the most solid of those arguments, by which its supporters still vindicate its authority, and labor zealously for its restoration.

Charles Butler has thus given the points of resemblance between the Churches of England and of Rome.

"The former has retained much of the dogma, and much of the discipline of Roman Catholics. Down to the sub-deacon it has retained the whole of their hierarchy; and, like them, has its deans, and rural deans, chapters, prebends, archdeacons, rectors, and vicars; a liturgy, taken in a great measure, from the Roman Catholic liturgy, and composed, like that, of psalms, canticles, the three creeds, litanies, gospels, epistles, prayers, and responses. Both churches have the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist, the absolution of the sick, the burial service, the sign of the cross in baptism, the reservation of confirmation and ordination to bishops, the difference of episcopal and sacerdotal dress, feasts, and fasts."*

These are indeed points of resemblance. But where is the spirit of unity, where the obedience of subordination, where the bold pretence of infallibility, where the secrets of the inquisition and the confessional, where the august sacrifice of the mass, where the terrific sentence of excommunication? Ichabod, is the name of the English hierarchy, for its glory has departed. So should we conceive it to be a matter of regret to the dignitary of the English Church, or for one who passed the pleasant life of a scholar within the walls of its more ancient University, to compare the latter with the former temple. And now that it is said, with some measure of truth, that the ancient faith iş erecting its monasteries, abbeys, and chapels in the land of Cranmer and Latimer, it is found that nobles and plebeians are likewise making the same comparison.

If we have not mistaken the tenor of these Tracts, and of

* Butler's Confessions of Faith, pp. 194, 195.

the mass of publications for and against them, which they have called forth, they owe their origin to this same contrast between the former and the latter temple. Rome stands single in its haughty pride of refusing to lower its standard one tittle to allure protestants. It has never given its sanction to one attempt of this kind, not even to those of Richelieu or Bossuet. Even of late years, when in compliance with the spirit which has led the world to seek for a remedy for all social evils in democracy, the Abbé de la Mennais recommended the same democracy to the Pope, as the means of regaining his lost ascendancy, Gregory the Sixteenth looked upon his adviser with a very suspicious eye. This was his answer: Religious toleration, though under certain circumstances prudence requires it as the less evil, should never be represented by a Catholic, as a good or a thing thing desirable." - (Affaires de Rome, p. 156.) This unyielding adherence withont fear or favor to all its primary principles, is another attribute of Rome, which many of the Reformers were from the beginning sorry to surrender, and the loss of which many English dignitaries have since lamented. But Dissent, the enemy of Episcopacy, has shorn this attribute of its strength, and the State, the friend of Episcopacy, has aided in levelling it to a mere pretence. It is no wonder, therefore, that some of the champions of the Church of England should endeavor to revive this pride of unchanging stability. Hence is engendered a tone of argument which many men look upon as the worst form of bigotry. This apparent bigotry therefore, together with the mournful sense of the departed glory of the church, will give us a key to the intent and character of the famous Oxford Tracts. The place of their origin glories in the character which it has ever labored to maintain, as the resolute opponent of all innovation in religion and politics, as the close adherent to tradition, ancient usage, and established forms. On every question which has agitated England for the last three centuries, ask which is the older side of it, and there you will find Oxford. It issued an edict against Wickliffe, and twice refused to sanction Henry the Eighth's divorce. Up to the present day it shows to its visitors the prison door which closed upon Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, and the spot upon which they suffered martyrdom. Oxford resisted the Parliamentary commissioners, and again opposed the popery of James the Second. It well nigh exhibited symptoms of madness in resisting the repeal of the Test

Act, Catholic Emancipation, the admission of Dissenters, and the exclusion of sectarian principles of religion from education. Here it was that Gibbon became a Catholic. See what compliments he passed upon his Alma Mater.

"These venerable bodies are sufficiently old to partake of all the prejudices and infirmities of age. The schools of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in a dark age of false and barbarous science; and they are still tainted with the vices of their origin. Their primitive discipline was adapted to the education of priests and monks; and the government still remains in the hands of the clergy, an order of men whose manners are remote from the present world, and whose eyes are dazzled by the light of philosophy. The legal incorporation of these societies by the charters of popes and kings had given them a monopoly of the public instruction, and the spirit of monopolists is narrow, lazy, and oppressive; their work is more costly and less productive than that of independent artists, and the new improvements so eagerly grasped by the competition of freedom, are admitted with slow and sullen reluctance in those proud corporations, above the fear of a rival, and below the confession of an error. - It might at least be expected, that an ecclesiastical school should inculcate the orthodox principles of religion. But our venerable mother had contrived to unite the opposite extremes of bigotry and indifference; an heretic, or unbeliever, was a monster in her eyes; but she was always, or often, or sometimes, remiss in the spiritual education of her own children.”*

There has ever been a broad distinction between the divines of Oxford and Cambridge. While it has ever been the aim of the former to cherish antiquity, the latter has befriended progress. The Cambridge school of divines, among the founders of which were Cudworth, Henry More, the Platonist and friend of Milton, Whichcote, and others, have labored to renew the ancient union between philosophy and religion, and by infusing the spirit of piety and the dignity of learning into English Episcopacy, to make the faith worthy of the scholar and the thinker. These men are called Latitudinarians, and the Oxford divines are called Papists. They make the foundation of the two great parties in the Church of England, and both seeming to be of Lord Bacon's mind, that, "things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be never altered for the better designed

* Memoirs of My Life and Writings, Chap. III.

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