reason of the Tradition? but the reason of the historical phenomenon? This seems still concealed from their view, and almost unsuspected. They have, then, themselves, seen the main question only by faith. It lies further back than they have gone, deeper than their plummets seem to have sounded. We take up Dr. Pusey's Sermon on the Eucharist; we find him recognizing a fact there, and laboring to prove, that, in the best days of even the Church of England, it was very generally believed, that there was a fact there; but what this fact is, his sermon does not tell us. He calls it the Real Presence, that is to say, a fact, and not the symbol of a fact; but this does not tell me what the fact is. We take up the Dissertation on Baptism, in the volumes before us; we find here, again, that Baptism is very properly declared to be a fact, not the mere symbol of a fact, or rather, as with the majority of modern Protestants, of a No-fact; but what is this fact? No answer. We are left in the dark. So of all the other matters touched upon. We find, and are most happy to find, that everywhere it is affirmed that there is fact, reality; but what the fact, what the reality is, we are nowhere told. These divines, therefore, are chiefly commendable for calling our attention to the fact, that the church really means something, rather than for having told us what it means.

The method of these divines is also defective. It is the historical method. They seek to instruct us, as to the significance of the fact in question, by piling quotation upon quotation. But, Reverend Doctors, this will not answer; for the sense of these quotations has escaped us. We know all very well what are the words the Fathers have used, but what have the Fathers meant by their words? We gain nothing by being told what they have said, for the question is not as to what the Fathers have said, but what the Fathers have meant. We all know the canons, the rubrics, the creeds, and the catechisms, in which the church has embodied her sense of her own significance; but what do these mean? what has the church meant by them?

Why do you light tapers upon the altar? Why do you turn to the east in prayer? Why do you kneel when you come to the word Jesus? We know the church commands us to believe in the Trinity; but what is the profound significance of this doctrine? What is the fact which lies under it? The church gives herself out as the medium of our union with Christ, through whom we have access to the Father. But what does this mean? The church insists on apostolic succession, and canonical appointment. Go to the bottom of this and tell us what it means? The age, Oxford Divines, has grown weary of idolatry; it is weary of mere images, symbols, representations; and demands to be made acquainted with the true God, the Infinite I-AM, not with the I-APPEAR. As yet, ye have done nothing but to erect an altar to the UNKNOWN GOD. But this ye have done, God be thanked! ye have declared your firm faith, that God is, and that in all holy things there is a reality, the NUMEN as well as the shrine.

The great evil is, that we have, as before said, lost the profound sense of the Christian mysteries, of the church and its dogmas, sacraments, and discipline. Quotations, then, from the accredited fathers of the church, cannot avail us; because these quotations are, as it were, part and parcel of the church, and their sense escapes us, as does hers. It is necessary, then, to go farther, to look deeper, and, by profound meditations on the very nature of things, and of God's providential dealings with humanity, to find the lost key to the mysteries of Christianity. We are now as the Jews, who had lost the true pronunciation of the sacred Tetragram; and prophecy, and inspiration, and the power to work miracles abandon us, and leave us to our merely human resources. We must find again the sacred NAME, and its right pronunciation; and then, but not till then, shall we be able to know Him whom we now ignorantly worship. In other words, it is in the study of the philosophy of the church, and not in its mere outward history, that we are to find the key to its mysteries, and to become acquainted with their significance, with the FACTS they cover, that is to say, with the

Christian ontology itself. Our Oxford divines seem to us to have neglected the philosophy of the church, and therefore to have failed to show us the real principle of unity and catholicity. We find them reproducing the phenomena of the church, but not its ontology; and yet it is its ontology, that is the principle of its phenomena.

We find no fault with the Oxford divines for reviving obsolete customs, and for studying to restore the liturgy of the church to its former completeness; although, were we of the Church of England, acknowledging episcopal authority, we should hold it to be as improper for a private presbyter to revive an obsolete. custom, on his private authority, as it would be for him. to introduce a new one, the rubric to the contrary notwithstanding. What has fallen, by general consent, into desuetude, though still standing in the rubrics and canons, is virtually repealed, and can properly be revived only by the supreme legislative authority. But this is no affair of ours. We make no doubt that many things have been cast off, that it will be well to resume. But do our Oxford divines ask, if these practices, which they are seeking to revive, have, or can have, the same significance for worshippers to-day, that they had formerly, when they were faithfully observed, and evidently attended with the best results? To revive, or to create, as it were, "with malice aforethought," can it ever do good? Bring us back the sense of these old practices; that we need; but that sense may, perhaps, now and hereafter, be better expressed in other, and even very different, forms. The great question, the main question, is not the restoration of the ancient forms of church discipline, but the restoration of the original sense of the church, and of the church herself to her true place in the economy of Providence, as the condition of more effectually discharging her high functions. This is the question, the real question for the age; and, after all, it is the real question with these Oxford divines, and they should, therefore, have proposed it clearly, distinctly, unencumbered by any minor

questions about details, however important these minor questions may become, when the main question itself is disposed of.

We repeat, the church question is not a question of details, of particular communions, of dogmas, nor of constitutions. It is not, whether we shall adopt this or that symbol of faith; whether we shall accept, and observe, this or that form of social or private worship; whether we shall contend for the Papal, the Episcopal, the Presbyterian, or the Congregational method of constituting the church; it is not, where the authority of the church shall be lodged, nor how its administration shall be provided for; all of which may become questions, and grave questions too; but, What is the church itself? what its office? and what its authority, however constituted, or however named? This, we believe, is the first and main question to be disposed of by our

own age.

Touching the constitution and discipline of the church, we say, in passing, the church is herself supreme. No precise model of the one, or minute details of the other, are given in the New Testament. It was, evidently, the design of the Founder of the church, to leave the constitution and discipline of the church to be shaped according to the exigencies of time and place; and the sacredness of this or that form of the one or the other must be supported, not by texts of Scripture, but by the inherent authority of the church herself to adopt such forms, from time to time, as in her wisdom she judges proper. If we deny to the church this authority, we make her an empty name, an institution without reality, a mere appearance, an optic illusion, about which no wise or sober man will concern himself for a moment. The question, then, comes up, Has the church this authority? If so, whence does she derive it? And this leads us back to what we have called the church question itself, and requires us to comprehend the whole scheme of God's Mediatorial Grace.

It is by no means our intention, in the present article, to try our hand at answering this question of the

church. That we have some thoughts on the subject, we should be sorry to be compelled to deny ; nay, that we have attained to some proximate solution of the problem, caught, at least, a transient glimpse of the profound significance of the Mighty Moral Fact before which we and all Christendom stand in awe, we firmly believe; but our present purpose has been merely to state the question, and to offer some few practical observations on the movements commenced, and commencing, by our age, which indicate a desire to return to unity and catholicity, that is to say, to the church of God.

How the fact, that the sense of the church, of its dogmas and ritual, has been lost, can be reconciled with this other fact, for which we strenuously contend, namely, that the Spirit of Truth, which leadeth into all truth, is ever present in the church, its organic principle, its vital force, we shall attempt on another occasion to explain. It suffices us, for the present, to assume the broad, obvious, undeniable fact, that this sense has been lost. We may find evidence of this anywhere throughout all Christendom, at any time. since the disappearance of the great names of the Middle Ages. Perhaps no single cause has contributed more to this result, than the philosophical movement commenced, in the twelfth century, by the layman, Abélard, the real father of what we call, by courtesy, Modern Philosophy. Abélard was the first to work that mighty change in philosophy, by which it leaves the ontological question, that is to say, theology, the eternal verities of things, and comes to concern itself solely with phenomena. He has placed in the Christian world the system of philosophy known as CONCEPTUALISM. Anselm and others had asserted the reality of ideas, making them, as we have elsewhere explained, the essential forms, or the essences of things. William de Champeaux, following, did the same, only taking care to distinguish between ideas, or genera, properly so called, and mere mental abstractions, and thus gave to Realism a systematic form. Roscelin, founder of the