Her real Character.

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pated her fate, and shortly before the 10th of August wrote thus with pathetic dignity :

:

My life is a different existence from what it was; it is one of daily and unceasing suffering; my health is gone, my happiness has fled; and but for my poor children I could wish to be in the grave. They will kill me, Christina, and after my death do you do justice to my memory. I have deserved your esteem and that of all good men. They charge me with revolting crimes; I need not say that I am innocent of them. Happily, the King judges me justly; he knows I have not failed in my duty to him.'

These letters end a few days before the 10th August, when Louis XVI. became the prisoner of the Assembly, and, amidst confusion, massacre, and terror, the Republic commenced its tremendous progress. They do not touch the events which followed, the trial and execution of the King; the frightful scenes of 1793; and that tragic spectacle when Marie Antoinette confronted calmly her pitiless judges, and having suffered many deaths, in the fate of all who had been dear to her, was at last released by the executioner from the agony of her mournful existence. This volume enables us to estimate justly a character not at all difficult to understand, although it has been differently interpreted. The nature of Marie Antoinette was not disposed to evil ways. Through life her moral conduct was, as we think, free from serious censure. But at an age scarce beyond childhood she was placed in a most difficult position, in which the ripest prudence was necessary; and being indiscreet and inexperienced, she became a victim of calumny and detraction. Then, suddenly plunged into the blinding chaos of a period unexampled in history, she mistook the signs of that fearful time; and, owing to this fatal mistake, went on a way which was not a wrong one in any intelligible moral sense, which, although it may appear tortuous, was consistent with uprightness in herself, but which led her to swift destruction. Her figure stands on the tracts of time, surrounded by tempests and dark clouds-an example of the mysterious truth that Providence sometimes visits on the innocent the results of the sins of those who preceded them.

ART. III.-(1.) Speech of the Bishop of London at Glasgow, Nov. 3, 1864. (2.) Speech of the Right Hon. B. D'Israeli, M.P., at Oxford, Nov. 25, 1864.

(3.) Speech of the Bishop of Oxford at Hastings, October 29, 1864.

(4.) Charge of the Bishop of Salisbury at the triennial visitation of his diocese, Aug. 11, 1864.

WHEN the sun is shining on us it is night at the Antipodes; and whilst we are keeping merry Christmas round the roaring fire, our Australian cousins are sweltering with midsummer heat, and voting plum-pudding a bore. So, when political questions are agitating the public mind, Church questions go to sleep; but when the former have died down into quiescence again, the latter are sure to come up. Politically, we have been bidden by a most potent voice to 'rest and be thankful.' Now then comes the Church's turn, and she seems bent on making the most of her opportunity. The Church of England as by law established' presents no longer (if it ever did) the spectacle of a pleasant landscape dotted over with rich and happy farms, and covered with the quiet but incessant industries of peace. It is no longer like a comfortable, easy, well-to-do family, dwelling peacefully in rich ancestral halls, enjoying, undisturbed, the ample ancestral income, accumulating with the generations; it resembles rather a battle-field, on which are to be seen the hurried preparations for speedy war; the rattan of the 'drum ecclesiastic' is heard all over the land; the Bishops have put the bugle to their mouths, and are rallying their followers on either side to hearty participation of the strife.

Through some chemical accident, or owing to some natural and inevitable process of disintegration, such as time and the elements work even in the granite rocks, the apparent homogeneity of the Church is gone, and it is most manifestly resolved into separate and diverse elements, still mechanically held to one another, but no longer one undivided substance. There is no longer any comfortable and quiet living in the old family mansion; even those who care nothing for the feuds must hear the din all round them, and have all the misery in the midst of war.

In some instances the dull eyes of an easy, sleepy orthodoxy, with its ready-made creed, have been made to open themselves a little more widely by the stronger lights that are playing over the nineteenth-century world, and they have seen strange

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things; startling things for men who had never questioned the rightness of their old faiths, nor sought for reasons for believing that which had upon it the stamp of so venerable a tradition. Others again, of an opposite tendency, have been dreaming dreams and seeing visions of the past; of the good old days, when the Priest was really the Priest, when he had an authority with the people which no Act of Parliament could give him, when a heavenly virtue dwelt in him, and when the sacraments, administered by him, had all the validity of divine acts. And these have been trying to realize their dreams and to plant the fourteenth in the midst of the nineteenth century. And betwixt these two, a third party, clinging tenaciously to what they found in the Church, scared at the reckless license of the one, and the dangerous trifling of the other, has been uttering its wild inarticulate cries, its feeble and vain remonstrances, and stands now trembling for the fate of that fabric which is being dragged at in such opposite directions and by such strong hands.

Of what is all this ferment the symptom? How will it end? Is it the culmination of the Chaos-period, out of which a new and more beautiful Church of England shall arise, stronger than ever in its hold of the affections of the people of England, and worthier of their loving reverence; more beautiful, and nearer to the true Divine ideal of a Church; a Church which shall be able successfully to solve the oft-attempted problem of a 'com"prehension' of all the sects, and to be what it never has been yet, the Church of the people of England; the elements that now in their separateness and antagonism are unlovely and a source of weakness, blended then into one new harmonious and beautiful whole; the love of the new light splendidly coalescing with reverence for the old; perfect freedom of thought, along with ready submission to the divinely authoritative, concentering in a living, ever-improving orthodoxy, by the force of its own truthfulness and moral and spiritual worth outgrowing all crotchety schisms, and with a healthy, mighty, but gentle compulsion attracting all to herself?-Shall this be the outcome of the present ferment? Is this the providential issue of the critical condition of the Church of England just now? Or does it mean disintegration? dissolution? Has the mass, hitherto solid and one, in appearance at least, become unable any longer to hold together? Have the moral solvents with which the air of our times is so richly impregnated proved too strong for the cohesion of her particles, and forced them into a manifest disruption, which must soon become complete, and end in the reduction of the Church of England into a threefold or manifold Episcopal sect?

A

These are undoubtedly grave questions: questions which some Churchmen, perhaps, will laugh at as proofs of the crass ignorance of an arrogant schism; questions which assuredly some other Churchmen will, equally with ourselves, hold to be worthy of very anxious deliberation, and not at all to be scouted as manifestly absurd. For ourselves, we will not assume the prophet's office, nor presume to do more than very carefully note the symptoms and their most manifest indications. We are by no means uninterested in the issue. Materially, and in respect of the lowest sorts of gain, not much. For 'equality' we care chiefly, because it will be the cessation of an unrighteous inequality; and it is the unrighteousness which galls us. Morally and spiritually, we have much to gain; and we must be gainers whichever way these questions are solved, and in whichever issue these symptoms shall have their end. purified and reformed and enfranchised Church of Englandenfranchised alike from State trammels and from all human authoritativeness; a free Church of England, able to gather and powerful to draw into one grand visible communion all the major sects, would be indeed a glorious ending of her present throes. The perpetual existence of Dissent-Nonconformity, is a thing we not only do not desire, but intensely deprecate. The divided condition of the Christian Church at present is its shame and its weakness, however much, and for a time, its necessity. But we hardly dare hope for such an issue of the matter. Should the other alternative, then, prove the real one, and the Church of England be doomed to a division which will be fatal to her position of supremacy and her boast of authority, still our gain will be chiefly moral. We shall rejoice, not at the downfall of an enemy, but at a happy accident to a friend. We shall look for new developments of spiritual power and worth in all that is truest and best in the Church, at which we shall do nothing but rejoice. Either way, it will be as much ours as the Church's gain.

One thing must, by this time, be palpably evident to the minds of all, whether Churchmen or Dissenters, and that is, the utter failure of the Act of Uniformity to secure anything beyond the merest external similarity, which covers a deep and serious internal diversity and antagonism. This Act, we contend, is the real national foundation on which the present Protestant establishment rests. We are quite aware that there are many, very many, Churchmen who profess to trace the history of their Church through the entire course of the national history up to Saxon times. Mr. Venables dates its origin from the days of 'Bran the blessed.' But we have

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never been able to understand how the history of the Papal Church in England can be made to be part of the history of the present Protestant Episcopal Church. It has always seemed to us to be a pure figment. Doubtless there has always been a spiritual Church of Christ in England from the time of the first planting of Christianity amongst us; but the members of this have often had no connection whatever with that body which has been ostensibly the Church. The essence of the Church of England as by law established' to-day is its Protestant Episcopacy. Do we find the history of that in the times of the Plantaganets and the Stuarts? Doubtless the present Church has a connection with that which preceded her in these realms. She is a schism from it—a portion of the great Romish Church detached and purified; and for that matter, so are we, only a little further detached and a little more purified. The Protestant Dissenters of England have just as good a right in this way to claim descent from the Church of the days of Bran the blessed' as have the Protestant Episcopalians; but they do not insist on this right: their existence as Protestant Nonconformists dates from a certain period, and they begin their Church history there. So, in the same way, the Protestant Establishment of this country dates (in its full and complete form) from the day when the Act of Uniformity became the law of the land, and we claim that her history shall also date from thence.

For about a century previous to the passing of that Act the Church of England had been struggling for birth. The working of the Protestant leaven with more or less of force in her different members had caused a vast diversity of opinion, belief, and practice within her. Some of the clergy retained nearly the whole of the externals and not a little of the spirit of Popery; others were desirous of so radical a change as would satisfy the stoutest Puritan of our own times; some used the liturgy in full, others only partially, others not at all; some were for Episcopacy, others for Presbyterianism, others again for Independency pure and simple. The Episcopalian and High Church party, however, were in the ascendant, and were able to get passed into law an act of their own device, which was to give unity, of the strictest and most complete kind, to the whole Church. And how has it fulfilled its purpose? We hesitate not to say that it has been the most utter failure that can be conceived. It is worm-eaten by time into a thousand holes, and is rent in every part by the hands of those who have subscribed it. It never held two men together in real agreement for an hour. Offspring of a tyrannous age and of a tyrannous