pathetic, and he would be Laud over again. He would have every parish in England so far under the priest's thumb that the beadle and churchwarden should be objects of equal veneration with the policeman, and the church porch should be to all sinners as dreadful a place as the lock-up or the stocks; he would have every drunk and disorderly visited with a double penalty, Five shillings and costs' at the magistrate's hand, and a white sheet and a candle at the hands of the Church. That we are not doing him injustice, we give his own words, as reported in the Guardian of September 7, 1864. His Lordship, speaking of the returns made previous to his visitation, said they were generally satisfactory, except the declarations made by churchwardens and sidesmen in the case of those articles of visitation and inquiry which regard the morals of their fellowparishioners:

'In these excepted and most important particulars the presentments are not always, I am well aware, a true representation of the facts of the case. But it could not under present circumstances have been otherwise. Not only is there at present in our Church no attempt to exercise discipline, but the very idea of discipline as an appointment of our Lord seems to have almost lost its place in our religious system; and this being so, I am not surprised that the churchwardens and sidesmen have not satisfied the demands which are made upon them at the time of their bishop's visitation for a report of such matters. I am not, however, on this account prepared to expunge these two articles of inquiry; for though we have been for some time under the necessity of foregoing the ancient discipline, my own hopes and wishes remain in entire accordance with our Church on this subject, and I look to and desire the coming of the time when "faith in the reality and grievous effect of excommunication" will have been thus far restored as to make it possible thus far to use the Church courts and Church laws that persons convicted of notorious sin may be put to open penance and punished in this world that their souls may be saved in the next."

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He then goes on to lament that at present the Bishops must content themselves with something considerably short of this, and adds, that they must nevertheless be regarded as 'instruments which may, in contingencies, possibly not very distant, be employed with the same results as attended them in 'former days.'

So! the Anglican dream hopes to realize itself before very long; and having leavened evangelicism and every other ism out of the Church, having revived Convocation in spite of the jealousy of the laity, and having outnumbered and overpowered that ever-increasing body of Nonconformists which has

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wrested so many concessions from the imperious Church, she is once more to rise up in her ancient majesty and might, and to hold England under her potent sway. We are charmed with the candour and simplicity of these avowals. How complete must be the severance from the world and all its false wisdom which is effected by the walls of an Episcopal palace! What a magnificent assurance of faith in their own ideas of the Church and her future is that which dwells in Episcopal breasts! Surely their Lordships may claim the merit of having that faith which, 'small as a grain of mustard seed, can remove mountains." What are the signs of the times to them? The very aspect of the heavens shall alter itself for the behalf of their Church. What though the spirit of the age and the universal tendency of human thought and human things be against them! Their Church is superior to all these things. The mighty hand of the dial of civilization will begin to traverse its disc backwards, that the ambitious Protestant priest may be all he wishes to be. The wheels of human progress will reverse their motion, to allow our Anglican hierarchy to lord it over God's heritage.

And this contingency is possibly not very distant'! Lord Palmerston cannot live for ever, and then Lord Shaftesbury may cease to play the ecclesiastical Warwick, and to be dubbed 'the 'Bishop-maker,' and Baron Westbury to wield the schoolmaster's birch over the pretentious impotency of Convocation. The sees of London, Ripon, Durham, Carlisle, and some others, may soon become vacant, and Lord Derby may have the appointment to them; and in the course of a decade the whole bench of Bishops may become consistently Anglican. The Nonconformists and Liberals of England may somehow wane in numbers and in power, and the next Parliament, composed entirely of good Anglican laymen, may succeed in re-imposing the Five-mile Act, and in allowing Convocation to meet for the despatch of business. When the sky falls wonderful things may be done! There is no telling what may not happen in the next ten years. For what has not happened in the last fifty years? Has not Parliament been reformed? Have we not gained free trade with all the world? Have we not our houses and streets lighted with gas? Have we not netted the country with railways? Have we not narrowed immensely the circumference of the world, and altered the mutual relations of time and space? Have we not outstripped the wind with the rapidity of our speech? Have we not strewn the country with a literature accessible to all? Have we not a school-house for every parish, and hundreds of them in every large town? Have we not in everything begun a new cycle of progress at a vastly accelerated speed? Why, then, should it be deemed a thing incredible that in another ten years we should

see some respectable provincial mayor standing in a white sheet in the porch of the parish church with a candle in his hand, because he obstinately will not go to church? Or perhaps have the edification of hearing the churchwarden read out a long list of names of sinful schismatics, whom the parish priest proceeds forthwith to excommunicate with bell, candle, and book? Why not? We shall see!

But though we treat the matter with an unaffected scorn, and do honestly laugh at these High Church hopes as the dreams and visions of disordered brains; perhaps of disordered stomachs begotten of a too sumptuous diet; still we are not unmindful of the fact that these men will seek to realise their dreams, and that we shall have to watch and to resist them.

Till within a few years-perhaps a year or so would be the truer expression-the more thoughtful portion of the Nonconformists have been accustomed to smile at the fears of Churchmen and others about the spread, and the possible dominance again of Popery in England. They have felt that with the Bible circulating so freely and widely as it is, and with the love of freedom so deeply engrafted in the English nature as it is, Popery had not the shadow of a chance. Looking carefully at the history of our country from the time of the Stuart dynasty till now, they have smiled in their hearts at all such dreams. But they have begun to think now that possibly they may have to fight a battle that they had not thought it would be necessary ever to fight again. And whence has come this fear? To what is it due? Not to the revived activity of Papists amongst us alone: they would have no fear of the utmost that Popery, unaided, might attempt. It is the Popery in the Church of England which has turned their smile of confidence into the serious aspect of men who must arm themselves to defend their own. We have to fight Popery in lawn sleeves and Protestant surplices: on the Bishops' Bench in the English Parliament, and at the altars of a Protestant Established Church. We have to wrestle with a Popery that demands to be treated as Protestantism, and which tells the people of England that it is the authorized and established religion of England; with a Popery that is insidiously sapping the foundations of Protestantism, upon whose bread it is living, and whose places of power and emolument it scruples not to appropriate. And if we are to prevent the unspeakable mischiefs of a return of spiritual and ecclesiastical despotism upon ourselves and our children, we must fight it there first. We venture to tell the people of England that they are in danger, not perhaps of a renewal of old tyranny in things spiritual, for that we deem impossible, but of having to

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fight a hard battle to be permitted to hold their spiritual liberties, if they do not seek earnestly the removal of that national fence behind which these men have entrenched themselves, of that national fortress which these enemies of England and liberty are using to our hurt.

Once more we tell these men who will be Catholic priests under a Protestant Episcopal disguise, that it is too late! The hand of the dial of time will not move back at their bidding. The wheels of human progress will not reverse themselves for them; and the faster they work to realize their aim, the shorter will be the days of their Church of England, as by law estab'lished,' with its 'succession in unbroken descent from the days of the Saviour and the whole of the holy Apostles.'

ART. IV. (1.) Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. By CHARLES BABBAGE, Esq., M.A., &c. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green.

1864.

(2.) The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. By CHARLES BABBAGE, Esq. London: John Murray. 1838.

(3.) The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. By CHARLES BABBAGE, Esq. London: Charles Knight. 1832.

MR. BABBAGE styles himself a 'philosopher.' To many this may seem a somewhat assuming designation. It is not customary for modest men of science to announce themselves as savans, nor for followers of the Muse (with the exception of the renowned Close, of Kirby Stephen) to arrogate the proud title of poet (spelling it, like the Westmoreland bard, with a capital P); but when a person like Mr. Babbage puts himself forward as a pióropos, we may rest assured that he uses the word in its primitive sense, to denote a lover of wisdom, and not to intimate that he is a thinker of fathomless profundity. If the possession of an acute and inquiring intellect, which cannot rest satisfied with the surfaces of phenomena, but must needs penetrate to their causes or conditions of action, constitutes a 'philosopher,' few men have a more decided right to that honourable appellation. He tells us that, when a child, his first question on receiving a new toy was invariably, 'What is inside of it?' No evasive reply would content the inquisitive young gentleman, who teased people right and left until he obtained the requisite information, or, in default, broke open the article in order to judge for himself. We should be loth to suggest to any fond parent that when a child hammers its way into the interior of a

watch, it is inspired by a profound passion for knowledge, but undoubtedly many a little outrage of this description would be cheerfully pardoned if it could be supposed to be prophetic of future distinction.

Not less characteristic was the mode in which young Babbage, whilst a schoolboy, dealt with his doubts respecting the existence of a devil. To satisfy himself on this point, he went to work like a genuine experimentalist, and resolved to 'raise' that formidable personage. First of all he collected evidence as to the forms in which his sable majesty is said to have appeared. From the authorities he consulted he learnt that rabbits, owls, ravens, black grimalkins, cloven-footed men, were favourite disguises with the prince of darkness. Having then studied the ceremony of invocation, he selected a deserted garret as the scene of this audacious transaction. In the dusk of the evening he entered the apartment alone, closed the door and opened the window, and having cut his finger, he traced a magic circle on the floor with the blood which flowed from the wound. Placing himself in the centre, he repeated the Lord's Prayer backwards. But the compelling charm of the dark ages was powerless in these days of modern light. Possibly the Evil One might think it beneath his dignity to obey the summons of a stripling who sought the favour of an interview simply to gratify his curiosity; but certain it is, that neither bird nor beast, nor cloven-footed man, nor phantom of any description, responded to the call. In later times and in wiser mood, the rash experimenter could not but acknowledge that any trivial sound or sight, acting upon excited nerves, might have cost him his reason, or perhaps his life.

So doubts respecting the existence of a devil led to doubts respecting the authenticity of the Bible. To settle this question, he resolved to subject it to an experiment, less impious perhaps, but fully as illogical as the last. Believing that God would not withhold information from a sincere inquirer after the truth, he thought he had only to fix upon some practical test in order to be guided to a safe conclusion. And this was the test he proposed. At a certain hour, on a certain day, he would go to a particular room in the house; and if he found the door open he would infer that the Scriptures were true; if closed that the Scriptures were false. The trial was made; his doubts disappeared. The boy was not the first who has gravely asked the Almighty to remove some sceptical difficulty by some frivolous solution-to convert religion, in fact, into a game at hazard; for, if such appeals to Omnipotence are allowable, there is no reason why a man should not dispose of every mystery in his theology by the toss of a shilling or the twirl of a teetotum.