The Church Congress at Brighton had an attempt at a
discussion on a subject which seems singularly unsuited to Congresses, " The Spiritual Life, its Helps and Hindrances," on which the Dean of Norwich read a paper. The Very Reverend Dean seemed to think that to know what in us is body, and what is soul, and what is spirit, and whether the emotions belong to the soul, and the affections to the spirit, or the converse, would be a great help to the spiritual life,—which seems to us, we confess, rather a baseless idea. Especially he thought the study of Bishop Butler's sermons on human nature would be a great help to the spiritual life. The three sermons on " Human Nature " are very good sermons, but are, to our mind, much more of helps to the intellectual than to the spiritual life ; and how it can help our spiritual life to be clear in our notions of the " tripartite nature of man," is a puzzle which the Dean of Norwich does not appear to have cleared up. It does not help a labourer to lift a weight to know what muscles he uses in the lifting ; but it might help him to talk about lifting a weight. And it was the necessity of talking about the spiritual life, not the spiritual life itself, we take it, which led Dean Goulburn into the " tripartite nature of man."
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