The British Quarterly Review. October. (Hodder and Stoughton.) —This number
is scarcely as interesting as usual. The reviewer con- tinues his answer to Mr. Matthew Arnold, and, though scarcely appreciating, we think, the spirit and purpose of the attack which he repels, puts his case forcibly. We find another article of the same kind in a review of Dr. Stoughton's "Church of the Restoration." Here we cannot but see a failure to perceive the real position of Dissent as it con- fronts the influence and movements of the age. It may be true that the Church of England is to fall, but its fall will be no victory of Noncon- formity, or rather—for Nonconformity is an extinct name, and the friends of the British Quarterly are only accidentally connected with the best men who bore it—of Voluntaryism. It will fakll partly, we fear, because of the general decay of belief in dogmatic truth, partly because the power of comprehension by which in its present form it exists can hardly resist the influences that are working for its disruption, but not in the least because men see in the Dissenting Communities an ideal of ecclesiastical society which it is anxious to substitute for it. The essential principle of the Congregationalist and Baptist Churches is the Calvinistic theory of an inner society of illuminati, which separates itself from the world. If they give this up, as indeed they seem inclined to do, they give up their very life, and become mere assemblies without history, dignity, purpose, or meaning. We read with the heartiest pleasure a well-merited rebuke to what seems a most flagrant piece of literary dishonesty, Mr. West's edition of Archbishop Leighton's works. Mr. West is a Scotch Episcopal clergyman, and has, it would seem, positively falsified his author in a way that might well be made punish- able by law. The article on "The Higher Education in America" is interesting, and some amusement may be got out of "American Humour," at least by readers who do not happen to be familiar with the stories and witticisms quoted, and these indeed are sufficiently old. The other articles are "Breton and Cornish Affinities," on "The Franco- Prussian War," and on "English Art in the Gothic, Centuries."
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