SOME MAGAZINES.

Macmillan is full of good papers this month, and promises for April a poem by George Eliot of eight hundred lines. The special character of the magazine is telling in its favour, and men of eminence express individual convictions through it as in old time they did through the great Quarterlies. The papers on "The Free- dom of Opinion Necessary in an Established Church in a Free Country," by Sir J. D. Coleridge ; on the "Hostel System in Public Schools," by the Head Master of Marlborough ; on "The Origin of the English Nation," by Mr. E. A. Freeman ; on the " Teaching of Politics," by Professor Seeley ; and on "American Relations with England," by President Grant's Private Secretary, General Badeau, are all something more than mere articles, are facts which every one interested in those questions is bound to assimi- late. We stated the Solicitor-General's conclusion last week. Sir -John Coleridge is emphatically in favour of the Broad Church, not of its tenets, about which he expresses no opinion, and from which he is generally understood to differ widely ; but of its main 'theorem, that the English Church must be widened if it is to hold its position as a national establishment ; that it must consent to allow all who teach the few elemental doctrines without which there is no Christianity—or, as we should say, the one elemental -doctrine that Christ was the Son of God—to be included within its pale. He argues that this form of comprehension is good for the Church, and is emphatically within the province of the State to secure, even if the bounds of the State and of the Church have dong ceased to be conterminous :— "It is plain, however, that this legal character of the doctrines and the 'forms of the Church of England, this strict limitation of its liberties by law, this creation by special Act of Parliament of a lay tribunal, speaking for and in the name of the Queen, to determine in the last resort its vales of discipline and the meaning of the doctrinal standards, conformity 'to which is a necessary condition on the part of its ministers for the tenure of their property and their position ; these things show the 'Church, in its character of an establishment, to be a national institution like the Houses of Lords and Commons, the Universities, the courts of law, the army and navy, the municipal corporations ; an institution with which Parliament has dealt, and may deal again, and which it has the same right to deal with, not greater right nor less right, but the 'same, as it has to deal with the other institutions which I have just -enumerated. It follows from this, that those who dissent from its 'doctrines, and do not worship God according to its forms, have yet, as Englishmen, an interest in its practical working, and a right to interfere both with its doctrines and its forms. If, for instance, a system of forced confession and direction of the conscience, an open maintenance of the Roman doctrine of the priesthood, an extravagant veneration for the -elements of the Blessed Sacrament, became common amongst the clergy, although opposed to the general sentiment of the country, and seemed to the majority of Englishmen outside the pale of the Church, as mis- chievous to morality and society, as they do to many men within the pale of the Church, those outside the Church would have as clear a right as those inside to interfere, even if necessary by Act of Parliament, to correct the evils resulting from the working of a great institution maintained by Parliament and subject to its authority. What was done at the Reformation must, if necessary, be repeated, and none the less .because the assembly which is now supreme has ceased to be composed -chiefly—it never was exclusively—of persons belonging to the Church. This is a proposition, I daresay, as distasteful to others as I admit it is to myself ; but it is one, depend upon it, which we shall see carried into action if ever the unpleasant necessity for action in these matters arises."

"That is Erastianism full-grown, but then those who reject Eras- tianism, that is, the pre-eminence of the State above the Church, as being itself the highest Church, will have some difficulty in -maintaining their intellectual right to uphold a State Church at all. The only other logical theory consistent with an establish- ment is that the State does but its duty in maintaining a religious organization, and that the duty confers no right of interference, but that theory is just only when the entire people are of one religious mind.

Mr. Bradley's paper on "The Hostel System" is an argu- ment against the scheme of management adopted in almost all new public schools, such as Marlborough, Wellington, Rossall, and Hayleybury, a scheme under which the separate "houses," each kept by a master, are replaced by a central boarding estab- lishment, the profits of which go to the foundation. This system is far cheaper in all ways, but it involves celibate masters, who therefore are incessantly changing, who have far less authority over the boys, especially moral authority, and less corporate interest and influence in the school. Again, the boys under the &stet system group badly, school society splitting in strata instead of downward, so that instead of a few competent and refined boys in each house, all the competent and refined separate themselves into a society of their own. "In the large world of the hostel

system there will always be a danger of the intellect and the con-

science that rise above the schoolboy average being repelled and .

silenced by numbers ; the tax and strain on the moral courage of servtence of Government to Parliament :- the nobler spirit will be heavier, the trial of resisting. a low tone I "The result of it is the paralysis of authority, the limitation of states-

special danger of the time, which to him appears to be the sub-

silenced by numbers ; the tax and strain on the moral courage of servtence of Government to Parliament :- the nobler spirit will be heavier, the trial of resisting. a low tone I "The result of it is the paralysis of authority, the limitation of states- more severe. Noble and vigorous characters will be produced, but the effort required for nobleness and vigour will be greater. Evil, too, will have a tendency to spread more easily, to escape notice more readily for a time, and to find a larger field." The invaluable advantage of the separate study can only be secured to a few, and if boys are collected in numbers there must be supervision. Mr. Bradley, though keenly sensible of some advantages on the other side, thinks the disadvantages so great that he recommends the Commissioners in organizing future schools to unite the two plans as far as possible by careful grouping of buildings, so as to shut off each house and give each lad his study. We would add, let them try whether the grand advantage of the House system, the fact that success means fortune to the master, cannot in some moderate degree be com- bined with the centralization which reasons of economy will make imperative.—In his paper on "The Origin of the English Nation," Mr. Freeman employs his unusual learning and acumen to demonstrate that the English are a " Low-Dutch " people, the descendants with certain admixtures of tribes from Sleswick- Holstein and its neighbourhood, who in continuous emigrations conquered the island, the first and strongest and most terrible of which tribes were the Angles. That he is right so far we have as little wish to dispute as we have power to disprove, but we do not see that he has finally disposed of the old difficulty,—did the Angles subjugate or did they settle? If they settled as we settle in Australia, cadit quieslio ; but if they subjugated, what became of the subjugated race, be it Iberian or other? Did it disappear or was it absorbed ? and if absorbed, how much or how little did it affect its conquerors, whose speech, for example, as Mr. Freeman shows, became the universal tongue, and developed into the splen- did instrument of expression known as the English, not the British, tongue.—We are not quite sure we understand Mr. Seeley's first lecture as Professor of History at Cambridge. If we do, we dis- agree with its drift. As we understand him, his object is to teach history through politics, to awaken an iuterest in the present, and thence to excite an interest in the past,—to study Thucydides through the Times of yesterday. That process, he contends, will make of history a stimulant. He does not, indeed, contend that history derives anything from nearness to our own time—many recent periods being uniustructive when compared with many classical—but he holds that whereas the study of the immediate present, and indeed of the future through the past is good, its ad- vantages might be attained by a much more direct route, the study of contemporary politics. "If, then, there is some age of which it is urgently important that the student should master the history—and such an age always is the age that is present—it is surely a serious matter to double or quadruple for him this already formidable task, by requiring him, as a mere preliminary exercita- tion, to master the history of two or three other periods." Is not that equivalent to saying that youth needs no preparation for the study of the present, that a lad may enter the vast maze of contemporary polities safely without a clue, without a principle or a precedent, and having gained experience, may study back, may in fact use his maps to most advantage after he has travelled ? And if that is true, does it not amount to this, that education, so far as it means anything but the command of the instruments of knowledge, is a surplusage, that experience is all in all, that each generation had better do its thinking for itself, unaided by the wisdom or the folly of the past ? That a man interested in politics will read Thucriides with deeper insight than a mere scholar is of course true, but surely if that interest cornea first, he will judge of politics leas wisely than if he comprehended before what Thucydides meant to teach. If the end is to understand ancient history clearly, there is much to be said for Mr. Seeley's method, but if the end, as he would allow, is to bring a trained brain instead of an immature one to bear on politics, then surely the maturity should be secured by study, not of the present, which interests us all far too much for impartiality, and interests lads of eighteen too much for clear perception ; but of the past, upon which it is possible to pour white light, which it is possible to study, and not merely to observe.

The editor of Fraser enforces in the first paper, on the "Reciprocal Duties of Stateand Subject," ideas which from a different stand-point we have pressed forward for years, and which we yet hope to see triumphant,—the ideas, namely, of the State's right to exact, and the subject's duty to yield all of service which the State as a living entity may need ; but we do not agree with him in his view of the

manship to the immediate necessities of the hour, and the surrounding the Prime Minister with so many intricacies of situation that he lives in a strait-waistcoat, with handcuffs on his wrists and fetters on his ankles. Wore he a Moses or a Lycurgus he can do nothing without a majority at his back—a majority composed of men who are sent to Parliament, not for their ability, not for their patriotism or their probity, but because they can be relied on to defend the interest which they are elected to represent. The Minister's first and last care is to avoid offending these persons. He must leave abuses untouched which he would not spare for an hour could he have his way, because this and that member of his party is interested in maintaining them. Every avenue of practical ad- ministration is obstructed. To get the slightest thing effectually done is made so difficult that any excuse is caught at for leaving it undone."

The true danger is not the want of power in the machine, which is strong enough to do anything small or great, but the want of will to use it, the lingering sense of a division between the State and the people which is the consequence of centuries of class govern- ment, and as the result of that division an irrational distrust of authority, leading to interferences and limitations of power which the nation does not desire. Instead of an Act, the Minister has to introduce a succession of clauses ; instead of a measure, he has to throw out vague and tentative proposals ; instead of an order, he has to give a quantity of reasons. All the signs of the hour, however, show that this form of weakness, which was the consequence not of popular but of class government, is passing away,—that the nation is hungering for an Executive almost imper- iously strong, and that measures of the highest importance already pass almost without discussion and wholly without modification. The whole paper, however, may be read with profit, and we quote a bit in Mr. Froude's best style :—

" saw,' says the Preacher, that wisdom excelleth folly as far as light excelleth darkness. The wise man's eyes are in his head, but the fool walketh in darkness ; and I perceived that one event happeneth to them all. I said in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth to me. Why then was I more wise ? ' But the man who was thus per- plexed with this inscrutable mystery, and was driven 'to hate life' by the confusion and misery around him, was a king who had believed in laissez-faire, who bad left justice and righteousness to nature and econo- mic laws. He sums up the catalogue of his achievements : 'He had built him houses and vineyards,' 'he had planted gardens and orchards and made pools of water,' 'he had got him servants and maidens and great possessions, and gold and silver, and all the delights of the sons of men.' This was the grand outcome of all his labours ; and he wondered to find that it was 'vanity.' That which was crooked could not be made straight,' because be had never tried to straighten it, and pre- ferred to gaze on the evils which were done under the sun in elegant despondency."

In "The Broad Church" Mr. Leslie Stephen makes a powerful attempt to show that clergymen of advanced opinions had better quit the Church than remain within it. He quite admits the hon- esty of many men who, differing widely from the popular creed, still remain ministers of the Church, but evidently considers that they are sacrificing their right of free speech to keep the Church of England together a little longer. He deems it almost unfair to use the old formulas as English clergymen must do, when at heart they put into them so much of new meaning that the old words almost involve intellectual falsity. "The test which might be applied in such cases would be simple. Let a man put out of his mind, as far as possible, all the old phrases with which he has become familiar, and simply express his thoughts in the clearest language he can find. If this new expression falls in naturally with the old, there is no more to be said. If there is a palpable difficulty in reconciling them, the problem occurs whether he shall use the old in a new sense, or simply abandon language with so many misleading associations ?" There is a kind of truth in that, but it is only quite true of those clergymen who are teaching ideas which they themselves do not believe. Such men no doubt there are, but the majority of teachers in the Broad Church, certainly its chiefs, believe that, allowing for human error and obscurity, and for the necessity of using old terms, because new ones would require a previous education in the audience, the Church formulas, if judged like all other formulas, by history and general object, do honestly express their meaning. Why, so believing, should they surrender to bigots a vantage-ground from which, as they think, they can bring the essential truths of Christianity home to the people with more power ? Of course, as we have often said, the minister who repeats a creed he does not believe is guilty of falsehood, but he is not bound to believe it in the sense ignorant men may put upon it, or any men within the limits fixed by his own conscience and the law. Mr. Leslie Stephen forgets that the first principle of the Broad Church is the denial of plenary inspiration, the assertion that human error is possible in the collection of books we call the Bible, and that the exemption from criticism and explanation which they refuse to the Bible they certainly do not concede to the Prayer-Book, and that they never hesitate to explain in the pulpit the sense in which they understand the formularies. What can men do more

than say publicly Sunday after Sunday exactly what they mean, and leave it to the Church to say whether they are heretical or

not ? Fraser publishes also a remarkable paper on "The Practical

Working of the Ballot in the United States," which should be read by all Members of Parliament, and which amounts to this :- it is not the custom in the Union for a man to conceal his opinions, but the ballot renders intimidation impossible, and bribery so difficult that it is never attempted on any consider- able scale. It is the members who are bribed in America, and not the electors. Much of the difficulty, however, is the vastness of the number of the electors, which forbids efficient espionage ; and we believe the writer would be as reluctant to trust in the ballot preventing bribery in Bridgwater as we are, though even there it would prevent intimidation. Another paper, on "Convent Life," states the argument in favour of the monastic system with some force, and with an odd underlying sense of freedom and perception of humour which, with one or two quaintnesses of expression, make us suspect that the author has studied what she calls "the nun business" in America as well as Ireland ; but the chief interest of her article is an account, far too short, of the Cistercian Monks of Mount Melleray, Waterford, who appear to have revived the old function of the Orders turning "a brown stone waste "into a fertile territory. There is matter for reflection in this paragraph, which contains the one religious idea Englishmen outside the Society of Friends have never been able to get into their heads :—

"That the Catholic Church takes your plighted troth,' to fold your warm heart on her heart of stone, and freeze it nor unfasten any more— is perfectly true. 'Leave that live passion, come, be dead with me! ' that is exactly what she says to those who quit the world for the cloister ; but the death she invites them to is not corruption, not stagnation—by

its fruits ye shall know it This freezing theory of ours is condemned most loudly by those who have given the matter least thought. Frost is very bracing and wholesome—in moderation ; ice keeps everything fresh and sweet."

By far the best paper in Blackwood is that on Miss Austen and Miss Mitford, as good and thorough a piece of criticism as we ever

remember to have read, the writer bringing out the faint flavour of contempt for the average world around her which penetrates Miss Austen's wit, with admirable force. There is, however, an extremely spirited account of the Ammergau decennial festival, which recurs this year, the Bavarian miracle play, which almost alone among such scenes appears to produce a distinct effect in developing or confirming the religious spirit. We are very tired of the Suez Canal, and Cornelius O'Dowd is not as good as usual, though nothing can be better than the little story with which he illustrates what he conceives to be the effect of recent legislation upon the Irish Church :—" There was once on a time a grand jury in a western county of Ireland—Mr. Justice Keogh can correct me if I be wrong in calling it Clare—who, having occasion to make a presentment for the erection of a new county jail, accom- panied their vote with the recommendation 'that the materials of the old jail should be used in the construction of the new, but that the old building was to stand, and be used for the confinement of prisoners till the new jail should be ready for their reception."

This is a very amusing number of The Month. Who the author of "The Dialogues of Lydney " may be we do not at all know, but

they are always pleasant and cultivated, and contain humour of a quiet kind. But the article which will be read with the deepest interest is the account of Dr. Newman's new philosophical book on "The Grammar of Assent," of which we suppose that our Catholic contemporary has had proof-sheets, as the book itself has not yet

reached the external world. It seems to be of the nature of a philo- sophical investigation of the methods by which certitude is practi- cally reached by the human mind, with very full illustrations of those methods in the region of religious conviction,—the philosophical

discussion being only the prelude to practical illustrations of the modes of attaining religious certitude almost as extended as the preliminary inquiry. The number ends with some very vigorous and striking, but harsh, and in some respects, we think, unjust stanzas,—unjust, we mean to the age they so sharply criticize, —called "Lines on The Unknown God." We quote the first two stanzas as a sample of their literary strength :—

" 'There's a sigh and a sob ever filling the land with their fears, There's a cry and a groan ever killing the joy of the years, There's a yearning for shores that have never been vexed by the sun, There's a hoping of Heaven to finish what earth has begun; Eyes look for a God through the skies, through the hills, through the sea, Ears strain for His voice when the wind wails from tree unto tree, Hands grope, and are gashed in the groping, far under the ground, But spite all the strain and the struggle no God can be found !'

"Stay, brothers: I only am putting the fears that I feel

When the great solemn sight rises round me, to stagger and reel

The brain from its wonted contentedness—grinding to dust The hopes of a God living with us to honour and trust— The great solemn sight of your world that calls God a lie In its life from the dawn to the midnight—that lifts up its cry, In lugs bare and brutish, in cheating,s through all the day long— That God is a name very great, not a Lord very strong !"