of your old loyal struggles. It is, moreover, a tenet most uncongenial to mediæval habits of thought, and has already worked your Church a mischief." 'Can you possibly," I demanded, "speak in the spirit of the Middle Ages, when you maintain the people to be the source of the sovereign power? Could the aristocratical temper of your times thus set at nought the mysterious influence of blood and hereditary right?" "Ah!" said he, laughing, "they have kept you so long in England from anything mysterious, that you are now disposed to imagine a moral power in everything which has the features of a mystery. But, recollect, it does not follow that everything which is outside the region of logic is necessarily above it." "Surely," I rejoined, "you do not speak in accordance with the old ecclesiastical spirit." “Was not this," replied he, "a prominent doctrine in the system whereby Rome saved Europe in the eleventh and twelfth century, that kings had no divine right to reign?" "True," said I, "yet Gregory VII. has been involved in a charge of irreverence because of it." "I know too much evil of Hildebrand," he answered, "to defend him, even where I will not blame him. It does not come home to me as an irreverence." "Besides," I continued, "the doctrine which the Church of those days substituted for that of the Church of Constantine or Theodosius, was, not that the people were the source of sovereign power, but that it came from the sanction of the Church." "True," said he, "yet surely the doctrine, whatever it

"In fact,"

was, of the Theodosian doctors, could not be that of a Divine Right, accompanying in some sacramental way an Hereditary Right. It could not hold with the real facts of Byzantine history." "It was, however," said I, "the Roman Church which invented the doctrine of Hildebrand's epoch; and the other doctrine, that the people are the source of the sovereign power, sprung up in the same Church, under the Jesuits, and Cardinal Bellarmine is its great doctor." "And a very respectable origin too," replied he. he added, with a smile, "the Divine Right of Hereditary Succession is but a symptom of your general revulsion from Rome, and it was hardened from a notion into a doctrine by the historical accident of your having so great a martyr as St. Charles Stuart. I recognize a Divine Right in all de facto authorities; but, as to a Divine Right of Kings in particular, I say, it must either be a Divine Right of Hereditary Succession, in which case your present lawful ruler is, not Victoria the First, but Francis Ferdinand of Modena ;-or it must be a Divine Right from the popular will, legitimately expressed, which Divine Right exists in your present sovereign ;—or lastly, a Divine Right from the unction of the Church, which is likewise possessed by your queen, as conferred upon her by the English primate in St. Peter's Abbey, at Westminster. I have no special objection to the last two Divine Rights, and the first is pretty, while it is made the subject of a poem ; silly, when the matter of an argument; wicked,

When

when a principle of action. But you shake your head, and I will say no more. There are worse bigotries than attachment to the memory of the Stuarts. Yet, bear in mind, that it is possible Rome may have been right, in this respect at least; for you are trembling on the verge of a new era. the Anglican Church throws herself, with something of the sublime spirit of Athanasian or Ambrosian times, into the arms of the people, it may be well not to be hampered with too many political tenets, this way or that. I do not say this as if the Church were to countenance unchristian views in politics, or stand aloof from existing institutions with selfish jealousy; but you may find what I have said applicable in another sense."

"But," said he, "as to politics in general, I think it is of importance to suggest to you, whether your present political depression, as a Church, and the probable increase of that depression, may not be providential, and, like all divine chastisements, pleasant, from the hope it brings along with it. You have failed greatly in one matter. You have been the rich man's Church. You have left it to Rome to honor poverty. You surrendered to her what may almost be counted for a note of the true Church. Rome has sat in higher temporal dignity than you, yet never has she forgotten to honor poverty. I trust the loss of your worldly place may be the only punishment inflicted upon you for this great sin. All sufferings of this sort are permitted, you may be

sure, because of some 'secret worm' in the root of your vine. They stay his gnawings and save the plant. Lay to heart, when your sees are diminished, your cathedrals silenced, your episcopal thrones filled as the Church would not wish them, your sanctifying interference with the State disallowed, your forms disused at court,-lay to heart the lesson of one of your austerest, and yet, as austere men are wont to be, gentlest bishops, taught before unto your Church, in a time of political suffering. It is a sad calamity,' he says, 'to see a kingdom spoiled, and a Church afflicted; the priests slain with the sword, and the blood of nobles mingled with cheaper sand; religion made a cause of trouble, and the best men most cruelly persecuted; government confounded, and laws ashamed; judges decreeing causes in fear and covetousness, and the ministers of holy things setting themselves against all that is sacred, and setting fire on the fields, and turning in little foxes on purpose to destroy the vineyards. In the mean time it serves religion, and the affliction shall try the children of God, and God shall crown them, and men shall grow wiser and more holy, and leave their petty interests, and take sanctuary in holy living, and be taught temperance by their want, and patience by their suffering, and charity by their persecution, and shall better understand the duty of their relations; and, at last, the secret worm that lay at the root of the plant, shall be drawn forth and quite extinguished. For so have I known a luxuriant vine swell into

irregular twigs and bold excrescences, and spend itself in leaves and little rings, and afford but trifling clusters to the wine-press, and a faint return to his heart which longed to be refreshed with a full vintage; but when the lord of the vine had caused the dressers to cut the wilder plant, and made it bleed, it grew temperate in its vain expense of useless leaves, and knotted into fair and juicy bunches, and made accounts of that loss of blood by the return of fruit.'

"Hope," he continued, after this quotation, "is one of the chief graces of a Church; yet amid angry words and scholastic definitions of faith and charity, hope has been well-nigh untwisted from the threefold cord of apostolic teaching. The Church in despondence is the Church loosening her anchors in rough seas, anxious to see what sort of earth adheres to them, because her faith is failing her as to the ground where she has moored herself. Beware of losing hope. Hope alone is the light by which we sad-featured dwellers among Christian tombs can find our way; the twilight, for it is but a twilight, of Christian expectation. Nay, there are smiles on men's faces, and gladness in their eyes, and mirth too in their voices, spite of their sadness and their strict lives; and all because of hope. Hope, to the Churches, is 'the wine of their beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak.' Hope reconciles them to life; hope makes death pleasant to them; hope tastes and smells of heaven;