certain landscapes by Huet and Théodore Rousseau; and of the Emperor's portrait by M. Cabanel. This our limits forbid, but we cannot resist adding that an insight into Japanese life, a vivid impression of its peculiar characteristics, may be rapidly and most agreeably gained by reading the charming little essay on Japanese Art with which M. Chesneau concludes his volume.

L. C. S.

Recueil de Travaux Originaux ou Traduits relatifs à la Philologie et à l'Histoire Littéraire, avec un Avant-propos de M. MICHEL BREAL. Deuxième Fascicule. Dictionnaire des Doublets, ou Doubles Formes de la Langue Française. Par AUGUSTE BRACHET. Paris: Librairie, A. Franck.

So early as the seventeenth century-before the birth of our modern science of comparative philology-an advocate of Bourges, Nicolas Catherinot by name, had, it would appear, been struck with the existence in the French language of what he called doublets, i.e., double and divergent derivations from a common root, as, for example, raison and ration, from the Latin rationem. The list of those that he drew up was, as might be expected, incomplete; neither did he attempt to explain what he looked upon as a "singular phenomenon." The present pamphlet takes up the subject under more favourable circumstances. It is now established, as M. Bréal expresses it in his introduction, "that words have a growth and a history; that they undergo regular transformations; that here, as elsewhere, law reigns; and that the rules of derivation from one language to another can be formularized with certainty." M. Auguste Brachet, accordingly, is not only able to enumerate 800 doublets where Catherinot could collect but 160-he proceeds to classify them under three heads, as doublets of learned, of popular, and of foreign origin, and describes the process of their formation. The special student will probably find interest and instruction in this contribution to philology; and he will doubtless be already aware that of the English words increasingly adopted into the French language, several are nothing more nor less than old French words imported into England by the Normans eight centuries ago, and now returned to the country of their birth, "stamped with the Saxon effigy." Such, for instance, is budget, originally a corruption of the old French word bougette, the diminutive of bouge, from the Latin bulga (small bag); pudding, the Saxon translation of boudin; tunnel, of the old French word tonnel. L. C. S.

I

AM exceedingly indebted to the kindness of the editor of this Review for giving me an opportunity of explaining an assertion which I recently made in a letter to the Times. That journal had put the question, What is the Church of England? I felt that "no more important or critical question could be put at the present hour;" for whatever may be the view taken as to the right course to be pursued with regard to the Irish Church, it is certain that the one condition of safe and right legislation on so momentous a subject is, that the facts of the case and the true nature of the problem should be previously ascertained with all practicable accuracy. The real position of the Church of England, of which the Irish Church is a portion, is manifestly a vital element of the problem; but, unfortunately, it is precisely on this central point that confusion most extensively prevails. Many use the phrase Church of England, but only few have distinctly asked themselves what it is, and have resolved to think the matter out, and arrive at a definite answer. Under these circumstances I thought it to be my duty to give plainly and concisely the answer, which, after much reflection, I had satisfied myself to be the true one. It had the advantage of being plain and intelligible. If it was true, it could be easily grasped; if erroneous, it presented a sharp and direct issue to those who might wish to controvert it.

The answer which I gave in my letter to the Times was this. I said that, "The Church of England is an institution created by the law, and it is nothing else whatever. Everything which constitutes it a society, every relation between man and man which belongs to it as a society, is law made." I hold this assertion to be true. I abide by it exactly as it was expressed; but it is capable of being easily

misunderstood. It requires explanation to guard it against misconstruction, and it was impossible to supply that explanation in the letter in which it originally appeared. And, as a fact, it has been misinterpreted. It has been represented as declaring that the Church of the nation is an institution which contains nothing beyond what the law of the land has bestowed upon it; that the authority with which its ministers speak has no higher source than the State; that if a Church can be made and unmade by municipal law, the religion of the people is as much prescribed by the State as the judicial or military establishments which are provided for them; and that thus the sacred institution of the Christian Church, the body of Christ, is degraded into an arrangement set up or taken down at the pleasure of the secular power. The divine character of the Christian Church becomes destroyed by such a view, its appointment by Christ negatived, and its clergy transformed into mere State officials, looking to the State for the definition of their duties and the determination of their teaching to their congregations.

I should be deeply pained if I could imagine that I had said anything which could warrant such inferences. It could not be doubtful that a position which involved such consequences must be intrinsically unsound; and the only thing to be done would be to search for the fallacy which had let in so much error. But these deductions have been drawn from misconception. The debasement of the idea of the Christian Church has no existence in the assertion I have made; it can be found only in the misapprehension of the bearing of my proposition, and of the sense in which it is to be understood.

The first part of my statement affirms that the society or Church, called the Church of England, was enacted and created by the State. I did not speak of the universal Church, but of a definite body, of an actual, concrete society, of an organization containing a governing body, rules that held its members together, rights that bound them to one another as parts of an organic whole, of authority and power to enforce them. These various relations, which together compose the Church of England, were, I assert, the creations of the law. I have already given the proof of this fact in the Edinburgh Review of October, 1851. The actual dominion of the law over every part of the Church of England is a fact patent to every eye, and absolutely indisputable. A lay-officer, the head of the State, the Crown, is supreme over the whole Church. It judges every ecclesiastical cause and every spiritual person by a State court called the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. This court is of recent date, but its creation involved no new principle, for it succeeded the Court of Delegates, whose members were nominated by the pleasure of the Crown. The Judicial Committee's judgments are upheld by the law alone; it regards nothing else, it takes account of nothing else; its sole inquiry ever is, whether the enactments of the law have been

violated or not. The opinions of any clergyman, the declarations of any bishop, the resolutions of the whole clerical body in Convocation, are destitute of all authority, of all right to regard, before the Privy Council: they are the utterances of private persons, valuable according to the credit for correctness which the court may award to them, and nothing more. Some have protested against the jurisdiction of this supreme tribunal of the Church, as an infringement of the inherent liberties of the Church; but the Judicial Committee gives no heed to theories, but pursues its way in the steady administration of the law, and of nothing else. To the Crown, as advised by this State court, and as administering the law of the land, every ecclesiastical person, every doctrine, every heresy, every part of the Church's worship, ritual, and discipline is subject; and over against this court the Archbishop of Canterbury reckons for no more than the humblest layman in the land. Nor is this all; very far from it. There reigns paramount over this court, and over the Crown itself, whose conduct it guides, the supreme legislature of the nation, the voice of the State, as represented in the great council of Parliament, the one and the same identical law-giver for Church and State alike. The law it makes becomes the law of the Church; the things it ordains are performed in the Church; the things it forbids are prevented. If Lord Ebury's Bill changes the funeral service, every clergyman of the Church of England must conform to the new formulary; if the ceremonial for the administration of the Eucharist is altered, every bishop and every priest will have to conduct the public worship as the law prescribes.

At the period when the work of the Church of England's creation was completed, Parliament, in the Act of Uniformity of Elizabeth, instituted thirty-nine articles of religion, and put together a Book of Common Prayer. Precisely in the same way, as naturally and as regularly, without any innovation or breach of practice, the Parliament may, if it so chooses, make the articles either thirty or forty, and remodel the Liturgy according to its pleasure. It may develop a new doctrine, exactly as the Roman Catholic Church is in the habit of doing, and as councils did in times gone by, and that doctrine would be as much a part of the Church of England as any doctrine now contained in its confession of faith. That development might be erroneous and mischievous; it might be tainted with heresy: but it would be the doctrine of the Church of England nevertheless. Just as Parliament enacted doctrines and forms of worship which were repudiated by the bishops, so it may now make articles declaring the immaculate conception of the Virgin or expunging every Catholic element from the Prayer Book. These measures might be called aggressive and heretical; but such protests would be mere utterances of private opinion. Neither the law nor the tribunals of the Church would take the slightest notice of them. Similar epithets are applied daily to secular Acts of

Parliament; they are, we know, simply personal talk. The Church of England would pursue its way as heedless of such denunciations, as was the State after the Revolution of the remonstrances of those who stood on the divine right of kings. Parliament has no body of any kind to reckon with in its Church legislation. The legal status of the Church of England is its only status. Let every law about the Church be repealed: its former members will then become a collection of unassociated Christians with a few ordained persons amongst them. This is the true test of what the Church of England is. Vague phrases about an abstract and mystical body called the Church are perfectly worthless here. Without the law, the bishops are nothing to each other or to the clergy; and none probably would insist on this more strenuously than many of the clergy themselves. A new organization, a new Church, would have to be made. Those who recoiled from the heresy would secede, but the Church of England would remain. It would have carried out a new act of legislation; but as an organized Church, it would not have suffered a particle of alteration.

I am not developing theory; I am reciting facts-facts as certain and as stubborn as any realities in this world. We find the law everywhere supreme over the Church of England, and we find nothing else that is fact except what is ordained or sanctioned by law. That is the Church of England, all opinion and theory notwithstanding. The Church of England, as it now exists in the world, is under law-that is certain, no man can deny it; and the only questions can be, Who made all these laws? and what was their effect at the time of their institution?

A portion of these laws forms a part of the common law of the country. The exact origin of the common law is, I believe, unknown to lawyers themselves; but those which bear on the Church must have been derived either from the State, or else from the Church which existed in England before the Reformation-the Roman Catholic Church. In either case they do not affect the present discussion; for they relate only to minor points, and assuredly they do not come from the body called the Church of England.

The laws which created the Church of England are the laws which were passed in the reign of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Elizabeth. I have recited these in the article of the Edinburgh Review to which I have referred above. They were enacted by the authority of Parliament, of the supreme legislature of the nation. They effected an entire revolution in the ecclesiastical affairs of the kingdom. They abolished the spiritual power by which the nation had for many centuries been governed in religious matters, breaking off all connection between the State and the Roman Catholic Church, and depriving the latter of all control and authority over the religion of the people. These statutes asserted and carried out the fundamental right of the nation to declare for itself its own faith, to construct its