nent, for this has been prohibited by the ascendant ecclesiasticism-yet her general state suffices to prove that the material well-being of England does not spring from that Protestantism in which she differs from Belgium, but from that freedom which she has in common with Belgium. Thus we cannot claim that Catholics will impute any of these exterior advantages, of which we boast, to our remaining ecclesiasticism, or regard them as an honour to the positive side of our national creed.

Nay, nor can be impute to this cause any part of our mental superiority to Belgium or to Sicily; and for this plain reason, that on the one side the ecclesiastical organs have done their worst to crush our intellectual vigour; and on the other our Ecclesiastical school has done its worst to scold it down. For every stupid and mischievous error a hard fight has been maintained by theologians, in proportion to their "orthodoxy." Take, for instance, the superstition concerning witches and the possession by devils. The truth of the latter is still guaranteed in the Canons of the Church of England, which regulate the casting out of devils by license of the bishop. The reality of witchcraft was publicly maintained on Scriptural evidence alike by clergymen and by judges. Chief Baron Hale (a very religious man) not only argued for it Scripturally from the judgment-seat in 1665, but had two women hanged for witches. Education and free thought prevailed, against the positive evidence of the Bible; in favour of which the celebrated John Wesley still struggled.

"It is true," says he, "that the English in general, and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions as mere old wives' fables. I am sorry for it. The giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible. I cannot give up to all the Deists in Great Britain the existence of witchcraft, till I give up the credit of all history, sacred and profane."

His contemporary, the celebrated Dr. Johnson, a High Churchman and anxiously orthodox, was a believer in the "Cock-lane ghost" of those days. Certainly no one can think that the theory of "the Bible and the Bible only," &c., has led Protestants to resign the Witch of Endor.-Again, if there is any one national enormity which more than all others tends to repress mental energy, it is religious persecution. Of this there has been far less among the Protestant countries-to their undoubted benefit; and yet, certainly, we have not to thank Protestant theology for it. The practice of Calvin was substantially the theory of all the orthodox reformed Churches. If the hierarchy or Presbyterians of England and Scotland could have had their will, mental

freedom would have been crippled in Great Britain as effectually as in France or even in Spain. The Independents won, by the sword of Cromwell, with political also a religious freedom before unheard of in these lands; yet for heretics who went beyond them, it was long before the law provided safety, much less gave them their natural equality. In every step of progress towards freedom, it is lamentable to say that English "orthodoxy" has always been found on the side of resistance. Not only were the Test and Corporation Acts sustained by the Church influence, and were abolished in 1828 by a lay Parliament, whose Protestantism had but few positive elements of the Reformed Theology; but even much later, when the Dissenters' Chapel Act was passed-an Act which, in its practical aim, did but hinder the Unitarian revenues, chapels, and burying-grounds from being taken from the hereditary possessors (often children or grandchildren of the donors), and given up to be scrambled for by strangers, with a certainty that the whole must be swallowed up in lawyers' fees;-in that crisis, when Peel and Lyndhurst, and even Gladstone, stood up for the Unitarians, all the "orthodoxy" of England stirred itself to resist this act of equity. It is to our laity, and to that part especially which has little ostensible religious character, that every successive victory over bigoted intolerance is due. Hence it is to the negative, not to the positive side of Protestantism, that we must ascribe our mental energy and intelligence.

Undoubtedly, these negative elements have been of vast national moment, by liberating the energies of individuals; whereby knowledge has risen into science, industry into systematic art, wealth and skill have increased, labour has organized itself, and an unusually large part of the nation has employed itself on fruitful thought and invention. But in all this there has been little or nothing of properly religious influence. The more Protestantism has been developed into its own characteristic prosperity, the more Atheistic is the aspect of public affairs. It has not known at all better than its Romish rival how to combine religious earnestness with tolerant justice, and has become just only by passing into indifference to religion. Its divines often attack Romanism by insisting on the vast spread of unbelief within the pale of that Church; while they are astonishingly blind to the very same phenomenon within all the national Protestant Churches. This is not a recent fact, as some imagine. Indeed, since the Restoration, it is difficult to name the time at which it

may reasonably be thought that the existing English statesmen had any grave and practical belief in the national religion. Montesquieu, who passed for a free thinker in France, found that in England (near a century and a half ago) he had far too much religion for our great-grandfathers. Equally in the Lutheran Churches of Germany and Sweden, also in the Calvinistic Churches of Switzerland and elsewhere, the same face of events has presented itself: the clergy tend either to lose all spiritual character, or to take refuge in Unitarianism; the laity, in proportion to their cultivation, have been prone to entire unbelief.

Under that measure of mental freedom which the great rebellion against Charles I. brought in, and by aid of the growing indifference to religion in France and elsewhere, physical science has in the last two centuries grown up. From this, more than from anything else, has proceeded the political superiority of Europe to the Turks, the Persians, the Chinese. It has given to us safe oceanic navigation-a vast command of the useful metals and all material of war-the steam engine and all its developmentswith a miscellany ever increasing of practical applications of chemistry. Indeed, the relative strength of different nations, which is ill measured by any religious test, such as Catholicism or Protestantism, and is not accurately measured even by a political test, such as freedom or despotism, yet (numbers being equal) is well measured by the development of physical science. Russia is stronger than China, though having but a quarter of the population; yet the form of government in China is as despotic, the people is as obedient, and far more conveniently situated, on the noblest rivers, in highly advantageous concentration, with a better soil and climate, and a splendid oceanic coast. Russia has but one advantage, and that one thing is allimportant: she has introduced the physical sciences of the West, and has turned to imperial service the skill of our ablest minds. Two centuries ago, before physical science had effected anything practical, the Protestant States had no perceptible superiority over the Catholic; now, they have on the whole a superiority, but it is proportioned chiefly to the development and application of science. Perhaps then in truth it is more to the science of matter than to Protestant theology, that we ought to attribute whatever advantages we can boast in material strength.

Meanwhile, no one can overlook the portentous fact, that this physical science-to which we owe so much of what some would

claim for the credit of Protestantism-is intensely repugnant and destructive to the theology of the Reformation, and constantly drives to results not only anti-Christian, but even Atheistic. Dr. Pusey and Mr. Sewell are forward to aver this. Mr. Sewell declares his aversion to the glaring light of science, and well understands its antagonism to the belief in miracles. It is not that many scientific men will go to the full length of asserting that no imaginable evidence could be strong enough to prove a miracle; yet, certainly, that no such evidence as is pretended by divines can ever prove such miracles as they allege. Science teaches us to study every question à priori, with a view to judge how much à posteriori evidence will suffice for its decision. If a statement is beforehand highly probable, we need but moderate and ordinary testimony to create belief in it; if it be decidedly improbable, we want first-rate and clear testimony; if it be intensely improbable, we need testimony direct, conclusive, and unimpeachable. Let us pass from this principle to the two great miracles which lie at the foundation of orthodox Christianity; we mean, of course, the miraculous conception and the resurrection of Jesus; and let us calmly consider how they would be treated if they were now for the first time heard of, and brought to the test of ordinary scientific evidence.

It is not our fault, if the discussion of the former topic somewhat shock religious decorum. In heathenism indecent fables are not uncommon; to have to refute such things is disagreeable. If the refutation prove disagreeable to the votary also, all unprejudiced bystanders will say that he must blame those who invented the creed, not him who refutes it; and surely the same topic applies here. We are ordered to believe that a certain person was born without a human father; and when we ask, on what proof, we have handed to us, in the first instance, the book called Matthew, in which it is alleged that Joseph, the ostensible father of Jesus, discovered his betrothed wife to have premature signs of maternity; that he was disposed to repudiate her privately, in order to save her shame; when, lo! he had a dream; a DREAM! informing him that there was no shame in the matter, but great glory; it was a holy miracle; the father of her child was no human being, but was the Spirit of God. Such is the account in Matthew.

We should fear to insult an English magistrate, by expecting him to believe a similar story concerning some English peasant girl, on the ground that her betrothed lover had had a dream to

that effect, which tranquillized his mind after a painful struggle. Not only no English magistrate, no judge, no jury, would believe such a tale on such evidence; but no clergyman would believe it, no bishop, no archbishop: this we may assert with absolute freedom and certainty, however large demands of easy faith they make on others. The least that even an archbishop could require would be some security,-or say, some plausible pretence for believing that it was not a common dream, but a properly miraculous vision; and that the man to whom it was vouchsafed should display some superiority of mind, which might, if not justify our trust in his power to discriminate between dreams and visions, yet palliate our credulity in so trusting him. Who then was Joseph? Why should we believe him so easily?

Who indeed was Joseph? We know nothing of him except that this story was told of him at a later time. Nay, we cannot even attain any moderately good proof that he ever had such a dream, or professed to have had it for it is on the face of the narrative that he passed as the father of Jesus, and that there was no public suspicion that that was an error, some thirty years later, at which time Joseph has vanished out of the narrative and is supposed to have been dead. We have then a second question: Who is it that tells us that Joseph ever narrated such a dream, ever professed painful suspicions, and received such a solution of them? The reply is: We know little or nothing about him. It is usual now to call him Matthew; and if Matthew was really the writer's name, if he even wrote within fifty years after the dream, it helps very little to prove that Joseph was his informant, or had ever heard the tale.

It has been observed (and the remark seems decisive) that no young woman of ordinary good sense or right feeling could have failed to reveal everything of this critical nature to her betrothed from the first moment. That she should allow him to have unjust and dishonouring suspicions, and remain silent, is quite unnatural: it is conduct of which no plausible explanation can be given. And now, we are expected to believe a mighty and cardinal miracle on evidence which would not suffice in the laxest court of law to establish an ordinary fact.

If the possession of an estate depended on priority of existence, and the evidence offered were, that a man called Matthew, who died last year, had left a MS. which stated that a certain Joseph had a dream, and that in this dream an angel of the Lord told him that "James was born before Joses;" we say, no ecclesias