12 MARCH 1910, Page 29

The Church of England in the Eighteenth Century. By Alfred

Plummer. (Methuen and Co. 2s. 6d. net.)—Dr. Plummer in his introductory chapter enlarges on the amount of material with which he has to deal, and the difficulty of drawing any certain conclusions. An historian who should have the nineteenth century for his subject might •say the same with even more force. But this volume (one of the " Handbooks of English Church History "), if it does not supply us with conclusions, helps us to form a clear conception of the time. Dr. Plummer has collected the available evidence with a most praiseworthy industry and he examines it with an unfailing fairness. What may be called an old truism—that there are two sides to everything—comes out with fresh force as we read. Take, for instance, the question of toleration. Our sympathies are alter- nately attracted and repelled. The movement against subscrip- tion headed by Archdeacon Blackburn in 1772 looks like an attempt to repudiate obligations; on the other hand, what could be more unreasonable than the attitude of the uncompromising opponents of change ? "You are not old enough to subscribe to the University statutes," said the Oxford Vice-Chancellor to an undergraduate of fourteen, " but you are old enough to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles." Then the subject of education is full of curious anomalies. How difficult to understand the frame

of mind which made men of intelligence regard Sunday-schools as hotbeds of revolution and sedition!