BOOKS.

CANON LIDDON ON CHURCH TROUBLES.{'

IT is as impossible for us to sympathise with the drift of Canon Liddon's proposal in the preface to these Sermons for putting an end to the present troubles in the Church, as it is not to sympathise with the spiritual tone and lofty teaching ot these eloquent sermons themselves. The drift of the preface is, that the only trustworthy teachers and the only trustworthy interpreters and judges of spiritual truth are to be found amongst clergymen ; while one of the finest of the sermons, that devoted to the martyrdom of St. Stephen, shows that the author of what may be fairly called the first spiritual reform in the Christian Church,--that which first broke through the prac- tice of the Apostles of attending the Temple worship, and asserted the spiritual essence of the Christian faith in all its universality,—was one specially set apart to the duty of " serving tables," in order that the Apostles might give them- selves wholly to preaching the Word of God. Of course, Dr. Liddon will maintain that Stephen, in being consecrated to the diaconate, received the preliminary ordination of a priest. But it seems to us, as we read the Acts of the Apostles, that the deacon of the Early Church was intended for the lay work of the Church, as distinguished from what we now call the work of ministers of the Gospel,—was, indeed, much nearer to the deacon of the Scotch

• An instance or the annatintactory manner in which this system of election works may be round in the latest election of members to the Old Society which took plats last week, when Mr. Napier Henry, ono or the most accomplished Painters of ships and shipping in England, wee blackballed without, mercy,

t Thoughts on Present Church Troubles, occurrimc in Four Sermons macheti in St. Paul's Colloulral in December, 0380. By 3.1. P. Liddon, D.D. Loudon: Itiviugions. Presbyterian Church or of some of our Dissenting bodies, than to the deacon of the Episcopal Churches,—and that, nevertheless,

a deacon of this kind, consecrated expressly to spare th sties

from giving their time to non-spiritual work, was the le f the

most spiritual movement of the Early Church. How, on, is it possible for us to follow Dr. Liddon. in his curious argument to show that the Church could properly trust an ecclesiastical Court of Appeal which consisted of Bishops, yet cannot trust one which consists of laymen ? For our own parts, we have seen occasional traces of far too much policy and far too little sense of mere justice, in our Ecclesiastical Courts as they now are, but we can hardly imagine any Ecclesias- tical Court less fitted to do justice without regard to policy than one composed of Bishops alone. Judge the Bishops by the part they take in the ecclesiastical squabbles of the day. We shall only'liere and there find one who seems to be penetrated with the judicial feeling, and to think of justice first and policy afterwards ; while amongst our Judges, we certainly think this latter temper the prevailing one. In point of fact, it is no great accusation to bring against ministers of God's Word that their temper is not judicial. They have not been trained for judicial duties ; they have been trained for duties which are not, indeed, inconsistent with, but by no means directly favourable to, a judicial frame of mind. But this we will say, that a narrower and more dangerous kind of Court of Appeal than one consist- ing of mere Bishops, it is not easy for us even to imagine.

Thus much to explain why we feel ourselves so completely out of sympathy with Dr. Liddon's preface. We are strongly of opinion, indeed, that so far from answering his purpose, such a Court of Appeal as he proposes would greatly multiply the per- plexities of the Church, nay, would far more than double the toil and trouble which led to the composition of these fine sermons. But when we come to the sermons themselves, the want of sym- pathy with which we read the preface at once vanishes. They are full of beauty, of power, and of truth, and, with one excep- tion, the very passages which seem to have been principally suggested by the ecclesiastical crisis in which they were com- posed, are amongst the finest of all. Sincere supporters of the Establishment, as, for England and for the present day, we avow ourselves, we would not alter a word in the following noble passage describing the dangers of the alliance between Church and State, and the power which a Christian Church, when that alliance is dissolved, may yet be expected to wield :-

" The kingdom of God came withoat observation, and we have seen that when it had come, it could not but be, in some sense, observed ; since it was to consist of believing men ; since it was to be, as St. Paul says, one body as well as one spirit (Epliesiana iv., 4) ; since as an institution, with public officers and territorial arrangements of its own, it so far entered into the sphere of sense. But a time came when, we must sorrowfully admit, our Lord's words no longer served to describe the manner in which efforts were always made to promote the advance of his kingdom. Christians were truer to him when they prayed and suffered in the Catacombs, than when, after Constantine's conversion, they had learned to wait as courtiers in the antechambers of the Caesars. And when tho Roman Empire fell, and amidst the general collapse of the old society the Church remained as a solitary institution, standing erect in the midst of a world of ruins, it followed that her chief pastors became, in the natural course and by the pres- sure of events, great temporal princes, ruling the bodies as well as the souls of men ; and that her Bishops took their seats in earthly legislatures ; and that her public action commingled with that of the powers of this world, and attracted at least an equal share of human observation. And then even good Christian men brought themselves to think that tho Kingdom of God could somehow be made to come, not merely with groat observation,' but by the more manipulation of physical force ; that it would come in the wake of conquering armies, or at the dictates of earthly magistrates, or in obedience to the sword, not of the Spirit., but of the soldier or the policeman. Now this gigantic and degrading misconception was undoubtedly, in its origin, due to a particular kind of intimacy between the Divine King- dom and the powers of this world ; en intimacy of such a sort and character, that the methods for extending and guarding an earthly empire seemed to be immediately applicable to the work of protect- ing and enlarging the Kingdom of God. The days of that old inti- macy are, it would seem, passing away all over Christendom. And if when wo look back on them, we must, as Christians, regret the loss of that public honour which was thus assigned by our forefathers to religion among the lessor concerns of life ; still, we may reflect that the true strength of Christianity lies, not in the outward sym- bols of its empire, but in the reality of its empire over hearts and wills ; that the Kingdom of God which ' comoth not with observation' does not really need contrivances for causing it to be ' observed ;' and that a possible future of the Church, which may seem, to worldly eyes, sheer poverty and failure, may yet contain within itself the springs of a. renovating moral force—a force intense and concentrated —whereby to win back to the fresh faith and love of early ages the worn-out or decaying energies of a jaded and heart-sick world."

We have said that we make one exception to our sympathy with the passages in his sermons in which Dr. Liddon refers

to the recent ecclesiastical troubles. It is the fine passage in_ which, in his eulogy on Gallio, ho evidently intends to condemn, by implication, our Judicial Committee of the Privy Council,. for passing judgment on subjects into which, as a council of

laymen, it can have no insight :—

" There are few men in ancient history to whom more injustice• has been done, ay, in the pulpits of the Christian Church, than ;Junius Ammous Gallio, who was Proconsul of Achaia in the year of our Lord 53, when St. Paul was conducting his greet mission in Corinth. In thousands of sermons, Gallio has been held up to pitying condemnation as the typical example of indifference to the great concerns of religion ; whm.eas in point of fact Gallic) was a Roman magistrate of the highest chirracter, who had a clear idea of the sub- jects which did and did not fall properly within his jurisdiction. his• well-known brother Seneca, the Stole philosopher, said of Gallio that ho was beloved by everybody ; and Seneca dedicated to him two of his treatises, in terms which show us what be thought of his brother's disposition. Gallio, we all remember, refused to listen to the Jews when they dragged St. Paul before his tribunal, on the ground that he was asked to interfere in what scorned to him to be a matter of words and names ;' words and names relating to the profound questions which, as we Christiana know, divided the faith of St. Pea and the Christian Church from the beliefs of the Jewish Synagogue., But let us suppose that Gallio, pagan as ho was, had taken a different view of his duty; that he had undertaken to decide, not merely the worth of St. Paul's theological position, as against the claims of the Synagogue, but also those various questions, internal to the Christian, Church, which St. Paul discusses in his First Epistle to the Corinthians ; the rivalries between the disciples of Paul, and Cophas, and Apace,. the penalty due to the incestuous Corinthians, the advisability of marriage or of single life in Christians, the lawfulness of the use of meat offered in sacrifice to idols, the dress of Christian women in Christian churches, the behaviour of Christians at the Holy Communion,„ or—graver far—the relation of those who denied the Resurrection of the dead to the faith of the Christian Church. if we could imagine Gallio first studying and then pronouncing on these subjects, can we imagine how St. Paul would have received his conclusions P"

Is it not obvious that in this passage Dr. Liddon's implied cen- sure rests upon exaggeration as well as a misconception P Gallia was, of course, not only an unbeliever in the Jewish law, but utterly ignorant of it. It was, as Dr. Liddell says, his business to ignore it. But supposing that, even without belief in it, it had been his business to administer it,—that he had been a, Jewish official commissioned to master and administer a code'

of Jewish law framed by his own people, though one in which he personally had lost faith, is there anything so absurd in the- assumption that he might have interpreted its drift honestly,. and even more fairly than either a Pharisee, or a Sadducee, or a Christian, who was a party to the controversies about it P To say that any one in Gallio's position would have been. no judge at all of the fair drift of either Jewish or Christ- ians law or doctrine, is one assertion ; to say that a Jew

trained to the subject would have been, if an unbeliever in their divine authority, an equally bad judge of that drift,.

is another and very different assertion ; and to say that such an unbeliever would be no authority at all on the spiritual value of what he disbelieved, is quite a distinct assertion from either of these, and might be perfectly true, even though the' second assertion were absolutely false. Dr. Liddon seems to us to mix up all three together, whereas the only assertion which• is germane to the subject of our recent ecclesiastical troubles would be the second, which does; not seem to us to be true. at till.

We should be sorry, however, to part from these fine. sermons in the mood of criticism on a purely incidental applica- tion of one passage which they contain, especially since, as our readers know, we are no admirers of the most important of the

recent decisions of the Ecclesiastical Court of Appeal, though we do not believe that the Archbishops did anything to keep that decision straight, but probably influenced it in the direction of what they held to be popular policy. There is much that is powerful iu these sermons which has no direct bearing on the ecclesiastical crisis, and of this we should like to give two. examples, from the very fine sermon on our Lord's estimate of John the Baptist. Here is Dr. Liddon's delineation of " the reed shaken with the wind," whom no one would go out. into the wilderness to see :- " Our Lord's words do, in fact, raise a very large and interesting question, which we may well consider this afternoon, namely, what it is in human character or life that exerts the most powerful, attraction over the hearts of men. Is it what we generally call. amiability ? the instinct or habit which makes itself agreeable to everybody ; which never opposes, never contradicts, never even holds its own, when to do so would cause a momentary sense of dis-

comfort ? Is it, as our Lord puts it, a reed shaken with the wind ?' a character that bends or that trembles at the first expres- sion of adverse opinion ; at a phrase in a speech, or at a phrase in a newspaper ? Is this the character that wins the human heart P Are we really won by men who, in intercourse with their fellows, can

see one, and one only, golden rule of conduct, that of making things easy,' and so of voting down principle, whenever it becomes unwelcome or exacting P There aro many people to bo met with who evidently take this view of life in perfect good-faith. They have 110 principles, or none which they care to defend or make sacrifices for ; their one object is to avoid that kind of discomfort which arises from a sense of social collision. So they go about the world bowing and smiling their unmeaning compliments to all the incom- patibilities whom they meet on their way ; and whatever also may be said of them, assuredly this 'is deservedly said of them, that they are very amiable people. Undoubtedly such persons are easier to get on with than those who look upon the society of their fellow-men as affording them the same sort of opportunity for distinction which a .sea captain discovers in the neighbourhood of a hostile fleet. They are entitled, beyond doubt, to this negative praise : but the question is, whether they exert any attraction on our hearts. And that question assuredly can only be answered in one way."

And here is his picture of the " man clothed in soft raiment," whom we May regard with some spasm of more or less spurious reverence, but whom, again, we should certainly make no forced march into the wilderness to hear :—

" A great position, as we call it, is the product of some form of human enterprise or virtue in bygone days ; it represents the valour, or the wisdom, or at least the perseverance of some among those whom we call the dead ; it has accumulated with the lapse of years a vast assortment of associations, each one of which adds to it some new .claim upon the popular feeling : it has been consecrated, we may dare to say, at least in some sense, by the protecting and upholding hand of God ; and so it comes down to us, as a royal dynasty, or as a great family, enriched with a thousand subtle but imperious recom- mendations. And thus as we look on the man clothed in soft rai- ment,' wo ungrudgingly yield to him at least a corner of our hearts. But ; does he really take possession of us ? Surely not. His life may be a contradiction to all the ideal expectations that are raised by his rank. And, when this is not the case, reflection here, as in -other matters, if not entirely undoing the work of imagination, at least obliges us to keep it in check. After all, what we seek in our most serious moments is not the position, but the man ; not the ' soft raiment,' but the mind and heart and will that underlie it. The position is not the real man ; it is merely a decoration altogether out- side ldtn. And when we have stripped it off, and have looked at what dies beneath, we find perhaps what we find elsewhere, a timid, for. torn soul, shivering at the Justice and the Magnificence of God, and as little able as ourselves to give the sort of satisfaction that is most 'constantly needed by the heart and will of a sinful fellow-creature."

'" A timid, forlorn soul, shivering at the Justice and the Mag- nificence of God," is a description which even Carlyle, in his Bailor Resartuo, hardly surpasses in graphic power, though his whole book is devoted to stripping off the soft raiment from human beings, while Dr. Liddon only touches the subject in one :aspect and for one purpose. These four sermons are fine ser- mons, if you regard them from the temporary point of view from which they were preached ; they are still finer, from the eternal point of view of absolute Christian teaching.