MR. MYERS ON CHRISTIANITY.* WE have long been acquainted with

Mr. Myers' admirable Lectures on Great Men, but it was from the perusal of the present volume that we first learnt that Mr. Myers was a great man himself. We do not mean to affirm that he was great as a lonely pioneer in the unfrequented tracks of speculation, or that he was great with the power that gives direction or impulse to new movements in social development, but certainly he was great in the width of the survey which, as revealed in these Catholic Thoughts, he made of the history of the world, great in the clear and to us altogether satisfactory estimate of the forces which were contending for spiritual mastery in his day, as they are in our own ; and great because of the patience in which he possessed his eoul, as he looked onward to the issue of the struggle. Before, however, we call the attention of our readers to the contents of this very remarkable book, we would advert to the special cir- cumstances amid which it is now for the first time published. As early as 1834, the Catholic Thoughts had already shaped them- selves in the form under which they are now given to the world. A postscript to them was added in 1841, and in that year the first portion of the book, that now lying before us, was printed, but printed only. What area of circulation the Catholic Thoughts covered in their unpublished days we cannot exactly tell, and but for the fact that the volume found its way into the possession of the late Bishop of Argyll,. it seems very doubtful whether a greater degree of publicity would ever have been given to it at all. "Keep a thing," says Tennyson, "and its use will come." It was as early, we believe, as the year of his consecration, 1847, that Bishop Ewing became acquainted with the existence of the Catholic Thoughts. But at that stage of his intellectual and spiritual development, the Bishop was not very much, if at all, prepared to sympathise with the teaching of Mr. Myers. It is, indeed, affirmed by those whose testimony is entirely reliable, that the young prelate put the book on a shelf, after a partial perusal of its pages, with the curt, but emphatic remark, "Oh no ! this will never do." And, so far as we can gather, the volume seems to have been entirely overlooked by Dr. Ewing until, from the deepening and widening of his own convictions, through the instrumentality of other influences, a kind of elective affinity led him to open it again in his later years. To read it now was to find himself in nearly every page, even to curious coincidences of expression. But, with the humility which was as characteristic of Dr. Ewing as was his courage in proclaiming unpopular truths, he assumed towards the new-found " thoughts " the attitude rather of a disciple than of a sympathiser, who, by methods and strugglings personal to himself, had reached the same conclu- sions as Mr. Myers had previously adopted ; and con- sequently, as his friend, the able editor of the present volume informs us, he not only desired that Mr. Myers' "Pages "- the modest phrase always employed by the latter in speaking of this work—should be introduced to the notice of the public, but seemed to think that in publishing them he would be leaving to the world "a more important legacy than any utter- ances of his own." The world is under great obligation to the late Bishop of Argyll for rescuing the Catholic Thoughts from relative obscurity, and giving them publicity with the sanction of his name. Having obtained permission from Mr. Myers' repre- sentatives to publish them in the Present-Day Papers, he was on the point of writing an introduction to them when he was overtaken by his fatal illness. That introduction was not to be

• Catholic Thoughts on the Church of Christ and the Church of England. By the late Frederick Myers, M.A., Perpetual Curate of St. John's, Keswick. London • Ishister and Co. 1874.

written by him, but so profoundly did he feel "the weight and power" of Mr. Myers' reasoning on some of the great questions which are still stirring to its inmost centre the thought of the age, that he laid it as a charge on Mr. Whitehead, Vicar of St. John's, Limehonse, that his desire for publication should be carried into effect. Mr. Whitehead's introduction, like all his sermons, which. are only too little known, is lucid and quietly effective; and frona it the reader will gain some very suggestive hints bah as regards- the character of Mr. Myers, and the special significance for the present time of his wonderfully Catholic thoughts.

The Catholic Thoughts consist of four books, of which only the first two are contained in the treatise before us—those on. the Church of Christ, and the Church of England. The two re- maining books—on the Bible and Theology—are shortly to be- published in another volume, with the issue of which the Pre- sent-Day Papers will be brought to a close. The great ques- tions which are discussed by Mr. Myers in this first portion of his work are these :—" Whether there is a divinely-appointed priest- hood on earth, or whether all Christians have essentially the same relationship to God and Christ ; whether the Church of Christ. is a kingdom of this world as to its constitution and its govern- ment, or whether it is characteristically a spiritual brotherhood,. a divinely incorporated commonwealth." These questions can only intelligently or intelligibly be answered in one of two ways, and the answer must be either the distinct denial or the distinct. affirmation of one of the alternatives now propounded. At the time when Mr. Myers was pursuing his -quiet meditations in the retirement of Keswick, Oxford —and soon all England — was- ringing with the loud-toned enunciation of a claim to Apostolic authority on the part of the ministers of the Established Church.. That claim appeared to some at the time only the sport of heated ecclesiastical fancy. It roused others to a passionate antagonism, such as found utterance in the vehement pamphlets. which the late Isaac Taylor brought out at intervals under the title of "Ancient Christianity." Mr. Myers had too much humour- not to perceive the ludicrousness of the position of Infallibility— for it meant nothing less than that—occupied by a clique of teachers belonging to a Church whose peculiar national existence,. in its present relations, was simply due to the fact that it had. broken with infallibility. He saw, moreover, with that fine intui- tive faculty that belonged to him, that spiritual truths, in the pro- foundest acceptation of the words, must at least be as independent. of authority as a common rule of arithmetic. Not being super- ficial, Mr. Myers was not romantic, as men reckon romantic. He did not believe that the "exclusive system "—its inherent and demonstrable absurdity notwithstanding—would not find a very considerable amount of sympathy, such as it was, ready for its adoption ; or that the principles implied in it would be laughed. or argued out of court, either in his day or in our day.. The recognition, however, of the great probability that the " Tract " principles, or, as he calls them, the " exclu- sive " ones, would work like leaven in certain measures of .meat for a season, neither obscured his judgment nor soured his- temper. Perhaps few, if any, of his contemporaries saw so clearly as he did the " drift " of the Oxford movement, but he does not rush forward to oppose it with party watchwords or personal denunciation. Mr.. Myers believed, and therefore spoke,—believed in principles deeper, wider, more pernianent than the "Tract "- ones, and thus his language is always calm, patient, hopeful, charitable. He could not doubt that any manifestation which- exalted itself against the liberty wherewith Christ maketh free must pass away, before an ampler unveiling of the light which. is in Christianity itself, and that a true Catholicism would, as, the fullness of the times drew on, replace all the narrow con- ventionalities which had been propounded or accepted by those who seemed to labour under the hallucination that the Church or humanity is in want of another foundation than that which is laid, in the love, the sacrifice, the brotherhood that are found with Christ in God.

In addition to his other admirable qualities, Mr. Myers is- specially eminent as an expositor, and in these " pages " the- reader will find a clearer and more masterly commentary on the profound principles and suggestions of Coleridge's Church and State than in any other work which the present reviewer can recall as he writes. It was, of course, inevitable that the value of Coleridge's essay should early be discovered by Frederick Maurice ;• and in the first edition of the Kingdom of Christ, which was pub- lished, we may observe, along time ago, he says of it:—" Scarcely any book published so recently, and producing so little apparent effect, has really exercised a more decided influence over the thoughts and- feelings of the men who ultimately rule the mass of their country-

men." in the case of Mr. Maurice, however, the feeling of some might be that his expositions of Coleridge were like deep calling unto deep,—for this'great theologian was more a miner than a gold.

beater. On the other hand, Mr. Myers is eminently luminous ; while it was only some four years after the brief treatise of

Coleridge appeared, the latter date being, probably, 1830, that the author of the Catholic Thoughts—then comparatively a youth,

for he had just reached his twenty-fourth year—had made its con- tents entirely his own. The proof of our assertion will be found in many a passage of this volnme, but the following sentences, taken almost at hazard from the commencement of the second book, will, perhaps, better than any other, illustrate our meaning.

It is Coleridge made popular :—

"A Christian Church is, according to its idea, a spiritual body only, not having necessarily any temporal interests whatever. It may exist alike essentially under every possible form of government, and in every stage of social civilisation. The idea is neither in opposition to nor in conjunction with any body politic. Its contrary is the worldly, its aim the unworldly. It asks nothing of this world for its members as Christians which they are not already entitled to as men. To be allowed to live and grow—the right of all creatures of God—is its only petition. And this even simply on the ground that there is nothing in its constitution or its aims which is inconsistent with the legitimate interests of any human government. Though specially a Spiritual society, a Christian Church is no mystery. Publicity is a necessary means and condition of its growth. Its element is light,—its object to enlighten. Its distinctive office is not to monopolise truth, but to communicate it ; not so to guard a revelation as to conceal it, but to perpetuate by proclaiming it. It admits every one, without reference to worldly distinctions of any kind, into membership with itself, provided only that they will profess themselves qualified morally, according to certain publicly prescribed and foreknown conditions. Its members are not desirous of differing visibly from the society by which they are sur- rounded otherwise than by obvious superiority of character ; and need be recognised solely by their more exemplary performance of their duties as citizens, or as subjects. So far, indeed, from a Christian Church being in any way oposed to the interests of a State, it may be rather said that it is a corrective, compensating counter-agency to the necessary defects and evils of a merely political community. It is the humanising, elevating element in the composition of all societies equally, strengthening and extending and multiplying their bonds of union, at the same time that it is executing purposes peculiarly its own."

If any one after reading these words will turn to page 138 of

Coleridge's Church and State, he will better appreciate Mr. Myers' powers of interpretation, and as he becomes further acquainted with the Catholic Thoughts, he will scarcely dissent - from our verdict that history has not many times showed us the principles of a great thinker springing up so early to such abundant fruit-

fulness in the mind of a disciple. We must content ourselves, for our space is limited, with only a brief reference to the various aspects of the great questions propounded above which are here handled by Mr. Myers. It is possible that the succeeding volume will have for many minds a superior attraction to this, the relation of the Biblical records to Revelation and history being with many a more pressing question than that of the constitution or claims of the Church and the Christian ministry. But for all who care to know what an eminently wise and good man thought con- cerning the ideal relation of Church and State, the baseless fabric of Apostolical succession, the metaphysical impossibility of legiti- mate authority in the sphere of spiritual truth ; concerning the moral fruits, or fruitlessness, that have respectively character- ised the Churches in which authority has been most developed, and those which recognised no law but that which flowed directly from Christ himself and his Apostles ; concerning the primitive independency, allowing only for full intercommunion, and the absence of any prescriptive rule touching government or discipline which marked the early Churches; and concerning the future of the Church to be united, not in the acceptance of any dogmatic system, but by the love of Christ and Christ-like lives, the

Catholic Thoughts will become a valued and permanent possession. But it was in his profound belief respecting the ultimate welfare of the whole human family, that the Catholicity of Mr. Myers' Thoughts attains its culmination. There was nothing too good to

hope for if the Incarnation of the Son of God be a fact. On the contrary, it is but the calmest wisdom to hope from it all the good things that it can enter into the heart of man to conceive.

A mere gradual extension of that mediocrity of happiness and of goodness which now characterises Christendom could scarcely be the consummation for which Christ was born, and lived, and died.

It must be something far greater than anything that yet has been ; and Mr. Myers, neither heisting nor resting, did his work, to gm:he his own eloquent words, "in the full faith that there must be a period in the infinite future when evil shall be utterly abolished, and there shall be no dark spot in the universe of God : when all the works of the Devil shall be destroyed, and love shall be all in all : yea, an ultimate restitution and regeneration of all things,— a millennium of millenniums, and much more." Whether Mr. ' Myers took sufficient account in this dogmatic universalism of the indefinite power of the human will to resist good, is, we think, a question. But even if we do not wholly agree with his con- clusion, we cannot doubt that in tendency and drift, it expresses what must be the hope of every Christian who believes that Christ took up our humanity to redeem us. There is on the earth as yet no sign that that redemption has really been effected, though there are many signs that it is in progress.