CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Ancient British Church : a Historical Essay. By John Price, M.A., Vicar of Bangor. (Longmans.)—This essay " was adjudged to be the best on The Ancient British Church,' of the essays submitted for competition at the National Eisteddfod of 1876," and it fully bears out the favourable opinion of the Committee with whom the decision rested. Mr. Price has brought to the elucidation of his sub- ject a great amount of industrious reading and investigation, and his copious notes are full of interest to the antiquarian and ecclesiastical student. The origin and progress of the early Church in Britain is a chapter of history which has hitherto attracted by far too little atten- tion. It has been generally supposed that little benefit can arise from the study of it, and so it has comp to pass that the revival of religion under the mission of Augustine has been made the starting- point of such partial information as ordinary educational works afford. Mr. Price shows that the popular view is, to a groat extent, erroneous. The early Church was a real power in the land long before the time of Gregory the Great. The author successfully con- tests the fairness of " the charge, so constantly brought against it, of culpable apathy to the spiritual welfare of the English people." He shows that the monastic system in the Celtic Churches, while it kept alive a spirit of piety and charity in those rough times, was also a fruitful source of missionary zeal, and of a large measure of missionary success. The British and Irish Churches had several distinctive usages, which they long retained, and which made a broad difference between them and Rome. Mr. Price mentions, as worthy of par.- tienlar notice, the time for tho observance of Easter; single immersion in baptism ; the tonsure, which differed both from the Roman and Greek type ; a peculiar ritual in the Mass ; and the con- secration of bishops by a single bishop. Moreover, "the British Churches appear to have had a Latin version of the Scrip- tures, peculiar to themselves." They seem to have guarded their independent position with jealous care, and oven in later times, when by degrees the native Church in Wales had become assimilated to the English communion, there existed a powerful feeling of dislike to the appointment of Bishops ignorant of the Welsh
language and antagonistic to the national sentiment. Between the times of the Reformation and the Revolution this feeling appears to ' have been, in some degree, respected ; and several native Bishops were appointed to Welsh Sees ; but after the Revolution, "to attempt to suppress this national sentiment through the medium of an Episcopate, Hanoverian in politics and latitudinarian in theology, became the constant aim and determination of the English Govern- ment." It followed—almost as a. matter of course—that when the groat revival now known as Calvinistic Methodism took place, considera- tions of ecclesiastical polity had so little weight with the leaders, though themselves clergymen, that they assisted to form an associa- tion which beoamo the parent of modern Dissent in Wales, Mr. Price gives a clear, though concise, account of the progress of that movement, and of its bearing upon the present condition of the Established Church, which he prefers to regard as the Church of Wales, rather than as a communion absolutely identical with that of England.
What he has to say on the prospect of reunion will be read with much interest by Englishmen and Welshmen alike. The liberal and kindly spirit in which Nonconformist difficulties and objections are considered is highly to be commended. Mr. Price is not without hope that better times are coming for the Church ; he believes that each year is modifying the relative numerical strength of the Church and Dissent, and that "there is a deepening of the spiritual life in the former, which is bringing abont between truly religions mon a greater sympathy and a clearer recognition of the truth."
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