NEWS OF THE WEEK.
T4ORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL on Monday resumed the adjourned debate on the Affirmation Bill in a clever speech, which he commenced by taunting Mr. Gladstone with his obscure dissertations on medileval divinity,—Lord Randolph appeared to think that Augus- tine, Origen (whom he pronounced " Origen"), and Jerome, all lived in "the middle ages,"—and then continued by launching into an elaborate dissertation on the analogy between Judaism and Arianism, a creed which he appeared greatly to favour, and described in a flight of most original theology as an improved form of Judaism. Lord Randolph's inquiries into the life and times of Athanasins had quite convinced him that, so far as it was lawful to pry into the causes of religious progress, "it was as much owing to accident as to anything else that the -whole of Europe at the present moment was not Arian." The orthodoxy of the West "depended entirely on the caprices of a despotic Emperor, the intrigues of an Oriental Court, and upon the hairbreadth escapes of an adventurous Bishop." He went on into a close imitation of Mr. Disraeli's defence of "the Semitic principle," but did not attempt to show why the Jews, who, if they be true Jews, must hold Christ to be an impostor and blasphemer, should have any more claim on Christian sympathies than the naked unbeliever who has never believed enough in God to regard the case of Revelation as even plausible. It is true that Judaism stands to Christianity in a certain relation, but it is the relation of the morning twilight to the day ; and, when the day has come, the eye that prefers the twilight must be regarded as longing for the night.
