gularly in the Sunday-school—it may quote texts or distribute tracts —it may put on a jaunting air and call itself liberality, or walk up and down with a demure face and claim near relationship with orthodoxy-it may bestow all its goods to feed the poor and give its body to be burned; but it is still a falsity: its work is no work of God, but only one of those works of darkness which Christ came not to bless but to destroy.

"And for the most part I believe that we are able of ourselves to find out the lie. We can distinguish pretty generally between genuine charity and all its counterfeits, whose name is Legion. We can see with our own eyes the difference between the spirit of one who counts every favour he gives, and adjusts his love to different ranks as a man adjusts the money in his purse, putting the gold to one end and the silver to the other; and the spirit of another, who sees, in all that he has, God's property, to be stewarded for the good of all around him; and who has, in all around him, friends whom God has made to be such by making them his friends, and who are therefore as little to be offended or insulted or treated with neglectful contempt, as the Queen's husband or his own relations. We can hardly go a yard from our house door without being compelled almost to contrast that stiff and prim apology for love, which paces up and down within its own narrow lines like that apology for a man, a soldier on the parade-ground, with this expansive and exhilarating love which, flowing from the full fountain of the love of God into as many channels as the Gospel itself can go, streams ever forth, spreading as it goes, like a river in a dry land, which fertilizes the banks that it washes with its waves, and widens evermore until it loses itself in the waters of the sea.

"But the thing which St. John brings home to us in the text ('He that loveth not, knoweth not God: for God is love) is, that this profit-and-loss style of relieving the poor and of getting rid of the debt of love which we are scarcely so blind as to mistake for charity, is not piety either. The thing which he establishes is, that they who in spite of all their ostentatious acts of apparently magnificent benevolence stand often exposed as close-handed and close-hearted skinflints before their fellow men, are not either right before God: that they who do not know aright their relationship with ragged urchins and maids of all-work, do not either know God aright: that, in short, to be without that love for one another which is death to all patronizing condescension on the part of the great, as much as to all obsequious servility on the part of the poor, is to be without that knowledge of God which alone is life eternal, for rich and for poor."-P. 21.

Not less earnest and plain-spoken in its language, nor, as we truly believe, less honest and sincere in its purpose,

is the Sermon which Mr. Kingsley has just published, and which produced such excitement at the time of its delivery. The preface, we think, entirely acquits him of any breach of faith towards the clergyman in whose pulpit it was preached. Mr. Kingsley, it appears from a letter of Mr. Maurice, had been solicited to preach, in consequence of the deep interest felt in his published writings. He did not seek out the occasion which has exposed him to so much animadversion. The task having been undertaken under such circumstances, it was naturally to be expected, that he would preach as he had written. If there was anything therefore in the style and tone of his address, at war with the understood proprieties of the Church, the blame must fall on the clergyman who gave, and not on the one who accepted, the invitation. But we have here only another of the daily recurring proofs, how impossible it is in the Church of England as at present constituted, for a man to be thoroughly in earnest and to speak forth the whole mind that is in him, without coming into collision with some of the technicalities and conventionalisms which hedge him in on every side. We do not agree with Mr. Kingsley, and think his mind ill-balanced and over-excited; but the unmistakeable earnestness of tone which pervades his discourse, satisfies us that he meant uprightly, and that his heart is fervently benevolent. In a freer system he would ultimately right himself, and his impulsive spirit recover the equilibrium which it needs. There is the unstudied eloquence of a genuine Christian sympathy in the following passage:

"When I have been inclined to take offence at people because they disagreed with me, because they seemed ungrateful or unjust to me, then, beyond all arguments, that blessed sign has recalled me to my senses, and said to me-See, these men with whom thou art angry are thy brothers after all. Their relation to thee is Godgiven and eternal. Thou didst not choose them-God joined thee to them-and thou canst not alter His choice-thou canst not part thyself from them. Hate them, and turn from them, if thou darest!

"Above all, when I have been inclined to give in to that subtlest of all temptations-the notion that one Gospel is required for the man of letters, and another for the labouring drudge-that he may pamper and glorify himself on art and science, and the higher and more delicate subjects of thought, while for the poor man a little

reading and writing, and religion, is enough and to spare; then again, that sacrament has warned me: Not so,-one bread, one wine, for thee and them. One Lord, one pardon, one fountain of life, one feeling and inspiring spirit. They have not only the same rights, but the same spiritual wealth in them. If thou hast been put into circumstances, in which thou canst use thy gifts more freely than they can theirs, why is it but that thou mayest share thy superfluity with their need-that thou mayest teach them, guide them, nourish up into flower and greet the heaven-given seed of nobleness which lies in them as surely as in thee? For after all, as that bread and that wine proclaim to thee-thou hast nothing of thy own, wit, scholarship, utterance,-what hast thou which thou didst not receive? Fool! instead of priding thyself on it as thine own property, confess it to be that which it is, the gift of God, who hath only bestowed it on thee as his steward-to give it freely to all, as he hath given freely to thee."-Pp. 25-27.

We must add, however, that these generous sentiments and the gleams of great and eternal truth which break through them, are perplexed and darkened by assumptions and inconsistencies and a confusion of ideas, which prevent our seeing what is the writer's own conception-if, as we rather doubt, he has any distinct one-of the precise change which he would have the Church introduce into the present state of the world. What is this Church to which such marvellous efficacy is ascribed? And where is it to be found? It cannot be the Church of England, for he indignantly disclaims the idea (p. 16) of recognising men of his own opinions as brothers, and not men who differ from him. Neither can it be as his text and his exposition of it might lead us to expect-the simple and formless institution of conversion and healing founded by Jesus of Nazarethfor he talks of priests and sacraments, ideas wholly alien to the Galilean ministry. The word Church, as used by him, is an unknown quantity which leaves the final sum of his meaning and purpose undetermined. Adopting the watchwords of the late French revolution as his own, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity-he finds their ecclesiastical equivalents in the Bible, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord-the Bible proclaiming man's freedom-Baptism his equality-and the Supper of the Lord his brotherhood (p. 17);-not perceiving, with strange inadvertency, that of these three influences to which he looks for re

storing peace, union and freedom to the world, the meaning, the efficacy and the obligation are now, and ever have been, subjects of the most vehement controversy among men, and that any attempt to fix or define them, in the present state of knowledge and opinion, by the Church or by any other authority, would involve a direct breach of the liberty and equality, and incurably divide the brotherhood, which they are held forth as the only possible means of producing. We may arbitrarily assume certain doctrines of the Bible to be incontestably true, and may arbitrarily assign to the Sacraments any signification that we like; and we may construct in this way a very plausible scheme of human peace and fraternity; but the difficulty will be to persuade others to adopt our views; and till that is done, the old disunion must continue, or submission be enforced on the reluctant-and then, what becomes of liberty!We believe, indeed, that there is an unity ultimately attainable on all these objects; but the notion of restoring social union by the most active present causes of social antagonism, the very causes which are driving men asunder and preventing all effectual combination for educational or other purposes-is most extraordinary; and from a person like Mr. Kingsley, might seem incredible, did we not mark an evident Socialist tendency in the working of his mind: and in every form of Socialism we detect a latent, perhaps unconscious, design on the freedom of individual speech and action, amidst its loudest protestations of regard for the equal rights of all.

To the immense difficulties of every kind which surround our present social condition, and which demand for their adequate treatment, knowledge, experience, and reasoning powers of the highest order, as well as the guidance of humane and religious feeling-Mr. Kingsley brings only a generous and impulsive heart, considerable impatience of views opposed to his own, and the crudest, vaguest conception of the specific life of Christianity. We rose from his Sermon, in spite of our sympathy with its benevolence, with a profounder feeling than ever, how utterly the Church of England has failed in her mission of training men to be the mental and spiritual guides of the nation. Her intellectual instrumentalities are wholly unsuited to the social demands of the age. Her Creeds, and

the Bible in its bare literalness, are the only arms on which she can lay her hand to do service in the deepening conflict with misery and wrong. She is shut out from the actual world by ideas and usages which belonged to it centuries ago, and which then sufficed as a passage for mutual intelligence and communication. Now they no longer answer that purpose. Cooped up within these antiquated barriers, her best and worthiest sons fret and chafe under the invincible consciousness of social impotence; and they must either violently extinguish their noblest impulses, or in giving them vent, cause havoc and confusion by their sudden explosion.