which is "written in the Register between 1704 and 1705."* This is immediately followed by the words, "It is not necessary to expose all the blunders of the Judicial Committee," and preceded by the statement that the list was sent him "by a friend." This, then, is the Canon's notion of evidence, and such is the testimony on which he claims to overthrow the Judicial Committee! Truly his party has the best of reasons for objecting to submit their case to the scrutiny of trained lawyers!

The history of this precious piece of "evidence" is this. The Vicar of Banwell sent the Guardian † this "list of the ornaments of the parish church in 1704-1705," as completing "a chain of evidence extending from the reign of Queen Elizabeth to that of Queen Anne.” In the very next number of the Guardian ‡ this evidence was "nailed to the counter" by the Vicar of Milton Clevedon, who pointed out that the list belonged to a far earlier time, and that "the entries for 1704-1705 are in a totally different and contemporary hand." And yet this "evidence" reappears in "The Reformation Settlement," and helps to turn the votes of forty members of Parliament ! §

But the point is this. Here is the Canon quoting, as of Queen Anne's reign, a list which not only the "expert" of his jeers, but every one who knows anything of the matter will recognise at once as an inventory of the sixteenth century. If he was really ignorant of this when he used it for Anne's reign, he stands confessed as a charlatan and impostor, who, after the manner of his tribe, breaks into wild bluster when his ludicrous pretensions are exposed.

Yet the crowning instance is to come. Treating the Bull of Excommunication (1570) as the real turning point in our Church history, he denounces "the arrogance and insolence of that Bull" (p. 87), and claims that the old belief and ritual were unmolested "till the issue of the Bull" (p. 127), producing in proof of that assertion a piece of evidence so startling that it has doubtless exercised on his readers' minds the effect he intended it to produce. Speaking of the Channel

Islands, he asserts that

"the Bishop of Coutances accepted the reformed Liturgy for that part of his ancient diocese, and continued to govern it till the eighth year of Elizabeth,|| when the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Coutances in the Channel Islands was abolished in consequence of the Pope's Bull of Excommunication. || To that arrogant exhibition of intolerable insolence is due no small share of our troubles in Church and State ever since. The Bishop of Coutances remonstrated against what he regarded as arbitrary injustice, and offered, on con

*The Reformation Settlement," pp. 431-432. + November 9, 1898, p. 1754.

November 16, 1898, p. 1795.

§ This "evidence" was actually produced at the Lambeth Hearing "on the authority of Canon MacColl"! Investigation proved, says an organ of his own party, not merely that "the writing was that of an earlier period," but that even then the list "only purports to be a copy of some previous inventory!"-Church Quarterly, July 1899, p. 293. The italics are mine.

dition of his jurisdiction being allowed, to give institution to such priests as the Queen might nominate from Oxford and Cambridge, waiving the right of presentation enjoyed by certain Abbots in Normandy" (Falle's "History of Jersey," p. 137).

"This interesting incident proves two things: first, that there was no question then on the part of Rome as to the validity of Anglican orders; secondly, that belief in Transubstantiation, so long as it was not enforced on others, was no disqualification for office in the Church of England until the violent action of the Pope compelled the English Government to treat Roman Catholicism as treason" (pp. 127-8).

The Pope's Bull, therefore, was the source of the whole trouble.

"An interesting incident," no doubt; but is there a word of truth in it? The bishop's jurisdiction, we learn, was abolished "in the eighth year of Queen Elizabeth . . . in consequence of the Bull of Excommunication"-in consequence of a Bull which was not issued till the twelfth year of Queen Elizabeth (1570)! In a foot-note to this very passage the Canon sarcastically exclaims:

"It is a great pity that the history of the English Reformation is so little. known by those who are most loud in protesting their loyalty to it."

Is it possible that he himself is so grossly, so incredibly ignorant of the whole history of the subject as not to know that the Pope's Ball, to which he attaches so vast an importance, was not even issued till 1570 ? But we must go further. How can the bishop have "remonstrated against what he regarded as arbitrary injustice" in the Pope's Bull years before that Bull was issued? Some one here is obviously romancing. Is it the writer whom the Canon cites? Or is it, can it be, the Canon himself? We need only turn to the writer he cites to learn that he has coolly interpolated the statements that the change was made in consequence of the Bull, that the Bishop of Coutances protested against the Bull, and that he offered to institute priests "from Oxford and Cambridge." And as to this "Popish bishop "governing" Jersey, Elizabeth had actually sanctioned, as early as 1565, the continuance of the Geneva discipline in the church of its capital!

The Canon's character has not changed; I may fitly close my reply to his attack with the words of a great scholar and divine, Bishop Thirlwall of St. David's:†

"I conceive that a man of honour, when he finds that he has had the misfortune to bring a wrongful accusation against any one, would feel himself bound, not only to retract it, but also to give some explanation of the way in which he was led into his mistake. Mr. MacColl wishes it to be believed that his accusation was the result of an examination of facts. I must remind the reader that the accusation was not simply a falsehood . . .

...

Falle himself explains that Jersey was, on the contrary, dependent on France for its ministers, "the difference of language making it impracticable to have assistance from England."

+ The Guardian, January 8, 1873, p. 46.

but it was as directly the reverse of the truth as it was possible for human imagination to devise.

"So complete a fiasco, so signal a miscarriage of an onset ushered in by such a flourish of trumpets, does not occur every day.

66

Will he plead a treacherous memory? No doubt he might easily forget a thing which he had read. But, unfortunately for him, he professed to remember what he had not read. . . . One thing, at least, is certain-that no assertion of Mr. MacColl can be safely trusted until it has been carefully verified. I suppose he knows some way of reconciling his conscience to these breaches of morality.* Possibly on the principle that the means are justified by the end. For this is an opinion which has so much authority, ancient and modern, in its favour, that it may well be an article of the Church of Mr. MacColl, though it has not yet become a doctrine of the Church of England.

"I feel that I am unequally matched with such an opponent. He enjoys two advantages which have been withheld from me. One is the readiness of invention, . . . the other is that pachydermatous nature, of which he is so proud, which shields him from the pain thin-skinned people feel in the shame of detection. If he goes on as he has begun, he will, no doubt, when he next appears at a meeting of the English Church Union, be rewarded by an ovation proportioned to the sacrifices he will have made to the cause. But I think I can employ myself more profitably than in following his track to sweep away the stones and mud with which he bestrews it. "In the ignominious position which he has made for himself I now leave him."

J. H. ROUND.

* Doubtless by confession and by absolution for his service in so good a cause, such as the pupils of the Jesuits may have been given for their work in the Dreyfus case.

NATURE IN THE LAST LATIN POETS.

THE

HE century of the first Christian and the last pagan Cæsar witnessed a truce of God between the old order and the new-a truce not always kept. The masses were loth to keep it, but among educated men the principle of tolerance found wider acceptance than in any other time till our own. Congenial spirits joined in intellectual marriage, at whichever altar they worshipped. Equality was more advanced socially than politically, reversing what usually happens, for in general people persuade themselves to give their religious opponents the right to exist long before they are ready to ask them to dinner. Such a period favoured the cultivation of poetry, though not the growth of a great poetry; it produced elaboration rather than strength, scholarship rather than originality, art for art's sake rather than art as the irrepressible expression of a nation's manhood. The one great

piece of literature that bears the date of the fourth century was not poetry but prose: it is the "Confessions" of St. Augustine. The poets of that period were impelled to write about Nature, a neutral theme on which they could all alike write, but what they wrote is often spoilt by conceit or formalism. Sometimes, however, through the husk of conventionality we catch glimpses of the great undiscovered treasure of modern sentiment. The poet-professor of Bordeaux, Ausonius, describes scenery, in his charming poem on the river Moselle, very much as a modern writer with a gift for wordpainting would describe it. As we read his enthusiastic verses we actually breathe the elastic air and see the swift rushing waters coursing before us. We pass the noble cities, the smiling villas, the woods and richly cultivated slopes; we hear the gay throng of vine-dressers calling to one another, and the river boatmen singing mocking songs to the country folk who return home along the banks in the late

evening. The river abounded in fish, whose pretty sports were described affectionately by Ausonius-not, alas! without a cannibalish relish, for he was very fond of good living. Where can we find a more vivid word-picture of the magical effects of reflection than in the following passage?

"The blue depths give back the river's wooded banks, the waters seem full of leaves and the stream planted with vines. When the evening star lengthens out the shadows and casts the verdant hillside on the breast of the Moselle, what glowing hues tinge the quivering surface! All the slopes swim in the ripples which hold them suspended; the vine wreaths-that are not there-tremble, the grapes swell beneath the crystal water. The deluded boatman counts the number of the young shoots as he rows his bark skiff among the little waves, to and fro across the outline of the reflections where the image of the hill loses itself in the water.”

Ausonius might have said, with a character in Balzac's "Médecin de Campagne," "Ah, monsieur, la vie en plein air, les beautés du ciel et de la terre, s'accordent si bien avec la perfection et les délices de l'âme!" His tenderest thoughts are linked with memories of natural things. When Paulinus does not answer his letters, he reminds him that all nature is responsive: the hedge rustles as the bees despoil it, the reeds murmur sweetly to the stream, the tremulous tresses of the pines hold converse with the winds. It was a pathetic friendship, this, between two men of irreconcilable temperaments: the lighthearted Hedonist and the god-intoxicated Saint. Both were of the same religion, for it seems unnecessary to have ever doubted that Ausonius was nominally a Christian, though he had far less in common with Paulinus than with a pagan man of the world such as Symmachus. He loved him, but the saying that to love is to understand is often tragically wrong. Ausonius did not understand his former pupil even well enough to gauge the abyss there was between them. He looked on his abandonment of the world, in which no career would have been closed to him, as an inexplicable caprice. Paulinus refrained from argument: he knew that what men are they are had he not given in to something very like the sacrifice of a pig to console the peasants for the loss of their ancient rites? He did not rebuke Ausonius for his frivolity, but after a time he wrote no more. In what seems to have been his final letter, without any reference to a last farewell he takes leave of his old friend and master with the promise that he will cherish him even after death, "for if the soul, surviving the dissolution of our mortal coil, is sustained by its heavenly origin, it must keep its sentiments and affections even as it keeps its existence: it can no more forget than die, but must live and remember for ever." A beautiful saying, worthy of the Saint who was one day to be followed to the grave by all the Jews, pagans, and