archy with the name of Revolution. Standing between two fires, they are so fearful of falling into either that they dare hardly move. Some help might have been expected from the Protestants, since, although sunk in the wickedness of heresy, they did once display political capacity, and they still contrive to make Christianity respected even by men who reject it as a dogmatic creed; but the act of Saint Bartholomew, and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, so broke the power of the Huguenots that, as the Company of Jesus may proudly boast, the French Protestants are now a powerless sect. Thus has the victory of Catholicism been so complete, that France, the leader of civilisation,' is made up of two nations which hate each other with the hatred which claims the appease ment of extermination; and the sovereignty is tossed, now to one nation, now to another, or again to a military despot; and the path of La Belle France lies from revolution to revolution; and she, the civiliser of nations, threatens to become, like Spain, the prey of pronunciamientos, the prize of uniformed brigands whose murders the Church shall wash away when the brigands shall give her part of their spoil. Thus is France a living plea for Black Bartholomew.

Such is my plea for the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. It was a tremendous theological triumph, justly conceived, if the Latin Church speaks the truth, and magnificently executed.

And for that very reason, of course, it is the most atrocious crime recorded in modern history. It is the seal and the symbol of the creed that God has appointed but one way of salvation, and given that way into the keeping of men who called themselves the Church. It flashes the light of fact on all

the dogmas which speak with the voice of infallibility, and which proclaim, with Thus saith the Lord, that all men must walk in the one way, or perish everlastingly.

It were a poor employment to treat the revealed theology of Archbishop Manning or of Mr. Mackonochie as gravely as we should be bound to weigh even the lightest guesses of Mr. Darwin. We might as profitably bring up again the old arguments of Copernicus. The theology of the High Anglicans and the Papal Church has ceased to be intellectually interesting, save as a collection of the symbols by which the best and the greatest of men once formed the expression of their highest hopes. Nor would it be worth while to make the story of Saint Bartholomew a mere chapter of theological polemics, if the battle lay between one set of dogmas and another. The story is full of moment because it cuts beneath the theological rind of dogmas to the moral pith, and because it proclaims that the last court of theological appeal is neither a Pope nor a book, but the individual conscience. In a confused and half-confessed way, this conviction has been the faith of all who have striven to lift their fellowmen out of the mire of systems. nerved Luther, although he lived too early to cut himself clean away from infallible leading-strings, and although his trust in his own reason betrays itself only by spasmodic spurts of rebellion. It gave force to the polemics of Calvin, notwithstanding the iron grip which he fastens on the letter of the Scripture. It was the inspiration that made Knox the prophet of an his toric people. It lay at the root of the spiritual life which was cast into Christianity by the Quakers, who have given a better picture than all the other sects put together of such moral beauty as lay

It

in the life of early Christendom, and who, as an organised body, are now perishing under the Pagan fascinations of the High Church and the Pauline dialectics of the Low, because they have not been true to the belief that God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. It is the same feeling that lies at the root of the Broad Church protest against dogmas which outrage the conscience by their departures from the commonest tenets of right and wrong. The future of Christianity will be shaped by the principle that churches and books can only be aids to devotion, promptings to piety, or guides to such work as men will profit by; that the last spring of action must be the individual conscience; that each man must be a law unto himself; and that unity must be sought in aim, instead of in assent to incomprehensible propositions. All this is a mere commonplace to men whose thoughts have been shaped by philosophical reflection. But truisms are often the most fertile of truths, and it is well to hold aloft the fact, that the Mount Sinai of the individual conscience must be the last court of theological appeal at a time when a wave of Paganism is sweeping over England side by side with a wave of science; when crowds are casting aside with scorn the name of Protestant, and when they are hastening to offer High Church incense to the gods which our fathers tried to throw down at the inspiration of commonsense, the healthy hatred of cloister sentimentalism, and the manly scorn of lies. It has become fashionable to sneer at Protestantism, and even Liberals sometimes join in the sport. Nor is it difficult to taunt Protestantism with its want of logical consistency, its narrowness, and its acceptance of doctrines

which have led it to make feeble copies of Saint Bartholomew. But, after all, Protestantism was an attempt to speak the truth. It has signified a slow but sure journey towards a rational appeal to the individual brain and conscience. It has signified, therefore, a gradual assent to that truth in word and deed, that habit of fair dealing between man and man, and that ordered sequence of things according to their tested values, which we call by the name of civilisation. A high and uniform level of civilisation cannot exist in the same land with a great and powerful priesthood, any more than a lighted torch can live in hydrogen gas. France will perhaps be the field of experiment in this matter as she has been in so many others. Either France must kill Catholicism, or Catholicism must kill France. It is worth while to forget the philosophical incompleteness of Protestantism and to look at the moral health which it generates, when, driven by those Pagan promptings which recur as certainly as the seasons of the year, crowds are rushing for the solace of devotion to a symbolism and a creed which enfeeble the thinking power and dull the moral sense. There could be no surer sign that the moral fibre of the English people is relaxing, and that they are losing the fearless honesty of instinct which made unlettered burghers and peasants rebel against the Universal Church, when she tried to harden their hearts so that they might believe a lie.

A time there was when that Church was the great moral teacher, and when she could be trusted to sound the noblest of moral notes. She stood thus high because the best brains and hearts of the age lay within her fold, and because her doctrines did but codify the best ideas of right and wrong to which

mankind had groped. That was long ago. We do not now go to Church Congresses, or Convocations, or Ecumenical Councils for clear and high notes of denunciation against such concrete forms of human wickedness as lies and fraud; nor do we go for a trumpet call to the highest duty which we owe to our race. We go chiefly for instruction as to the use of incense, the colour of vestments, the proper shape of incomprehensible dogmas, and aids to overcome Dissent. We have ceased to expect that the priesthood shall rush to the front with jubilations and anathemas when slaves

have to be liberated, or a great unjust war to be stayed. For high moral guidance we now look to those secular teachers whom the sacerdotal churches cast out of the spiritual fold with as much pomp of mute anathema as lay in the comprehensive curses with which the synagogue of Amsterdam cursed Baruch Spinoza in his goings out and comings in. Nor will the Church win back its lost moral power until it shall part with all the theology which drove kings and citizens to do, and popes to bless, the deed of Black Bartholomew.

JAMES MACDONELL.

lish-speaking or any other human nature is now constituted, there is no more delicate or hazardous question to put than that of pedigree. There is no more sensitive human weakness (or strength?) than the vanity of descent. Pride is, I think, the more accurate word. Pride of race, of family, of lineage, of bloodwhat a part it has played in the tragedies of history! No form of government or of society or of religion has ever done it away. Rev. olutions may submerge it for a time, but when they spend themselves, it gradually regains its old ascendency. The Americans of the United States are all the more touchy respecting their origin and social status for repudiating such trifles in the articles of their political faith. There is no more thin-skinned aristocracy than the highest society of the great Republic, and none that betrays so alert an anxiety with respect to the foreign estimation of its sign-marks and credentials.

This leading question-Who are the Americans? receives two answers in England. The one is extremely gratifying to the vanity (or pride) aforementioned, and is therefore well calculated to keep our international social relations in the best of repair; the otheris to a much greater degree aggravating and separating, because it wounds the American sensibilities at their tenderest point.

'With regard to what was once our colony but is now the United States of America '-said an eloquent English statesman on a recent public occasion- not anything has been lost of the masculine character of Englishmen.' No compliment more acceptable to an American than this could be spoken by an Englishman. But it is only in the after-dinner speech that we are congratulated upon having the honour of belonging to the muscular christian branch of the human family. Elsewhere, which comes exasperatingly near being every

where, we are condoled with for having long since lost our pure English' characteristics. Statistics are so manipulated as to confirm our worst apprehensions. Additions and subtractions are paraded to show with what rapidity we are ceasing to be the descendants of our European ancestors and are becoming the descendants of our American predecessors. The climate is named as one of the reasons for this English theory of Anglo-American

extinction.' Aversion for family responsibility, and the disobedience of an explicit Divine command are deplored as other causes of this degeneracy.'

degeneracy.' Your America of 'the old thirteen' feels his 'colonial' blood rise to see that blood subjected to the analytical complacency of his English contemporaries. How is his mettle stirred within him by this question of his identity ! Instead of being congratulated upon his success in supplanting the barbarous tribes of aborigines, with the highest attainment in the way of a race which the world has ever seen, he is deliberately diagnosed as a new and curious species of the genus homo by the chiel among us taking notes.' His dream of being all this century back the admiration of mankind, especially of the English portion of mankind, is suddenly interrupted by the question of his rank in the descending scale of being.

When we do well, our mother country presses us to her bosom and pats us on the back ; when we stumble or go wrong, our mother country shakes us out of her lap and pushes us from her in energetic disdain. When all goes hopefully she takes the credit of our success and calls the world to witness-How like his mother! Chip of the old block! No decay or degeneracy there! When something happens to us, even if it be the breaking_out of an inherited disease-We are no child of hers;