that, with his lordship's commands, he would read it in a moment. The Bishop would give him no command. He told his unjust judge that he had the law of the Church on his side. The Bishop said, "I know you have, but custom is against you;" and revoked his license. This has now become the notorious characteristic of an Anglican Bishop,-the most summary, harsh, and savage treatment of his inferiors, united with the most tame, cowardly, paltry concessions to every popular clamour. After the Bishops, the Evangelical clergy, and the silly tract-distributing women who abet them, are the most contemptible actors in these movements. The facility with which they judge and condemn all men; the open-mouthed admiration with which they accept every morsel of scandal, no matter from what ditch it is raked up, against any of their brethren that have the good sense to disagree with them,-is perfectly monstrous. A woman of ill-fame reports to a female busybody a conversation with a curate, spiced, as whining mendicants know how to spice their tales, to the prurient taste of the female missionary. The elect sister enters it in her notebook, and shows it about with marvellous self-importance to her congenial and truly pious acquaintance. In process of time the story gets into a provincial paper. The incumbent of a sequestered village, having nothing particular to do in his parish, but with a great mission to set the whole world to rights, takes the matter up, and without a single inquiry into the respectability of his informants, without a moment's consideration of the ease with which a conversation of the kind might be misunderstood and misrepresented, without a thought of the "delicacy and difficulty which beset a clergyman whenever he endeavours to excite to repentance the conscience of a hardened and abandoned sinner," without saying a word to the person accused,-he proceeds to calumniate a servant to his master, and at the same time to set himself up as judge, jury, and accuser, to denounce his victim in the public journals, to renew his accusation after it had been quashed, and, even pending the second trial, which his importunity had cajoled from episcopal weakness, to write afresh to the papers, renewing all his calumnies, and prejudging the case that was, fortunately for justice, removed from his hands. Truly we hope that this exhibition of Evangelical charity and fair-play will redound to the benefit of that contemptible system, and draw down such a puff of scorn as will extinguish its rushlight, and leave it " like an unsavoury snuff, whose property is only to offend.” For the public and its faithful jackal the press, whose clamour is the strength of these reverend and right reverend informers, accusers, and unjust judges, we will only say, that the more exhibitions like that at Maidenhead that can be got up, the sooner the people will be disabused, and will hold in its proper estimation the party that now affects to have its hook in their nose and its bridle in their lips. Surely the faithful followers of Tartuffe and Lord Shaftesbury must lose immensely in public estimation by every such revelation. We accept as good omens the "considerable cheering" with which the Maidenhead decision was received, and the utter vexation with which the writer in the Times pronounced the whole thing to be a hoax, and fell foul of the poor curate because, even when he had to deal with a fallen woman, he had remembered that he was a gentleman, and in suggesting questions to her to assist her in self-examination had observed a cautious delicacy and reserve, attempting by hints, rather than by direct accusations, to move a conscience that, after all, might not prove impervious to gentleness and consideration. The curate emphatically denied that in any single question he had any intention of leading to confession; he was merely showing the woman how to perform her acknowledged but neglected duty of examination of conscience. A clergyman of common sense and simple feeling, says the writer in the Times, would have assumed that the woman was what he knew her to be, and would have addressed her accordingly the curate's sin was, that he addressed a loose female like a lady, instead of coming down upon her with the brutal magisterial coarseness prescribed by the writer in the Times; who seems to forget that to treat people as better than they are is the way to shame most minds into virtue, and that the emancipating power of great trusts and high inspirations makes itself felt even in the most degraded souls. Even Nancy Arnold had been impressed by this, to her novel method; and had told a person who went to see her that the curate was just the right kind of gentleman to visit a sick person-much better than his predecessor, whom, however, she liked very much. Perhaps the poor soul was touched, perhaps some of Mary Magdalen's tears might have flowed from her seared eyes; but visiting ladies and Evangelical ministers came o'er like frosts in June and withered all her budding resolutions, and left her as desolate as before and probably much more wicked: a worthy work for hypocrites, who compass sea and land to make one proselyte, only to render him ten times more the child of hell than themselves. After what we have written, it is needless to say that our sympathy is entirely on the side of the poor curates who have been so abominably treated by their Bishops, and of the whole party whom they represent: the restoration of the examination of conscience, for which they are labouring, is a thing absolutely and without drawback for the benefit of religion. Not so their pretended restoration of sacramental confession. But we flatter ourselves they cannot do it; it is alien from the spirit of their communion. They dare not openly preach about it; very few of those who recommend it ever practise it themselves; the Anglican clergy, with their wives and their want of training, are not the kind of men to attract people to open their whole souls to them. If they succeed in getting it up in a few cases, it is only a solemn sham and a half-conscious imposture. Have any of them such perfect faith in their orders as to warrant perfect certainty in conferring absolution? Do the Anglican clergy, in spite of the words said over them at their ordination, believe, or dare to act upon the belief, that they have power to forgive sins? The negative is too notorious to deserve an argument; and we can only pity the sacerdotal puerilities of those who expect to regain what their whole body has deliberately cast away by merely asserting that they have it. However, we would not discourage them: at a considerable sacrifice, they act, perhaps, up to their convictions; and each one of them contributes to effect a change in public opinion from which the Catholic Church reaps the ultimate advantage. Finally, if there is one thing more discouraging than another to him who has the conversion of his country at heart, it is the state of the English poor, whose single idea about religion seems to be, that that is best out of which they can get most. The whole case gone into at Maidenhead reveals the root of this evil. A poor body is looked upon as a prize at an archery meeting, and each section of English religionism proves its prowess by its success in shooting the soul. Is a woman near her confinement? she is visited by as motley a crew as those that visited poor Reding in his lodging; with as many incompatible offers, as many mutually destructive denunciations, as many competitive biddings of canvassers, each anxious for the honour of enrolling her name on their catalogue. It is a regular auction; it is a hunt, a fight; it is "pull devil, pull baker," for the woman's vote and adhesion. She is ignorant and wicked, but she is also acute, and finds that she is worth something, and that her interest is to play off one set of missionaries or visitors against the other; and, as a natural consequence, the only conviction allowed to remain in her breast is, that religion is all hum bug, the hobby of the rich, who have got nothing else to think about; and thus a matter out of which a poor body of any shrewdness may pick a very decent livelihood. Thus the English poor have come to their apparent slavishness in religion, which is at bottom nothing more than the oily hypocrisy of the dishonest tradesman, who cringes only to cheat. The most unintelligible part of the conduct of the Anglican curates of whom we have been speaking is their condescending to take a part in this unmannerly scuffle, and their simplicity in putting themselves and their characters into the power of Nancy Arnolds. They might do all they want to do without running such a risk. A person may be instructed how to examine his conscience in the presence of a third party; and such instruction need never be put into the shape of questions, much less need any direct and personal answer be required. There would be a certain amount of brutality in catching a bed-ridden victim, and forcing a confession out of him, for the Church allows us to confess to whom we like; but Anglican curates seem to insist on their parishioners confessing to their own pastors, whether they like it or not. LONGFELLOW'S NEW POEM. Or SHALL we throw Mr. Longfellow's new volume aside, and have nothing to say to him or his heroes because they are Puritans? Have we, with Sir Andrew Aguecheek, any reason to beat a fellow like a dog if he carries that name? if we had assured ourselves that Puritans were only woven out of the same web as Hudibras and Ralpho, "in whom hypocrisy and nonsense had got the advowson of their conscience," that they were the dryest, most unpoetical creatures that could be, fit enough to drone out a stave of a psalm-tune through the nose, but too sour ever to be fitted into rhymes, except into Butler's contemptuous iambics,would not this rather be a reason why we should open Miles Standish's Courtship, to see how our poet can make supple such rigid materials, or extract honey from such a black congregation of cockroaches? It will be found that Mr. Longfellow's recipe is a very easy one. His Puritans are no more the real Puritans of the seventeenth century than they are Chinese mandarins or Hindoo fakirs: historical truth has sat as lightly on Mr. Longfellow's literary conscience as it has on that of certain other American scribes he is quite content with making his outline agree with an old story; the colours with which he paints are all his own; he neither knows nor cares what manner of men the Puritans really were, what were their principles, their thoughts, their manners; sufficient for him to take in three facts about them, that they were men, men of sword and gun, and men who interlarded their talk with much Bible phraseology. Given a puritan legend, and thus much intuition of puritan nature, and our poet will make out of it a very pretty fancyhistorical sketch, which even the bitterest haters of Puritanism may read without recognising any of that sour crop-eared hypocrisy which is the basis of their ideal. Longfellow's Puritans have in truth very little of the Puritan about them; they are ordinary men and women, dressed up in a few of the stageproperties of Puritanism, and forced to talk a little puritanical language when the author is hard up for any thing more sensible to put into their mouths. They are like children playing at kings and queens; childhood appears through every thing, and the unreality of their acting proves at once that they only know by name the thing which they would represent. So, in spite of their denomination, and in spite of the affected language which sometimes disfigures their talk, the characters of our poet will be found natural enough, moved by the ordinary springs of action, and manifesting their peculiarities not in their manners nor in their deeds, but only in their words. So, with this reservation, let it be assumed that Miles Standish and all the other settlers in the American Plymouth are what they call themselves, Puritans; and then let the assumption be forgotten, and the story read with no such cruel prejudice, and it will not be found either ungenial or uninteresting. Miles Standish is a captain,-a short, broad, iron man, with nut-brown face and russet beard flaked with patches of snow like a hedge in November (not a good simile for a beard); has a friend for his secretary, John Alden, fairhaired, azure-eyed, in the dew of youth: the Captain is boasting of his deeds and his arms, or commenting on the Commentaries of Cæsar, and drawing from each consideration the conclusion, "serve yourself, if you would be well served." John Alden is scribbling many a letter to be sent to England by the ship next day, all filled with the praises of Priscilla,as pretty and natural a young orphan as she could have been even if her name had contained no smack of the prim and the priggish. The Captain has been brooding over the fair damsel; and forgetful of his motto "serve yourself," intrusts the reluctant and protesting John with an embassy of love. |