Church will be agitated ere long by ultra-advocates of two classes-the one insisting too pertinaciously on precision in ritual ceremonies; the other, displaying a lax observance, amounting, in the indiscreet, to disrespect and contumely, exceedingly to be deprecated. The tenets of F. are, I conceive the juste milieu; and the calm authority of opinions such as his, will maintain our holy Mother's equilibrium, until her querulous children shall cease from troubling." Many there are who prophecy" Woe! woe!" some in timid alarm -in envious gratulation others—at the prospective issue of these dissensions; and an old friend-a kind of brother in my youth, alack! a weary distance to look back upon-would have made me melancholy a few days ago, if gloomy predictions from a venerable prophet could have prevailed over anticipations more sanguine. I wish you to understand the complexion of that virtue which F. attributes to the extraneous circumstance of antiquity and of hereditary sonship. He would urge his flock to scrutinise the intrinsic strength and moral grandeur of the Ark of our Faith -to mark well her bulwarks; and is content that by her own merits she stand or fall. You shall not -wafted in a tiny boat, on sunny ripples in Spring, around a noble bark motionless as a structure built

up in stateliness and beauty through the pellucid sea -I say you shall not in a petit shallop contemplate the Flower of your country's fleet with a more complacent assurance of security and overpowering sense of majesty, than when on the current of that Charmer's oratory you " go round about and tell the towers" of Christian-England's Ark. Then, after demonstrating her superior construction to that of the surrounding small-craft, and convincing you of her surpassing sailing qualities by reference to many a remembered contest and truthful record-then will he press her upon our affections by energetic arguments ab extrâ.-"Our fathers," says he, "our FATHERS reared this Ark, despite of terrors—never be their holy heroism forgotten!—and having launched it on the tide of Time, they committed themselves to its guardianship; and generations have since been borne in it to the haven where they would be. And in our voyage, shall we hesitate to embark in that imperishable vessel which has survived the wreck of ages and which shall survive? From the cradle to the grave we are on the stormy sea;' but may we not well exult, that in trusting the treasure we carry with us to the keeping of the Ancient Mariner, we are able to confide in our Pilot? And shall we, then,

H

look indifferently on, while the foes of the ship we sail in are attempting to dismast the stately fabric which they cannot overwhelm ?"

C.-You make me anxious to hear your clerical friend: his sentiments appear to be in strict accordance with what I recognise as the theory of legitimate churchmanship—the love of our Church primarily as the uncompromising Expositress of Truth; secondarily, because bequeathed to us-like the inestimable Hope of Glory—at the price of anguish and of blood. The wise man preserves with solicitude the costly purchase of a prudent ancestor; and the unlettered poor regard, with religious carefulness, the heir-looms of sires who sleep. The Protestant Church descends to us as a legacy which inherent worth enriches and historic associations sanctify; and Montgomery, in extolling the past chivalrous patriotism of Britons, expresses our estimation of the valiant who reared and defended the nation's best bulwark:

"Their deeds of old renown inspire

Our bosoms with our fathers' fire;

A proud inheritance we claim

In all their sufferings, all their fame."

And now our Church resembles, morally, a luminary in whose radiations are cheering and all-hallowing

influences-influences which can hardly altogether expire while the elements of our present nature constitute man. For, amid the incessant tumult of sectarianism, enlightened by that calm beam which the experienced Instructors and judicious Senators of our age are concerned in shedding upon the intellect of the people-the flickering meteor-light of mere secular intelligence tranquillised and gently coerced by the salutary companion-ray of Religion-enlightened thus, unperverted by sophistry, unmoved by scorn, the heart which values a stedfast anchor for its faith will render its ready tribute of admiration to the fortitude that wrought it; and with the reverence which from a child he is taught to yield to Wisdom, will the Man blend the veneration he instinctively owns to Antiquity. To me it is joyful to perceive, on all sides, a simultaneous endeavour in the clergy to rivet the links which attach the English Churchman to the ancestral altar, by appealing to feelings

"Essential and eternal in the heart;"

an earnest striving to quicken a soul in the cold habit of modern conformity; to strengthen present decrepitude by illustrations of primitive vigour; to fetter us by the permitted rumination-not the unlicensed

vagaries of Fancy, as well as by the stirring representations of Reality; and, by poetic pictures of past attachment,

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Leaving that beautiful which still was se,

And making that which was not, till the shrine
Becomes religion, and the heart runs o'er
With silent worship.

*

*The dead still rule

Our spirits from their urns."

E-If that be the character of your churchmanship Mr. F. is your priestly champion; and in the Ecclesiastical Armoury of Wordsworth might you have found a cartel, in terms entrancing as the strains of Momus' Mother and the Syrens:

"More sweet than odours caught by him who sails Near spicy shores of Araby the blest,

A thousand times more exquisitely sweet

The freight of holy feeling which we meet,

In thoughtful moments wafted by the gales

From fields where good men walk, or bowers wherein they rest."

But I am guilty of a kindred superstition. I remember part of an ex cathedrâ exhortation to fidelity to holy Mother, made by F. during the Voluntary-system struggle, and delivered from the pulpit because "he believed it due from him to warn his people against the craft and malice of designing men, and could not