addressed to them by Churchmen on the ground of their inferiority in this field of benevolent activity must certainly cease when Churchmen tell us that if they had to meet the claims which Dissenters have always discharged, they must either withdraw their subscriptions altogether, or seriously curtail their present rate of contribution. We believe better things of them than they do of themselves. It is the natural effect of endowments to make men distrustful of their own capacity. So have Dissenters found it in. their very limited experience, and here it is manifest on the larger scale. It seems to be as hard to depend on two opposite forces as to serve two masters. We can no more trust than we can serve God and mammon, for in proportion as we lean on the one do we lose the power to be derived from the other.

For

The results of the election supply the most instructive commentary on these predictions. Where the Church has been brought nearest to the condition of a voluntary society, and has had to depend most upon the faith and energy of its own members, its power has been greatest. Where its supremacy has been most unquestioned, and its clergy have retained most of the position and authority of the representatives of the nation, its weakness has been most manifest and its failure the most humiliating. The Bishop of Chichester is to be honoured for the manliness with which he acknowledged the lesson of the brilliant and surprising Liberal victories in the counties. They are the sign that the heart of the peasantry has been estranged from the National Church." centuries squire and parson have had that peasantry under their training and control, and the result is that, on the first possible opportunity, they have given unmistakable expression to their distrust of both. It was a clever piece of strategy on the part of the squire, as represented by the Tory leaders, to put the parson in the forefront of the battle. The only cause for surprise is that the latter should have entered into the arrangement with such cordiality. Possibly both of them might have thought that it might serve to disarm the attack of some of its severity. But it has not been so. A grateful people rising to protest against the removal from their midst of the 'educated Christian gentleman,' who had been the ornament and pride of every parish in the land, would have been an impressive spectacle, and one which must have checked the progress of the movement for Disestablishment. But when,

on the contrary, we are told on every side that the extraordinary revolution in the counties is an uprising against the Establishment and its State clergy, every candid man must feel

that the question has entered on an entirely new phase. This alienation of so large a proportion of the peasantry from the Church is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. Why is it? May it not be that the very position which the clergyman has held has prejudiced him in the eyes of his parishioners, and that he would have had more influence over them if he had been less of the public official; that his virtues and his good works have failed to produce their proper effect because he was so much out of living sympathy with the people; in short, that he has suffered for the system which has been so much belauded, for it is that system which has been so emphatically condemned by the peasants of Norfolk and of Devon, of Dorset and of Suffolk.

A more emphatic warning this than that which Lord Grey addressed to the bishops in 1832. In presence of the facts of the situation, the manifesto of Whig patrons of livings, of recreant Liberals, and of plutocrats aspiring to the honours of another place, is of very slight significance. This and the innumerable movements of a like character we have had during the late contest are but the feeble barriers which prejudice and fashion have erected in order to roll back the swelling tide, and it is but for a moment they will avail to check its progress. There is one way, and one way only, in which the friends of the Establishment can avert the dreaded catastrophe. Let them address themselves to the proof that truth and justice are on their side. If they can succeed in convincing impartial judges that the Episcopal Church holds no property which is not its own private possession in the sense in which Dissenters hold their chapels or their manses, and enjoys no privileges which are not equally shared by all Christian Churches, or if, admitting the existence of inequalities, they can prove that they do not contravene the principles of justice or violate the rights of conscience, while, on the other hand, they are productive of a positive advantage to the community, they will win their case. otherwise not.

But

Hitherto there has been a good deal of playing with the subject. Sometimes we are mocked with fair ideals to which there is no corresponding reality. We are asked to maintain a bulwark against sacerdotalism in face of ten thousand facts which show that it is under the shelter of this very bulwar that sacerdotalism has developed a rank luxuriance which has no parallel, or even a distant approach to one, in any of our Free Churches. Or we are told that a Church which is hidebound by an Act of Uniformity, and which requires its clergy

three times in each year to fulminate anathemas against all who do not accept the narrowest and darkest of all creeds, is a witness for catholicity and comprehensiveness. It is time that we were done with these illusions aud dealt with sober facts. We deny the right of the State to suppress sacerdotalism or enforce comprehensiveness; but the suggestion that the Establishment does either the one or the other involves an entire inversion of the facts, which can provoke only indignation or ridicule.

At other times we are threatened with all kinds of dire calamities—as, for example, that (as the Bishop of Rochester puts it) we shall have a 'religious war which will penetrate every home, set class against class and neighbour against neighbour, in a kind of strife which, as history tells us, is wont to be far more bitter than a mere civil dispute.' The Archbishop of Canterbury goes further, and warns us that if the Church be disestablished it will become a compact political force in the nation. Unfortunately for the effect of these predictions they have been realized already. We are in the midst of this warfare, and it certainly is hard to conceive how the clergy could exhibit more political activity than they have put forth during the recent contest. We are not likely to be scared by such prophecies, even if they hinted at more serious calamities. We are engaged in a conflict for principle, and are not to be turned aside from our purpose by anything except a demonstration that the principle is false.

At present the air is full of cries for Church Reform. They are valuable as confessions that the present system is felt to be indefensible by far-seeing Churchmen, who refuse to be imposed upon by specious pretences, or who are unable to blind themselves to the manifest tendencies of the age. Beyond this the value of these movements is not apparent. There are some of the proposals which Nonconformists can regard only with approval, but the question is whether that approval will be shared by the most powerful defenders of the Establishment. The abolition of patronage would be welcomed by all who care for the sanctities of religious life, but is it certain that it would be acceptable to the patrons, say even to the peers who issued the celebrated manifesto? The creation of a legislative body within the Church is a very different matter. The Church cannot be allowed to regain its independence, and yet retain its exclusive privileges. We must not, however, attempt the discussion of these reforms here. We do not believe them practicable, but if they were all carried they would not alter the position of those who con

tend that the State which confers on one Church a privileged position as the Church of the nation, undertakes functions which lie beyond its sphere, and which it cannot attempt to discharge without an injury and insult to religion, a wrong to the consciences of all who dissent from its action, and a breach in the unity of the nation, which is sure to be the parent of untold political and social evil.

J. GUINNESS ROGERS.

ART. VI. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. In Two Volumes. Vol. I. Sampson Low and Co.

utter

THE great civil war that raged in the United States from April, 1861, until April, 1865, brought into world-wide prominence two remarkable men, Lincoln and Grant. The former is a conspicuous instance of the way in which Divine Providence, at the greatest crisis in American history, raised up men specially fitted to lead that nation, through all the conflict of a terrible internecine strife, into safety and lasting peace. Wholly unconventional, separated in many qualities of character and mental habit from the ordinary type of statesman, Lincoln possessed the supreme qualities needed at that epoch in the chief magistrate of the great republic-absolute disinterestedness in the service of his country, and an absence of all personal aims in the discharge of his weighty duties and grave responsibilities. In his own noble words, With malice towards none, with charity towards all,' he set free four millions of slaves and led his nation through a war that was inevitable to a peace which even the vanquished now freely admit to be better than the independence they vainly fought to win. It was not unfitting that such a life, even in the moment of complete victory, should have been crowned by the martyr's death. 'Without doubt,' says General Longstreet, one of the most brilliant generals the Confederate army possessed, in a recently published paper, without doubt the greatest man of rebellion times, the one matchless among forty millions for the peculiar difficulties of the period, was Abraham Lincoln.'

The companion figure the informing spirit of military affairs, as Lincoln was of the civil administration-is that of General Grant. Slowly but steadily, under many adverse

circumstances, but with a certainty that has a touch of destiny about it, the conviction seized upon the public mind of the States fighting for the maintenance of the Union that Grant was the one general who could bring the war to a successful issue. He had brilliant lieutenants, such as Sherman, Sheridan, and Hancock, and some of their deeds during the last year of the war appeared to cast his own performances into the shade. It is only since the din of war has ceased, and its events have been studied with more calmness as years pass on, that it has become evident how largely the utter collapse of the Confederacy was due to Grant's self-reliance, patience, skill in conception, and energy in pressing forward his plans. It is true that the Confederacy at the close of the struggle was utterly worn out, but Grant had brought it to this condition. In June, 1863, many, both in North and South, thought that the re-establishment of Federal authority in Dixie's Land was impossible. But from the capture of Vicksburg until the surrender of Lee, from the moment of Jefferson Davis's seeming triumph until his crushing and irretrievable defeat, Grant planned and directed the constant and contemporaneous blows that subdued the rebellion. This aspect of Grant's character has never been better depicted than in a celebrated letter which Sherman wrote to him on his appointment to the supreme command of all the armies of the United States in March, 1864.

Until you had won Donelson, I confess I was almost cowed by the terrible array of anarchical elements that presented themselves at every point; but that victory admitted a ray of light which I have followed ever since. I believe you are as brave, patriotic, and just as the great prototype, Washington; as unselfish, kind-hearted, and honest as a man should be; but the chief characteristic in your nature is the simple faith in success you have always manifested, which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in his Saviour.

Twenty years after the triumphant close of the Civil War its great military hero has passed away. The frauds of a trusted friend, the troubles that are apt to befall those who embark on the stormy waters of New York finance led Grant to do what nothing else could have accomplished, viz., give the world his own picture of his life and work. And the story of the composition of this book will rank high among the nobler incidents of modern literature.

A few years ago General Grant made a tour round the world. He was welcomed and entertained everywhere with honours usually reserved for royal personages, and these tokens of respect were all the more creditable to Grant inasmuch as