To be free from all bias, and to begin his review of sects in that temper, he must begin by being an infidel. Vainly a man endeavours to reserve in a state of neutrality any preconceptions that he may have formed for himself, or prepossessions that he may have inherited from "mamma;" he cannot do it any more than he can dismiss his own shadow. Every man that lives, has (or has had) a mamma, who has made it impossible for him to be neutral in religious beliefs. And it is strange to contemplate the weakness of strong minds in fancying that they can. Calvin, whilst amiably engaged in hunting Servetus to death, and writing daily letters to his friends, in which he expresses his hope that the executive power would not think of burning the poor man, since really justice would be quite satisfied by cutting his head off, meets with some correspondents who conceive (idiots that they were!) even that little amputation not absolutely indispensable. But Calvin soon settles their scruples. You don't perceive, he tells them, what this man has been about. When a writer attacks Popery, it's very wrong in the Papists to cut his head off; and why? Because he has tions, he will say, do not entirely exclude each other as they ought to do. The class calling itself Evangelical, for instance, may also be Calvinistic; the Newmanite is not, therefore, anti-Romish. True, says Phil.; I am quite aware of it. But to be aware of an objection is not to answer it. The fact seems to be, that the actual combinations of life, not conforming to the truth of abstractions, compel us to seeming breaches of logic. It would be right practically to distinguish the Radical from the Whig; and yet it might shock Duns or Lombardus, the magister sententiarum, when he came to understand that partially the principles of Radicals and Whigs coincide. But, for all that, the logic which distinguishes them is right; and the apparent error must be sought in the fact, that all cases (political or religious) being cases of life, are concretes, which never conform to the exquisite truth of abstractions. Practically, the Radical is opposed to the Whig, though casually the two are continually in conjunction; for, as acting partisans, they work from different centres, and finally, for different results.

only been attacking error. But here lies the difference in this case; Servetus had been attacking the TRUTH. Do you see the distinction, my friends? Consider it, and I am sure you will be sensible that this quite alters the case. It is shocking, it is perfectly ridiculous, that the Bishop of Rome should touch a hair of any man's head for contradicting him; and why? Because, do you see, he is wrong. On the other hand, it is evidently agreeable to philosophy, that I, John Calvin, should shave off the hair, and, indeed, the head itself (as I heartily hope* will be done in this present case), of any man presumptuous enough

*The reader may imagine that, in thus abstracting Calvin's epistolary sentiments, I am a little improving them. Certainly they would bear improvement, but that is not my business. What the reader sees here is but the result of bringing scattered passages into closer juxtaposition, whilst, as to the strongest (viz., the most sanguinary) sentiments here ascribed to him, it will be a sufficient evidence of my fidelity to the literal truth, if I cite three separate sentences. Writing to Farrel, he says, "Spero capitale saltem fore judicium." Sentence of the court, he hopes, will, at any rate, reach the life of Servetus. Die he must, and die he shall. But why should he die a cruel death? "Pœnæ vero atrocitatem remitti cupio." To the same purpose, when writing to Sultzer, he expresses his satisfaction in being able to assure him that a principal civic officer of Geneva was, in this case, entirely upright, and animated by the most virtuous sentiments. Indeed! what an interesting character! and in what way now might this good man show this beautiful tenderness of conscience? Why, by a fixed resolve that Servetus should not in any case escape the catastrophe which I, John Calvin, am longing for ("ut saltem exitum, quem optamus, non fugiat "). Finally, writing to the same Sultzer, he remarks that-when we see the Papists such avenging champions of their own superstitious fables as not to falter in shedding innocent blood, "pudeat Christianos magistratus [as if the Roman Catholic magistrates were not Christians] in tuendâ certá veritate nihil prorsus habere animi”—“Christian magistrates ought to be ashamed of themselves for manifesting no energy at all in the vindication of truth undeniable;" yet really, since these magistrates had at that time the full design, which design not many days after they executed, of maintaining truth by fire and faggot, one does not see the call upon them for blushes so very deep as Calvin requires. Hands so crimson with blood might compensate the absence of crimson cheeks.

to contradict me; but then, why? For a reason that makes all the difference in the world, and which, one would think, idiocy itself could not overlook-viz., that I, John Calvin, am right—right through three degrees of comparisonright, righter, or more right, rightest, or most right.

The self-sufficingness of the Bible, and the right of private judgment—here, then, are the two great characters in which Protestantism commences; these are the bulwarks behind which it intrenches itself against Rome. And it is remarkable that these two great preliminary laws, which soon diverge into fields so different, at the first are virtually one and the same law. The refusal of a Delphic oracle at Rome alien to the Bible, extrinsic to the Bible, and claiming the sole interpretation of the Bible; the refusal of an oracle that reduced the Bible to a hollow mask, underneath which fraudulently introducing itself any earthly voice could mimic a heavenly voice, was in effect to refuse the coercion of this false oracle over each man's conscientious judgment; to make the Bible independent of the Pope, was to make man independent of all religious controllers. The self-sufficingness of Scripture, its independency of any external interpreter, passed in one moment into the other great Protestant doctrine of Toleration. It was but the same triumphal monument under a new angle of sight, the golden and silver faces of the same heraldic shield. The very same act which denies the right of interpretation to a mysterious Papal phoenix, renewed from generation to generation, having the antiquity and the incomprehensible omniscience of the Simorg, that ancient bird in Southey.

"The Simorg:"-If the reader has not ma le the acquaintance of tha mysterious bird, eldest of created things, it is time he should. The Simorg would help him out of all his troubles, if the reader could And him at home. Les him onault Southey's "Thaiz

transferred this right of mere necessity to the individuals of the whole human race. For where else could it have been lodged? Any attempt in any other direction was but to restore the Papal power in a new impersonation. Every man, therefore, suddenly obtained the right of interpreting the Bible for himself. But the word "right" obtained a new sense. Every man has the right, protected by the Queen's Bench, of publishing an unlimited number of metaphysical systems; and, under favour of the same indulgent Bench, we all enjoy the unlimited right of laughing at him. But not the whole race of man has a right to coerce, in the exercise of his intellectual rights, the humblest of individuals. The rights of men are thus unspeakbly elevated; for, being now freed from all anxiety, being sacred as merely legal rights, they suddenly rise into a new mode of responsibility as intellectual rights. As a Protestant, every mature man, the very humblest and poorest, has the same dignified right over his own opinions and profession of faith that he has over his own hearth. But his hearth can rarely be abused; whereas his religious system, being a vast kingdom, opening by immeasurable gates upon worlds of light and worlds of darkness, now brings him within a new amenability-called upon to answer new impeachments, and to seek for new assistances. Formerly another was answerable for his belief; if that were wrong, it was no fault of his. Now he has new rights, but these have burdened him with new obligations. Now he is crowned with the glory and the palms of an intellectual creature, but he is alarmed by the certainty of corresponding struggles. Protestantism it is that has created him into this child and heir of liberty; Protestantism it is that has invested him with these unbounded privileges of private judgment, giving him in one moment the sublime

powers of a Pope within one solitary conscience; but Protestantism it is that has introduced him to the most dreadful of responsibilities.

I repeat that the twin maxims, the columns of Hercules through which Protestantism entered the great sea of human activities, were originally but two aspects of one law: to deny the Papal control over men's conscience being to affirm man's self-control, was, therefore, to affirm man's universal right to toleration, which again implied a corresponding duty of toleration. Under this bi-fronted law, generated by Protestantism, but in its turn regulating Protestantism, Phil. undertakes to develop all the principles that belong to a Protestant church. The seasonableness of such an investigation—its critical application to an evil now spreading like a fever through Europe-he perceives fully, and in the following terms he expresses this percep tion:

"That we stand on the brink of a great theological crisis, that the problem must soon be solved, how far orthodox Christianity is possible for those who are not behind their age in scholarship and science; this is a solemn fact, which may be ignored by the partisans of shortsighted bigotry, but which is felt by all, and confessed by most of those who are capable of appreciating its reality and importance. The deep sybilline vaticinations of Coleridge's philosophical mind, the practical working of Arnold's religious sentimentalism, and the open acknowledgment of many divines who are living examples of the spirit of the age, have all, in different ways, foretold the advent of a Church of the Future."

This is from the preface, p. ix., where the phrase, Church of the Future, points to the Prussian minister's (Bunsen's) Kirche der Zukunft: but in the body of the work, and not far from its close (p. 114), he recurs to this crisis, and more circumstantially.

Phil. embarrasses himself and his readers in this development of Protestant principles. His own view of the task before him requires that he should separate himself