but of peace.' But the proposed Oxford addition to Subscription goes directly to abridge that freedom which so many of our best and most temperate divines have claimed and lived upon.

In principle, the introduction of a new Test is a plain innovation upon the doctrine of the Church; and for the first time a recognition of that very straitness which the Puritans, on the one side, and such as Blackburne on the other, sought to impose. It sets up an authority in the University, the Church's minister, apart from, and paramount to, the Church itself.

It invests an official, who may be a layman, with the power of summoning before him any individual, upon any occasion, one even so vague as general suspicion, whether clergyman or layman,* and compels him to sign a document in his, the imposer's sense, without the least security that the imposer is himself orthodox. It proposes for a standard of interpretation the animus imponentis, which must vary every year, according to the accidental constitution of Convocation, or the Hebdomadal Board, or the literature and orthodoxy of a single person, i.e. the Vice-Chancellor.

It seeks to combine, as paris materia, two authorities equally unascertainable; viz. the sense of the imposers (of which we have disposed), and the sense of the compilers, who never were imposers at all: the Articles being framed by the unauthoritative responsibility of Cranmer, &c., to whom we owe no duties whatever, but they were not adopted by the Church till the Convocation of 1562. If, therefore, this compositet sense is to be discovered anywhere it must be, 1. either in the records of that very Convocation of 1571, which passed the famous Canon, cited by the Bishop of Exeter, about the Catholic fathers, at the same time that it enjoined subscription to the Articles; or, 2. in the known opinions and writings of the revisers of the Prayer-book in 1661; beyond whom no Anglican is bound to go, because they are the last Reformers to us; the last compilers, because revisers, of doctrine and discipline to us, and because they, if any, are imposers of the Articles upon us, and the last declaratists of the Church's sense. And for either of these ascertainable standards of interpretation we are called upon to substitute one as vague as it is ensnaring. For all these reasons, and many more might be urged, had we space or time, we earnestly conjure every one of every school

*The omission of the phrase S. ordinibus initiatus must be carefully weighed.

+ It might at first be thought that this compound rule is sanctioned by the statements of the present Bishop of London, in his Charge, 1842; who (p. 14) interprets the Articles, first "by the Church's Liturgy and Homilies, especially the former :" failing this, "by the known, or probable, intention of those who framed" the Articles: but (Appendix, Note A, p. 68), in settling how their intention is to be discovered, his Lordship says, 66 we shall derive assistance from the teaching of the earlier Fathers, by whose statements of all the essential points of Christian doctrine, the fathers of our Reformed Church constantly declared themselves willing to abide." The Bishop's triple standard is the Prayer-book, interpreted by the Reformers, and them by primitive antiquity; the binary rule suggested by the Hebdomadal Board, is the Reformers interpreted by-the Hebdomadal Board!

save that of the bigoted and inconsistent party which sacrifices the peace of the Church to personal pique, and which, on the strength of an accidental majority in October, now thinks to gain the whole government of the University by this new Testto resist with all their might the measure of February 13.

The cup is now about full: it is significant as well as cheering to know on what ground all who wish well, in whatever degree, to that great movement which has forced the Church of England out of apathy and false doctrine, may at length combine. It is to reject a measure which, in principle, has been affirmed by the Regicides and Puritans of the great Rebellion,* as we have shown a measure which is directly opposed to the Declaration of King Charles and Archbishop Laud-a measure which seeks to impose a stringent test, which not one of the great ANGLICAN writers whom we have quoted, the Hammonds and Pearsons, the Bramhalls and Bulls, could possibly have taken—which in its degree undoes, for the Church of England, the work of centuries-repeals in principle all that the persecutions of the Rebellion, and the successive revisions of the Prayer-book have achieved for us; and finally, invests an individual with an instrument of the most grinding and oppressive tyranny to the conscience, which has been heard of since the days of the Solemn League and Covenant and the Westminster Assembly.†

*The ordinance convoking the Westminster Assembly recites as its purpose "the vindicating and clearing of the doctrine of the Church of England from all false aspersions and misconstructions."

We have said nothing of the two previous measures which are to be proposed in Convocation on the 13th of February. As to the passages from Mr. Ward's book which it is proposed to condemn, we are neither called upon nor are we desirous to defend them but remembering who sit in the high places of Oxford and the Church, and what they have said and done about Creeds, and the most living truths of the Faith, to inflict degradation with its ignominious ceremonial on Mr. Ward, is an attempt at oppression, combined with mob-worship, which we are bound to resist: and this the more because it seems that at least one Head is displeased with the measure because it does not go far enough. We leave Dr. Cotton and Mr. Ward to count the steps between degradation and combustion.

At the moment of going to press we have received early copies of a well-timed and well-principled pamphlet from Mr. Gresley, Suggestions on the proposed Statute,' &c. (Burns), in which he very earnestly and seasonably remonstrates against the whole measure-and a serviceable reprint of Mr. Oakeley's 'The Subject of Tract XC. Historically Examined, &c.' (Toovey). From a new Preface we make an extract:

"The sense in which the Articles were propounded, was not a Catholic, nor a Protestant, but a vague, indecisive, and therefore comprehensive, sense; that the Reformers themselves were without any precise doctrinal views of their own upon the points in controversy; that they were consequently the victims, alternately, of extreme Catholic and extreme Protestant influences; that, so far as they had any doctrinal sympathies of their own, they were Protestant rather than Catholic, but that the necessities of their position, as having to provide for the religious pacification of a country partly Catholic, partly Protestant, obliged them to a course (so far as doctrines at issue between the contending parties were concerned) of the strictest neutrality; and that the mode by which they sought to carry out this principle of neutrality, was that of couching their Formulary in language at once sufficiently Protestant in tone to satisfy the Reformers abroad, and sufficiently vague in expression to include the Catholics at home."

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ART. VIII.-1. The Autobiography of Dr. William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Martyr; collected from his Remains. Oxford: J. H. Parker. 1839.

2. Archbishop Laud's Devotions. Oxford: J. H. Parker.

3. Archbishop Laud's Speeches on the Liturgy. Oxford: J. H. Parker.

BEFORE entering on our subject, we will venture a preliminary remark. None of the regular modern lives (we are not speaking, of course, of the Autobiography at the head of our list,) appear to do full justice to Archbishop Laud. We do not mean that they are not eulogistic enough, and defective in favourable intention to him:-by no means. Benevolence in a biographer, however, is not always synonymous with genuineness. What we want to see in a biography is the man himself, and not the biographer's affection for him. Benevolence does really great injustice often in this way, when it least intends it. A friendly portrait is very apt to be a weak one. We are so tender about our hero; we will not let him come out, but keep him in doors like a sickly child. And the more complex and irregular the kind of character, the greater the risk of its suffering in this way. The biographer is too friendly to be bold; he will not confront traits in his hero that do not primâ facie promise well; he avoids rough parts, and goes by the dark corners, instead of going into them, and seeing where they lead him. One set of features preoccupies his field: he is afraid of any irruption. The effect of a favourite trait is threatened to be interfered with by an apparent contrary to it lurking in another part of the character; he stops the rising antagonism from coming to the surface. The consequence is, one weak phenomenon instead of two strong ones,-for the probability is, that the two opposite elements of character would have been positively improved and heightened, instead of being nullified by the antagonism; and that each would have been the better for the opposition of the other. It is hardly paradoxical to say, that a friendly hand is almost as capable of being disadvantageous to a portrait, as a hostile one. The effect of the one touch is favourable but mawkish, of the other malignant but real. We have to go to the enemy for colours which the friend will not give us. And perhaps the joint production of both parties is a more really interesting likeness, after all, to an eye that can embrace and combine them, than the purely and exclusively friendly one.

Laud is regarded too generally in the one light of a zealous champion of forms and ceremonies, an uncompromising advocate of rubrical uniformity. He was certainly this; but he was a

great many other things too: and in the department of character, additions tell more than simply arithmetically, they enlarge, elevate, alter the whole basis of a man. The political department e. g. in Laud, throws depth on the ecclesiastical, and each benefits the other. But the biographer is afraid of the politician. The combination of bishop and politician has a worldly look; and seems to give an advantage to puritans. The politician is accordingly put in the background: the pious upholder of vestments and the Church service is presented to us. The age catches the character, and expresses it in its own way and the stickler for obsolete forms, the obstinate old zealot about trifles, becomes the one popular figure of Laud.

We must pay our tribute, however, to the contemporary historian, to the vivid, amusing, clever Heylyn. Heylyn was one of those persons whom Laud picked up in the course of his administration, (as he did many others), and set to work in the Church cause. He wrote books and pamphlets when Laud wanted them, and supplied the Archbishop with university and clerical information. It was Laud's character to be most goodnatured and familiar with his subordinates-with any who worked under him, and did what he told them; and Heylyn thoroughly enjoyed and relished his good graces. There is an amusing under-stream of self-congratulation throughout his biography, at his participation of the great man's patronage. He seems to have been occasionally told secrets and let behind the scenes; -a matter of great pride to him. He communicates the information, with a kind of sly, invisible smirk in the background, and a nudge under the table to the reader,-to remind him of the Archbishop's cleverness, not forgetting the biographer's. The former would not have been particularly obliged, on one or two occasions, for the candid display of his strategics, and bits of necessary state-craft, in his devoted admirer's pages. Heylyn gives us his own account of his first reception by Laud; and it is very significant of the relationship of the two. The flattering attentions of the Metropolitan and Premier to the poor Oxford scholar, that is to say, a fellow of Magdalen, as Heylyn was, were quite enough to win a person of his temperament; and the courteous arts of the great man, and the pleased sensations of the little man, are equally characteristic.

Being kept to his chamber at the time with lameness, I had,' says Heylyn, both the happiness of being taken into 'his special knowledge of me, and the opportunity of a longer conference than I should otherwise have expected. I went 'to present my service to him, as he was preparing for this journey, and was appointed to attend him the same day sevennight, when I might presume on his return. Coming

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precisely at the time, I heard of his mischance, and that he kept himself to his chamber; but order had been left among his servants, that if I came, he should be made acquainted with 'it; which being done accordingly, I was brought into his 'chamber, where I found him sitting on a chair, with his lame leg resting on a pillow. Commanding that nobody should 6 come and interrupt him till he called for them, he caused me to sit down by him, inquired first into the course of my studies, 'which he well approved of, exhorting me to hold myself in that 'moderate course in which he found me. He fell afterwards to 'discourse of some passages in Oxford in which I was specially 'concerned, and told me thereupon the story of such opposition 'as had been made against him in the University by Archbishop Abbot, and others; and encouraged me not to shrink, if I ⚫ had already, and should hereafter find the like. I was with him 'thus, remotis arbitris, almost two hours. It grew almost 12 of the 'clock, and then he knocked for his servants to come to him. He 'dined that day in his ordinary dining-room, which was the first ' time he had done so since his mishap. He caused me to tarry ' dinner with him, and used me with no small respect; which ' was much noticed by some gentlemen (Elphinstone, one of his Majesty's cupbearers, being one of the company) who dined that day with him. A passage, I confess, not pertinent to my present story, but such as I have good precedent for from Philip de Comines, who telleth us impertinently of the time of his leaving the Duke of Burgundy's service to betake himself to the employments of King Louis XI.',

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Heylyn's biography, however, only gives one side of the Archbishop: it exhibits the shrewd tactician, the active indefatigable man of business, the spirited Church Champion. Heylyn realizes acutely the religious politics, and party aspects of the times: he catches phrases, watchwords, party notes: a cant term, a piece of abuse that he has treasured up, lets you into the whole feeling of the time being, like a newspaper. Laud, the ecclesiastical combatant and schemer, figures in strong colours throughout; but we are not let into the inner and deeper part of his character: the homo interior was not in Heylyn's line. We read through his book and have barely a glimpse of a whole inward sphere of thought and feeling in which Laud's mind was moving all the time. We go to another document for this: the Diary reveals a different man from what the active scene presented; and a fresh and rather opposite field of character appears. Heylyn's portrait has a new colour thrown upon it by the connexion; we look on the stirring features with another eye when we have seen the quiescent ones; the bustle of State and Church politics covers an interior of depth and feeling; the