for such as are most instructive, and must leave our readers to peruse some of those that are most brilliant and original, for themselves. There is even considerable amusement to be found in these pages; and we have enjoyed a good laugh over many of the quaint incidents of the life of Nicon, as told by the canny Archdeacon: and the anecdotes with which the reforms of Peter the Great are interspersed.

We begin, therefore, with a selection from the first Lecture on "the Characteristics of the Eastern Church; and certainly never was "breath" spent to better purpose upon "dry bones." In other hands it would have been a dull subject indeed; in these, we cannot afford room for enough of it.

"The distinction which has been most frequently remarked is that of the speculative tendency of the Oriental, and the practical character of the Western Church. This distinction is deep-seated in the contrast long ago described by Aristotle between the savage energy and freedom of Europe, and the intellectual repose and apathy of Asia. It naturally finds its point and expression in the theology of the two Churches. Whilst the Western prides itself on the title of the 'Catholic;' the Eastern claims the title of the 'Orthodox.' The East,' says Dean Milman, enacted creeds, the West discipline.' The first decree of an Eastern Council was to determine the relations of the Godhead. The first decree of the Pope of Rome was to interdict the marriage of the clergy. All the first founders of theology were Easterns. Till the time of Augustine, no eminent divine had arisen in the West; till the time of Gregory the Great, none had filled the Papal chair. The doctrine of Athanasius was received, not originated, by Rome. The great Italian Council of Ariminum lapsed into Arianism by an oversight. The Italian language was inadequate to express the minute shades of meaning for which the Greek is admirably fitted. Of the two creeds peculiar to the Latin Church, the earlier, that called the Apostles,' is characterised by its simplicity and its freedom from dogmatic assertions; the latter, that called the Athanasian, as its name confesses, is an endeavour to imitate the Greek theology, and by the evident strain of its sentences, reveals the ineffectual labour of the Latin phrases, persona' and substantia,' to represent the correlative, but hardly corresponding words by which the Greeks, with a natural facility, expressed the hypostatic union.'......

"The Athanasian Controversy of Constantinople and Alexandria, is, strictly speaking, theological; unlike the Pelagian, or the Lutheran, controversies, it relates not to man, but to God.

"This fundamental contrast naturally widened into other cognate differences. The Western theology is essentially logical in form, and based on law. The Eastern is rhetorical in form, and based on philosophy. The Latin divine succeeded to the Roman advocate. The Oriental divine succeeded to the Grecian sophist. logical and legal elements in the West, have grown up all that is Out of the most peculiar in the scholastic theology of the middle ages, the Calvinistic theology of the Reformation. To one or both of these causes of difference may be reduced many of the divergences which the theological student will trace in regard to dogmatic statements, or to interpretations of Scripture, between Tertullian and Origen, between Prosper and Cassian, between Augustine and Chrysostom, between Thomas Aquinas and John Damascenus....

A single instance illustrates the Eastern tendency to a high theological view of the doctrine of the Trinity, combined with an absence of any precision of statement in regard to mediation or redemption. In the Western liturgies direct addresses to Christ are exceptions. In the East they are the rule. In the West, even in Unitarian liturgies, it is deemed almost essential that every prayer should be closed, through Jesus Christ.' In the East, such a close is rarely, if ever, found. One vestige of this Oriental practice is retained by the English Prayer-book in the collect attributed to S. Chrysostom."-pp. 24 29.

Under the head of monasticism, he continues:

"It is this Oriental seclusion which, whether from character, or climate, or contagion, has to the Christian world been far more forcibly represented in the Oriental than in the Latin Church. The solitary and contemplative devotion of the Eastern monks, whether in Egypt or Greece, though broken by the manual labour necessary for their subsistence, has been very slightly modified either by literary or agricultural activity....

As a general rule, there has arisen in the East no society like the Benedictines, held in honour wherever literature or civilization has spread; no charitable orders, like the Sisters of Mercy, which carry light and peace into the darkest haunts of suffering humanity. Active life is, on the strict Eastern theory, an abuse of the system."-p. 30.

In what follows he advances into the general subject more fully.

Another important difference between the two Churches was one which, though in substance the same, may be expressed in various forms. The Eastern Church was, like the East, stationary and inmutable; the Western, like the West, progressive and flexible. This distinction is the more remarkable, because at certain periods of their course, there can be no doubt that the civilization of the

Eastern Church was far higher than the Western. No one can read the account of the capture of Constantinople by the crusaders of the thirteenth century, without perceiving that it is the occupation of a refined and civilized capital by a horde of comparative barbarians. The arrival of the Greek scholars in Europe in the fifteenth century, was the signal for the most progressive step that Western theology has ever made. And in earlier ages, whilst it might still be thought that Rome, not Constantinople, was the natural refuge of the arts of the ancient classical world, the literature of the Church was almost entirely confined to the Byzantine hemisphere..........

"The straws of custom show which way the spirit of an institution blows. The primitive posture of standing in prayer still retains its ground in the East. Organs and musical instruments have never penetrated into its worship. Jewish ordinances still keep their hold on Abyssinia. Even the schism which convulsed the Russian Church nearly at the same time that Latin Christendom was rent by the German Reformation, was not a forward, but a retrograde movement, a protest, not against abuses, but against innovation. The calendars of the Churches show the eagerness with which, whilst the one, at least till a recent period, placed herself at the head of European civilization, the other still studiously lags behind it. The new style,' which the world owes to the enlightened activity of Pope Gregory XIII., after having with difficulty overcome the Protestant scruples of Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland, and last of all, (with shame be it said), of England and Sweden, has never been able to penetrate into the wide dominions of the old Byzantine and the modern Russian empires, which still hold to the Greek calendar, eleven days behind the rest of the civilized world.”—pp. 31-3.

Proceeding to the sacraments, he says:

"The Latin doctrine, on this subject, is by Protestants so frequently regarded as the highest pitch of superstition-by Roman Catholics as the highest pitch of reverence of which the subject is capable that it may be instructive to both to see the contrast between the freedom and reasonableness of the sacramental doctrine as held by the highest Roman doctors, compared with the stiff, the magical, the antiquarian character of the same doctrine as represented in the East."

"There can be no question that the original form of baptism, the very meaning of the word, was complete immersion in the deep baptismal waters; and that, for at least four centuries, any other form was either unknown, or regarded as an exceptional, almost a monstrous case. To this form the Eastern Church still rigidly adheres, and the most illustrious aud venerable portion of it, that

of the Byzantine Empire, absolutely repudiates and ignores any other mode of administration as essentially invalid. The Latin Church, on the other hand, doubtless in deference to the requirements of a northern climate, to the change of manners, to the couvenience of custom, has wholly altered the mode, preferring, as it would fairly say, mercy to sacrifice; and (with the two exceptions of the cathedral of Milan, and the sect of the Baptists), a few drops of water are now the Western substitute for the three-fold plunge into the rushing rivers, or the wide baptisteries of the East."

Of confirmation.

"In the first age of the Church it was customary for the Apostles to lay their hands on the heads of the newly baptized converts, that they might receive the gifts of the Spirit.' but the custom of laying on of hands remained. It remained, and The 'gifts' vanished, was continued, and so in the Greek Church is still continued, at the baptism of children as of adults. Confirmation is, with them, simultaneous with the act of the baptismal immersion. But, the Latin Church, whilst it adopted or retained the practice of admitting infants to baptism, soon set itself to remedy the obvious defect arising from their unconscious age, by separating, and postponing, and giving a new life and meaning to the rite of confirmation. two ceremonies, which, in the Eastern Church are indissolubly confounded, are now, throughout Western Christendom, by a salutary innovation, each made to minister to the edification of the individual, and completion of the whole baptismal ordinance."

Of Extreme Unction.

The

"In like manner the East retained, and still retains, the apostolical practice mentioned by S. James-for the sick to call in the elders of the Church, to anoint him with oil, and pray over him, that he may recover.......

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And thus the

"But the Latin Church, seeing that the special object for which the ceremony was first instituted, the recovery of the sick, had long ceased to be effected, determined to change its form, that it still might be preserved as an instructive symbol. 'anointing with oil' of the first century, and of the Oriental Church, has become, with the Latins, the last, the Extreme Unction of the dying man, a ceremony, doubtless, to our notions, useless, perhaps superstitious, but on the whole more reasonable than the mere perpetuation of a shadow, when the substance is departed."-pp. 33 5. He now takes a wider, and still more interesting range. There is yet another more general subject, on which the widest difference, involving the same principle, exists between the two communious, namely, the whole relation of art to religious worship.

Let any one enter an Oriental church, and he will at once be struck by the contrast which the architecture, the paintings, the very aspect of the ceremonial, present to the churches of the West. Often, indeed, this may arise from the poverty or oppression under which most Christian communities labour whose lot has been cast in the Ottoman empire; but, often the altars may blaze with gold, the dresses of the priest stiffen with the richest silks of Brousa, yet the contrast remains. The difference lies in the fact, that art, as such, has no place in the worship or in the edifice. There is no aiming at effect, no dim religious light, no beauty of form or colour, beyond what is produced by the mere display of gorgeous and barbaric pomp. Yet it would be a great mistake to infer from this absence of art, indeed, no one who has never seen it could infer, that this involves a more decided absence of form and of ceremonial. The mystical gestures, the awe which surrounds the sacerdotal functions, the long repetitions, the severance of the sound from the sense, of the mind from the act, both in priest and people, are not less, but more remarkable than in the Churches of the West. The traveller, who finds himself in the interior of the old cathedral of Malta, after having been accustomed for a few weeks or months to the ritual of the convents and churches of the Levant, experiences almost the same emotion as when he passes again from the services of the Roman Catholic, to those of the reformed Churches."pp. 36.7.

This is extremely well put, and we can attest the justice of it by personal experience. The least travelled Protestant would not find half the difficulty in really following a High Mass abroad, that we did in only attempting to follow a Greek service. But strongly recommending the perusal of the whole Lecture, though not necessarily endorsing it all, we must bring these citations to a close.

"The variety, the stir, the life, the turmoil, the drive,' as our American brethren would call it, is, in every western Church, contrasted with the immobility, the repose, the inaction of Greece, of Syria, and of Russia. It is instructive for the stanch adherents of the Reformation to feel that the Latin Church, which we have been accustomed to regard as our chief antagonist, has, after all, the same elements of Western life and civilization, as those of which we are justly proud; that, whatever it be, as compared with England or Germany, it is, as compared with Egypt or Syria, enlightened, progressive, in one word, Protestant. It is instructive for the opponents of the Reformation to see that in the Eastern section of the Christian Church, vast as it is, the whole Western Church, Latin and German, Papal and Lutheran, is often regarde l as essentially one; that the first concessions to reason and freedom, which involve by necessity all the subsequent stages, were made long