The Festival Psalter; being the Proper Psalms for the Four Great Feasts, adapted to the Gregorian Tones. By the Rev. T. F. RAVENSHAW, M.A., Rector of Pewsey, Wilts, and W. S. ROCKSTRO, Esq., late Honorary Organist of S. Mary Church, Devon. Masters. THIS is the most sensible treatment of the old Church Tones that we I have met with. It does not affect any special purism, as does Mr. Chope; but starting on the basis of Mr. Helmore's labours, the Editors have introduced some variations from foreign sources, and sometimes use several endings in the same Psalm. We are surprised that they have not done the same for the Canticles, which, more than the Psalms, need a richer and more ornate treatment.

Simple Lessons (Masters) contain much useful and sound instruction on Catholic Truth, and we recommend the book. We think, however, that it would be useful only to the uneducated teacher. It is a gratuitous task to attempt to supply simple language suitable to the ideas of the educated, if their own intellect does not suggest it. The book would be useful in the hands of the ignorant themselves, we should say ; and we should be glad to see the plan to extend these lessons to other portions of the Faith carried out. For the educated class of teachers, referred to above, we consider the Questions and Answers Illustrative of the Church Catechism supply all that is needed.

Mr. ARTHUR BAKER'S Three Sermons (Mozleys,)_ form an opportune publication, both as belonging to the season of Lent, and because they treat of the subject of Temptation by the Evil One, concerning whose operations some at the present day profess to be sceptical. They are written, it is almost superfluous to remark, in a thoughtful and religious spirit. To say, however, that the FATHER is liable to temptation, seems to us to be using the word equivocally. The third Sermon on the perversions of Scripture is especially good.

If any one desires ten minutes' amusement, we recommend them to procure Correspondence on the Question, whether Dr. Newman teaches that Truth is no Virtue. (Longman.) It arose out of a statement made in "Macmillan's Magazine," by an anonymous writer, who turned out to be Mr. Kingsley. Mr. Kingsley is exceedingly polite in his share of the correspondence; but Dr. Newman, as is natural, is not satisfied with politeness, and sums up the dispute in a way which we should think must make his correspondent's ears tingle.

Messrs. Mozley with the present year have commenced a new maga zine, bearing the very inadequate title of Events of the Month. The detailing of current events is undoubtedly a considerable feature in the magazine; but tales and miscellaneous papers are also inserted and give interest and variety to the publication.

Mr. VOGAN'S Use of the Burial Service as required by Law (Bell and Daldy,) touches the question on its legal side; but we doubt if it is law that will altogether hold in the courts. It is worth reading,

however.

Mr. MONRO has written another nice little story, Pascal the Pilgrim (Masters,) which he has thrown into the form of a dialogue, on the model, he tells us, of that admirable book, "The Divine Master."

DR. TODD'S LIFE OF S. PATRICK.

S. Patrick, Apostle of Ireland. A Memoir of his Life and Mission, with an Introductory Dissertation on some early usages of the Church in Ireland, and its historical position from the establishment of the English Colony to the present day. By JAMES HENTHORN TODD, D.D. Dublin: Hodges and Smith. 1864.

THE history of the Early Church in Ireland, by which we mean the Church prior to the tenth century, presents some features of especial interest to the Church historian. During a period when darkness had fallen upon other Churches, it was a centre of light and learning to Western Europe, and a school in which many of her brightest ornaments were trained. During the tenth and eleventh centuries it manifested an extraordinary amount of missionary energy; and a stream of Celtic missionaries issuing from the remote island of Ireland poured upon the Continent, bringing with them the rude and primitive habits, and the peculiar usages of their native Church, and preaching and founding monasteries as they went, till they filled all France and Germany with their cloisters.

We can hardly now realise to ourselves the extent to which these Irish missionaries influenced the Christianity of the Continent, and occupied its territory with their monastic foundations. Fridolin, Columbanus, Furseus, and Fiacrius, in France; Kilian,1 Rupert, Corbinian, and Pirmin, in Bavaria, founded many Culdee monasteries, and their names are still known and venerated there. In France alone there were-in Franche Comté six of their foundations, in Alsace three, in Lotheringia four, in Champagne five, in Picardy three, in Normandy two, in Bretagne three, in the Isle of France eight, in Burgundy two, and in Switzerland three, all celebrated monasteries, and two, Luxieu and S. Gallen, especially famous. We might greatly extend the list, but we have said enough to show the extraordinary extent to which the missionary enterprise of the Irish monks had penetrated into the Continent.

But not the least curious and interesting feature of the early Irish Church arises from some very marked peculiarities in her constitution, which seemed to distinguish her from all other Churches, and were viewed by her contemporaries with wondering doubt as very great anomalies, but which, though to some degree repellent to the fundamental ideas of the clergy of the Church of the Roman Empire, were not in reality so inconsistent with the principles of the Church's constitution as they appeared to be.

1 On S. Kilian's Day there is still a procession of the peasantry around Wurzburg to the Kreuzberg, the scene of his martyrdom, where they pass the night. VOL. XXVI. APRIL, 1864.

X

For the causes which stamped this peculiar character upon the early Irish Church, both as regards her missionary spirit and her anomalous institutions, we must look to the history of her foundation as a Church; and this is inseparably bound up with legends of her great traditionary founder, S. Patrick. It was therefore with no ordinary satisfaction that we found upon our editorial table a goodly octavo bearing the title which we have prefixed to this notice, and sanctioned by the great name and profound learning of Dr. Todd, of Trinity College, Dublin. The work consists of a critical analysis of the legenda which make up the life of S. Patrick, to which is prefixed an elaborate dissertation upon the peculiarities of the Irish Church, both characterized by the same critical acumen and accurate research which so eminently distinguish Dr. Todd.

But while thus expressing our satisfaction at the appearance of this learned work, we must frankly confess that it is not unmingled with a feeling of disappointment that it is not so complete as we should have expected from Dr. Todd; and that while it commends itself to our reason so far as it goes, it yet falls short of that complete grasp and analysis of the subject which would have satisfied the difficulties of the question, and leaves many a problem unsolved and many a question untouched which fairly come within the compass of his inquiry, and must have been quite familiar to his mind in connection with the history of the great legendary Apostle of Ireland.

Not the least valuable portion of the work is the elaborate introduction, in which Dr. Todd discusses with much learning the chief peculiarities of the early Irish Church. Among these the character of its Episcopacy occupies the chief place. The Irish Church possessed an Episcopacy in the legitimate sense of the term, but it was not a diocesan Episcopacy. She had the three orders of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, and her Bishops alone exercised the Episcopal functions of consecrating, ordaining, and confirming, and as appears from a curious passage in Adamnan's life of S. Columba, were privileged "solus episcopali ritu frangere panem," but they possessed no sees and exercised no diocesan jurisdiction. This appeared to the clergy of the more regularly constituted Churches, a great and unaccountable anomaly. In the Churches founded upon the platform of the Roman Empire, a Bishop exercising episcopal functions, but without jurisdiction over any district, was so alien to their habits and to what existed around them, that it was simply unintelligible. It appeared to them as if the inferior order had power over the superior, and that its Episcopacy could not be genuine: but in theory the separation of the jurisdiction from the functions of the Episcopate was not inconsistent with the original principles which governed the Church's constitution. Although in fact combined, in theory the functions

and the jurisdiction of a Bishop are derived from separate sources, which need not of necessity be always united. The episcopal functions are derived from the power of orders, the jurisdiction from mission; and it is possible, at least in idea, that though the power of orders may be fully possessed, the mission may be wanting. Even in our own Church, intimately connected and blended as it is with a territorial foundation, such a separation is possible. The Church might consecrate a Bishop who was not instituted to any diocese, or a Bishop might resign his diocese and, though then without jurisdiction, might still exercise episcopal functions for a time; and, if again appointed to a diocese, would not require reconsecration. A recent instance of this will recur at once to the minds of our readers where the Bishop of a Northern diocese, in the interval between his resignation of one diocese and his appointment to another, presented no inapt illustration of what the Episcopi Scoti vagantes of the early centuries, so much dreaded by the AngloSaxon and Continental Churches, really were. The existence of this, as it were, personal Episcopate, as contradistinguished from what was diocesan, in the early Irish Church, had already been clearly established and very ably analysed by Dr. Reeves, in his Antiquities of Down and Connor, and by Mr. King in his Introduction to the History of the Bishops of Armagh; and Dr. Todd has now left nothing to be desired in the mass of facts and illustrations which he has brought to bear upon it from all sources.

As to the origin of this peculiarity, and the grounds on which it could be vindicated, he is less distinct. He says (p. 36):

"The Irish Church, it should be remembered, was planted in a heathen land, and for some centuries continued to be surrounded on all sides by a very gross form of heathenism. . . . . The consecration of Bishops without sees was therefore a matter of necessity, nor was it irregular that Bishops should be so consecrated whose duties were essentially missionary; the abundance of the harvest led very naturally to a readiness which later ages have thought laxity in the multiplication of labourers, and every one who was deemed qualified by his piety or learning to spread Christianity among the savage Picts or heathen Saxons of Great Britain, was as a natural consequence deemed qualified to receive episcopal consecration."

This is to put it on a very low ground of temporary necessity, and very insufficiently accounts for the fact; for while it may explain her missionary Bishops sent to foreign countries being appointed to no sees, it leaves untouched the anomalous position of her Bishops at home being vested with no diocesan jurisdiction; for there seems nothing to distinguish Ireland from the German tribes of the Continent similarly situated, and at no very different stage in the progress of society, while the Churches founded there presented no such uniform and vital anomaly.

Dr. Todd touches more nearly upon the rationale of it, when he

hints as one reason why this custom prevailed in Ireland, that "she was never included within the bounds of the Roman Empire," though he is mistaken in the inference which he adds, "and consequently did not receive the decrees of the Eastern and Western Councils summoned under the authority of the Emperors, &c."

Columbanus in the seventh century knew the position of his Church better, and when he was driven to vindicate her peculiarities appealed to these very councils. He had no sooner founded several monasteries in Gaul, than the local Church found herself as it were brought in contact with a Church established by missionaries from a remote western island, of which they hardly knew the existence, a Church keeping Easter on a different computation, with a different tonsure, a monastic clergy, and an anomalous Episcopacy. When attacked on this score, Columbanus in his first letter to Pope Boniface the IVth, appealed to the 2nd Canon of the Council of Constantinople, held in 383, which, after regulating the jurisdiction of the Bishops within the territory of the Roman Empire, adds" that the Churches which are among the barbarians, that is to say, those that are without the Roman Empire, shall be governed according to their ancient customs, because in these countries there is no distinction of dioceses or provinces." The dioceses or provinces here alluded to, are the civil divisions of the Roman Empire; but Columbanus' argument was this: the Irish Church is a Church without the Roman Empire, and we claim, under this canon, a right to be governed according to our ancient customs, and not according to the rule prevailing within the Roman Empire.

The source, however, of this peculiar condition of the Irish Episcopate, lies much deeper, and arose from the very nature of that Church. The Irish Church was a monastic Church in the fullest sense of the term; not merely that she possessed monastic institutions, and that these institutions occupied a wide and prominent position in the Church, but that the entire Church was monastic, and her whole clergy embraced within the fold of the monastic rule. As Bede expresses it, in talking of her offshoot at Lindisfarne: "Omnes Presbyteri diaconi cantores lectores ceterique gradus ecclesiastici monachicam per omnia cum ipso episcopo regulam servent." 1 She required the exercise of episcopal functions within her as much as any other Church, and had the superior order of Bishops according to canonical rule for the purpose; but, just as the tendency of all monasteries within a Church was to obtain exemption from the rule of the diocesan Bishop, and even to have within themselves a resident Bishop for the exercise of episcopal functions in the monastery to whose abbot he was subject as being under the monastic rule, (as Dr. Todd has most conclusively shown,) so when the entire Church was monastic, the

1 Beda in Vit. S. Cuthberti, c. xvi.