of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries was a period of as great mental activity as it was of external disturbance. It was a time when history was writing itself in very deep and striking colours: men fought, men plotted for high stakes, and men went to the scaffold for their opinions. Periods of violence have always been periods of deep spirituality. When the world is calm, souls, which ought to be God's only, venture out into the world more freely; they take its calmness for innocence, and think that because it is peaceable it has ceased to be worldly; and the breath of worldliness taints the spirit even of a good man. But when the world's face shows the world's passions, then piety shrinks back into its chamber, as the flower folds its petals up before the rain. Then it becomes more concentrated on God; it grows less inclined to try to make the best of both worlds; and as it more thoroughly divests itself of obstacles and hearkens to the voice of the Guide of the Christian soul, it grows deeper and wider. The troubled ages of early persecution gave us the spirituality of Athanasius, writing in his hiding-place; and the ferocious Paganism of the great cities of the fourth and fifth centuries has left us the holy teachings and practice of the desert. The Rule of S. Benedict was written in a solitude round about which Totila and his Goths were at large. The Pastorals of S. Gregory and his exposition of Ezechiel, were the fruit of meditations stimulated by a fear that the horrors of the world's end were beginning. The great mystical school of S. Victor rose and flourished when Arnold of Brescia and Frederick Barbarossa seemed to be almost about to destroy the indestructible Papacy. It was during the fourteenth century,-the century of Papal banishment which prepared the Great Schism,-that we have the wonderful school of German mystics, with such names as Master Eckhart, Ludolf of Saxony, John Tauler, Blessed Henry Suso, John Ruisbrock,-names of unequal merit and reputation for orthodoxy, but which, taken together, show what a realm of deep spirituality was growing and blossoming in that troubled time. The "Following of Christ," summing up whatever was good, closed with a worthy close the list of the German mystical books. In every page it breathes the aspirations of one who watches a tempest from the window of his cell, and whose heart rises the more ardently to heaven for the sin and the violence of the outside world. And so, at the period when Father Baker went from Abergavenny to S. Justina of Padua, and passed thence to live, first in English country-houses, and then in a convent of Flanders, men and women of interior minds were driven to be all the more inte

rior by the bleak aspect of things without. It was more than an impulse; it was, perhaps, almost a temptation. In no page of Father Baker do we find the zeal for souls, and the heart of controversy, which make Edmund Campion, for instance, such a distinguished figure. He represents those who withdrew from the world; not those who felt impelled to rush into the world's conflicts. He was none the less a perfect Christian and Monk; he died in apostolic labour, of a sickness which only saved him from the gaol and the rope. But, the inclination of his soul was to shrink from the work and noise, and to use his knowledge of sin and trouble only to force his heart to more intimate union with God. His voice through many years, and his pen in more than forty treatises, assisted in kindred spirits the aspirations which ruled his own. His work has a colour about it, as of a work which ignores the world of sins and sorrows. But, it is a great work, for all that. Much confusion is created by talking about "schools " of spirituality. The differences in spiritual training must arise solely from differences in the temperament and vocation of men and women. A writer or a director cannot write or speak for every conceivable case. "Sancta Sophia" is the summary, and the best specimen, of that school of monastic writers, Spanish, Italian, and English-Franciscan and Benedictinewhich directed so many cloistered nuns and so many retiring priests and laymen in the stormy days which were bounded by the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. in England, and typified in the names of S. Pius V. and the fifth Sixtus. Whilst we praise controversialists and preachers we must not underrate the value of Contemplatives. Father Baker eloquently says:

Those inexpressible devotions which they exercise, and in which they tacitly involve the needs of the whole Church, are far more prevalent with God, than the busy endeavours and prayers of ten thousand others. A few such secret and unknown servants of God are the chariots and horsemen, the strength and bulwarks of the kingdom and churches where they live (p. 508).

ART. IV.-ANGLICANISM IN AUSTRALIA.

Advent Conferences. By ARCHBISHOP VAUGHAN. Sydney, N. S. Wales. Flanagan 1876.

A

NGLICANISM is only known in lands where Englishmen congregate. It is as purely English as if heaven were only a remote British colony. It is as inveterately national as if all the Apostles had been born in London in the sixteenth century, and had taught only what Queen Elizabeth permitted them to teach. There was an earlier religion in England, which lasted from the time of King Lucius, who, in the second century, petitioned to be baptized "by command of the Pope," till the year 1534. But Elizabeth did not like it, nor her father either. They both knew it was true, and both died in despair because they had invented a new one. The whole Church of England-Convocation, all the Bishops, and both Universities-declined to accept the new one, and had an unpleasant time in consequence-unpleasant to the flesh, though profitable to the soul. But a majority of contemporary Englishmen, in the colonies as at home, stick to the new one. They renounce their fathers, the first apostles of England, and all the saints who followed them. They renounce with even more contempt the English martyrs of the sixteenth century, who preferred death to Queen Elizabeth's new religion. Yet the martyrs gave persuasive reasons for their choice. They are as impressive now to the soul of a Christian as they were then. Like the words of the Apostles of Jesus Christ, they have lost none of their original force. Archbishop Vaughan, who will tell us presently what Anglicanism is in Australia,-we only anticipate a little in saying that it is exactly what it is in England,-quotes the famous speech of the martyred Bishop Fisher addressed to Convocation, which Henry had commanded to accept and proclaim his spiritual supremacy. It was the answer of unquenchable faith to impudent heresy, of Christian zeal to a hardened apostate, of courage inspired by grace to a sanguinary tyrant. "My lords," said this heir of S. James and S. Stephen, "we are under the King's lash." Were they to crouch under it with abject fear, like a Cranmer, or a Jewel? That was not Bishop Fisher's counsel to his brethren. The spirit of God was upon him, teaching him what he should say. "Yet this argues not," he continued, "that we should, therefore, do that which

will render us both ridiculous and contemptible to all the Christian world, and hissed out of the society of God's Holy Catholic Church. Let us lose all," he went on,"goods, houses, cloisters, and convents," and life itself, rather than consent to this treason. "What is the supremacy of the Church which we are to give unto the king? It is to exercise the supremacy of the Church in chief, which, according to all that ever I have learned, both in the Gospel and through the whole course of divinity, mainly consists in these points: Firstly, in loosing and binding sinners according to that which our Saviour said unto S. Peter, when He ordained him head of the Church, To thee I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Now, my lords, can we say unto the king, To thee I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven? If you say aye, where is your warrant? If you say no, then you have answered yourselves that you cannot put such keys into his hands." The argument seems as peremptory to us as it did to them. "Secondly, the supreme government of the Church consists in feeding Christ's sheep and lambs, according to our Saviour's promise unto Peter, of making him His universal shepherd. Christ gave to Peter unlimited jurisdiction when He said, Feed My lambs; and not only so, but feed those who are the feeders of My lambs,-Feed My sheep? Now, my lords, can any of us say to the king, Pasce oves, feed my lambs"? The question answers itself. God, he continued, has given to His Church some to be apostles, some evangelists, some pastors, some doctors; "so that you must make the king one of these before you can set him one over these. . What then will become of the supremacy? Attendite vobis: Take heed to yourselves, and to the whole flock wherein the Holy Ghost hath placed you Bishops to rule the Church of God, was not said to kings but to bishops." While he reasoned thus calmly, others were already sharpening the axe which was to decapitate him; but that vision did not make the martyr lose the thread of his discourse, because he saw already that other Vision upon which S. Stephen looked, before they beat out his life with stones. "We cannot grant this unto the king," continued Christ's witness, "without renouncing our unity with the See of Rome." For him, about to appear before God, as for S. Jerome, S. Ambrose, S. Boniface, S. Anselm, and all saints, that unity was an ordinary condition of salvation. And in separating from the See of Rome, he added, they would become outlaws from Christendom. "In doing this, we should forsake the first four General Councils. . The Council of Constantinople did acknowledge Pope Damasus to

be their chief, by admitting him to give sentence against the heretics Macedonius and Sabellius. The Council of Ephesus admitted Pope Celestine to be their chief judge by admitting his condemnation of the heretic Nestorius. The Council of Chalcedon admitted Pope Leo to be their chief head; and all General Councils of the world admitted the Pope of Rome only to be the Supreme Head of the Church. And now shall we acknowledge another head? or one head to be in England, and another in Rome? By this argument Herod must have been the head of the church of the Jews; Nero must have been the head of the Church of Christ. The King's majesty is not susceptible of this donation."

The so-called Anglican bishops, as soon as they were created by Elizabeth, eagerly proclaimed the opposite doctrine; but at present we are quoting not Anglican heretics, but Catholic saints and martyrs. "All good Christian emperors," Bishop Fisher proceeded, like David the King, "have ever refused ecclesiastical authority." From Constantine to Theodosius they declared in succession that to judge spiritual causes was no function of theirs, since, as laymen, they were themselves subject to ecclesiastical authority. "And now shall we cause our king to be head of the Church when all good kings have abhorred the very least thought thereof, and so many wicked kings have been plagued for so doing? Truly I think, my lords, they are his best friends who dissuade him from it." S. Paul did not reason more fearlessly before Agrippa, nor the proto-martyr before the Jewish priests. But he had still a word to add. The mad king might plunge himself into perdition, but should he be permitted to drag England down with him into the abyss? "If this thing be, farewell to all unity of Christendom. For, as that holy and blessed martyr S. Cyprian saith, all unity depends upon that Holy See, as upon the authority of S. Peter's successors; for, saith the same holy father, all heresies, sects, and schisms have no other rise but this, that men will not be obedient to the chief Bishop." And then he anticipated the Anglican heresy, not yet invented, that the faith of the Roman See had become corrupt. "For us to shake off our communion with that Church, either we must grant the Church of Rome to be the Church of God, or else a malignant Church. If you answer she is of God, and a Church where Christ is truly taught, and His sacraments rightly administered, how can we forsake, how can we fly from such a Church? Certainly we ought to be with, and not to separate ourselves from, such a one. If we answer that the Church of Rome is not of God, but a malignant Church, then it will follow that we, the inhabitants of