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A NIGHT-WATCH BY THE SEA.

BY ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

THE Ocean wheels around in circles of low sound,
Around the rocky basement;

And every midnight long, distinct as human song,
I hear it by the casement.

Oh, many many be anear unto the sea,

The waker and the dreamer

While ever ever low, the water measures go

Beneath the moony glimmer.

There watcheth in the house the fisher's widow'd spouse

There prayeth soft the muser

The nurse that came for hire, nods besides the sick man's fire,

Whose eyes grow dark and lose her:

A poet sleepeth calm, with meek brow on his arm,

Though shadow'd by the wreathing;

Two children, mouth to mouth!-- sweetest mouths! the redder both For warmth of mutual breathing!

But the corpse lies all alone, and never, more than stone,

Sigh or motion can be giving,

And to-morrow, all alone, they will leave it 'neath the stone,
When the priest hath bless'd the living.

The fisher's widow'd spouse, she watcheth in the house

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Loving angels seem to say sweet amens to those who pray,
In tones the wave is working-

Nods the nurse to every tone, little thinking how upon

Her charge, the death is winning,

While the sick man, dreamingly, takes the rushing of the sea
For eternity beginning!

And that rushing is bewild'ring the poet and the children

With dream-voices in love measure,

Till the little children stir, like the birds in sunny air,

Made uneasy with a pleasure!

But the corpse lies deaf and still, with its feet toward the hill,

And its ear to the sea-murmur,

Nor, though stormy winds should bring a louder murmuring

Than the present or the former,

Sound or vision will it have,— till the trump outsounds the wave

Where the wormwood star descended*,

And with one foot on the sea, and a lifted hand to Thee,

Thine angel, by the secret of Thine own eternity,

Shall swear that Time is ended!

• Revelations.

THE OXFORD TRACTS.

Tracts for the Times. London: Rivington.

THE changeableness of human opinion is the most obvious of all the lessons which are suggested to us by the records of human affairs. It is a fact written upon the very brow of history. Creed after creed, with its long train of grotesque legend and pompous ritual, has passed for ever from the veneration and remembrance of man. Nor has it fared better with the philosophy of the wise than with the belief of the vulgar. Theories, the highest and most laboured works of the most gifted of God's creatures, seem to us of this age little better than the feverish dreams of sick men. The advance of human intelligence towards its far object, the attainment of truth, seems not unlike the course of that sacred river on whose banks its early efforts were made, streaming slowly on towards the distant sea-waters through countless wrecks and fragments of " temple and tower," the ruins of the religions and the polities of by-gone generations. Yet this great natural law of change yields to him who rightly apprehends it feelings not of melancholy but rather of sober and chastened gladness, for it is a law not of change only, but of progress - progress through and by means of change. For us science has unveiled a portion (slight though it be) of the wondrous mechanism of the material universe; and though mental science may still seem only to slumber or to dream, yet we doubt not that her slumbers are lighter than heretofore, and that she dreams more healthfully. And on the graver questions of religious faith men have learned the wisdom of wrangling less, and slaughtering one another less, and are beginning to content themselves with endeavouring to open and prepare, in all gentleness, the hearts of themselves and their fellow-men for the reception of those influences of truth which are gradually descending upon the world. Thus after all the mutations of man's opinion, the whole realm of thought, the region in which man has his true home and being, is more rich, more glorious, more peaceful than ever-even as the beauty and usefulness of man's physical dwelling-place have grown out of the shocks and changes of ages which no man can number.

Yet, in the way of this most beneficent law the ignorance of man has been at all times busy in raising up obstacles; for it was easy to see the wreck and decay, whilst the principle of reconstruction was working, though most powerfully, yet altogether unseen. Therefore it was a natural desire to seek to repress the tendency to change to "stand on the old ways," and bind society as firmly as might be to those principles which were deemed to be its only strength and security. Of all devices which have been resorted to for this end, the most important, and perhaps the most natural, is that of a church establishment. The very soul of such an institution is the stability of opinion; the very object of its existence is to eternalise one form of that which is essentially mutable. Now, if ever this end could have been attained, here in England ought that success to have been achieved. Articles carefully worded-homilies diffusely explaining those articles-bishops armed with powers of excommunication, suspension, deposition-all this ought to have been enough amongst a people so little speculative as this nation of England. Yet enough it has not been; and in no church have more various forms of opinion been maintained within comparatively short periods, or even at one and the same time. The English divines of the period more

closely following the Reformation were men, subtle, searching, and laborious; but their inquiries were confined chiefly to decrees of councils and traditions of fathers; and they propounded their own dogmas, or anathematised those of their antagonists, with the warmth of undoubting conviction. But the ages of faith were fast giving place to the ages of science. Gradually there came over the awakening minds of men a higher reverence than that which had before bound them to Pope or Schoolman -a reverence for human reason they began to perceive that, amidst the infinite babbling and tumult of disputation, the "voiceless lessons" of Nature had been altogether disregarded. Every step made in natural science gave strength to the growing spirit of disregard for ancient authority; and this spirit could not fail to spread itself by degrees even to the inquiries of theology. And thus in the long series of our Anglican divines, no distinction can be more obvious than that which separates the stern, heartfelt, dogmatical theology of Andrews and Hooker, from the cautious, half-sceptical, religious philosophy of Watson and Paley. A corresponding alteration had taken place in the convictions of the great body of the laity. They had watched with no small care the doings of their ecclesiastical guides; they had witnessed much of bitter controversy and fierce persecution, and had seen that a man might be at the same time a subtle theologian and a sorry Christian; they had been assailed by scraps of Latin and Greek, written when or by whom they knew not, until they grew careless of such artillery, and became assured that the moral well-being of a Christian man could not in any way depend on the acceptance of a right or wrong interpretation of some sacred fragment drawn from the crabbed obscurity of Tertullian, or the over-wrought hyperbole of Chrysostom. They felt, not only as a judgment of the understanding but as a dictate of the moral sense, that there was no trustworthiness save only in Scripture. They readily adopted the noble words of Chillingworth,-—

"I see plainly, and with mine own eyes, that there are popes against popes, councils against councils, some fathers against others, the same fathers against themselves, a consent of fathers of one age against a consent of fathers of another age, the church of one age against the church of another age. Traditive interpretations of Scripture are pretended, but there are few or none to be found: no tradition, but only of Scripture, can derive itself from the fountain. In a word, there is no sufficient certainty but of Scripture only for any considering man to build upon."*

Such was in the main the Anglican Protestantism of the last generation. But in our time another great change has begun: a tendency in a directly contrary direction is strongly manifesting itself. A party has arisen, which seeks, by availing itself of the dogmas and the ritual of the church, to lead us back to the spirit and the principles from which we have departed. We are openly called on to renounce the exercise of private judgment, and to listen, with unquestioning reverence, to the teaching of the Catholic and Episcopal Church; and to take our interpretation of Scripture, our notions of Christianity, not from philology and reason, but from the authority of the monks and bishops of the Nicene age.

Our business in this article is simply to exhibit the character, to tell the story, of this phenomenon. We shall, therefore, only advert briefly to two of its apparent causes. The first is the advance and political emancipation of Dissenters. Recent alterations in the laws, by diminishing the privileges of the church and recognising the rights of the Dissenters, have tended to put the two classes of religious teachers more upon a level. It has, therefore, been requisite to find some ground on which the claims of the establishment to a higher, and indeed to an exclusive, authority might be rested. This

Chillingworth's Works, vol. ii. p. 450. London, 1820.

ground is furnished by the doctrines of the Oxford Tracts. But there is a second consideration of greater moment, and more fitted to act upon the minds of men of large and noble views. The Oxford Tracts oftentimes refer to the progress of what is called Rationalism in Germany - the spirit of bold speculation, which, ever since the Protestant churches of Germany escaped from the dogmatism and intolerance which disgraced them during the seventeenth century, has gone steadily and boldly forward searching into all the deep and hidden things of Christian faith, until it has shaken and well nigh cast down the very pillars of orthodoxy. They believe that they can discern the workings of this same principle around them on all sides, and that, if not in due time checked, it will extend or even establish itself through the whole region of European and American Protestantism. It is therefore their main object to strengthen the faith and allegiance of the votaries of the church against the coming of the evil day of aggression and revolt. And most wisely, with this view, they seek, not to supply proof and argument to be used against the proofs and arguments of the adversary-a conflict of which the issue might be doubtful but rather to bind and secure to the church the feelings and affections of her sons. Discarding therefore, as they are driven to do, some considerable portion of the doctrines of the ancient religion of Europe, they retain so much as they can of what that faith contained of the touching, the imposing, and the awful. According to these teachers every one of us may say "It is God's will, under any circumstances, that I should believe what, in the way of Providence, has been put before me to believe. - Doubt is misery and sin, but belief has received Christ's blessing." Indeed it is not a little remarkable, that not many years have passed since Dr. Pusey, the very head of this new school of theologians, published a work upon the causes of Rationalism in Germany, so fair, impartial, and tolerant, as to draw down upon its author the express censure and strong suspicions of the more stern and zealous partisans of his own church. †

We now proceed to exhibit to our readers the principal features of the Oxford system, avoiding, as far as may be, all the dark and mysterious questions of Christian doctrine which lie close upon our path.

It must be premised, that we are not to expect in the Oxford Tracts a full and undisguised avowal of the tenets of their authors; for it is one of their main principles that great caution and reserve are to be exercised in the communication of religious truth - a principle which is discussed and defended in a tract of considerable length ‡, characterised, we must admit, by a spirit of deep and earnest, though mystical, piety. Herein they believe themselves to be following the example of Jesus himself, who, in the midst of an unbelieving generation, prone to attribute his signs and wonders to the agency of evil spirits, would not raise to life again the sleeping maiden until he had first put forth from the chamber all witnesses save his two disciples only; and who resorted to ambiguous speech and dark parable for the purpose of conveying to the few, who amidst the crowd of Pharisees and scoffers were lovers of God and truth, some intimation respecting the nature and destiny of the Gospel. Hence they infer that it is an act of mercy not to propound the truth to those who, if it were clearly set before them, would be sure to reject it. They follow, also, the so-called Disciplina Arcani, which is asserted to have been practised by the primitive church, which, in an age when Pagans did not hesitate to compare the sacramental

Tr. 85. p. 101.

↑ Letter to the Bishop of London by H. J. Rose. London, 1829.

+ Tr. 80.

meal to the supper of Atreus, was content to instruct its younger proselytes in the bare elements of the faith, and reserved the more solemn mysteries for the ears of those alone who were steady and confirmed in their obedience. When the reader is aware that in this tract great doubts are raised respecting the propriety of what are called "the popular modes of extending Christianity- that of bringing churches near to the houses of every body, cheap publications, and national schools," he will be prepared to expect that the doctrines of the Tracts themselves, so far at least as they differ from those commonly received, will be conveyed less by way of direct assertion than of incidental allusion and covert intimation.

The most weighty and affecting of all questions are those which concern the duty and destiny of man. The noblest intellects have ever been busied with attempts at their solution, although the mass of human kind has gone on, it must be confessed, without any great distress on this head, moneyworshipping, meat-and-drink-worshipping, and taking things for granted; troubled it might be occasionally by the stingings of conscience, as by a snake which they had chanced to tread upon, but soon ceasing to remember the smart. Meanwhile, upon the higher order of minds the question has recurred - Does the Almighty sit on high, calm and voiceless above this marvellous mechanism of the world, whilst man wails and laughs, sins and suffers, and then passes away, like a bubble glistening and breaking on a wide and desolate sea? Or has the parent felt for the doubt and sorrow of his children? Has he uttered forth his will, and are there in truth sure and authoritative records of that utterance? From the first lispings of philosophy men strove to find an answer to these inquiries. Their labour was in truth little successful, but we will pass thereon no condemnation, for .even in the dusty tomes which contain their speculations, we see strong and most assuring evidence of the divinity of man.

To still these "obstinate questionings" the Church Catholic, say the divines of Oxford, is gifted from God with sure and certain truth, which she offers, with the authority of Heaven, to the reception of men. The Catholic Episcopal Church in every land is for that land a perpetual depository of religious truth, preserving not only the records of Scripture, but also that apostolical tradition which is the only interpreter of those records. These episcopal churches in all lands are in rank and dignity co-ordinate, and the traditions of all do, to a certain extent, and in all material matters, agree. This agreement of catholic tradition constitutes the sum of catholic truth and unalterable orthodoxy -" the catholic truth written and unwritten."+"The Bible is the record of necessary truth, or of matters of faith, and the Church Catholic's tradition is the interpreter of it." We are further told, that "the liturgy, as coming down from the apostles, is the depository of their complete teaching."§ To this Catholic Church collectively is committed the truth of God: so every one of her ministers is entrusted with some measure of the power of God.

"If Christ || is with his ministers according to his promise, even to the end of the world, so that he that despiseth them despiseth Him, then, though they do no miracles, they are in office as great as Elisha. And if baptism be the cleansing and quickening of the dead soul, to say nothing of the Lord's supper, they do work miracles."

The words, "Receive the Holy Ghost (in the ordination service) had been," says Dr. Pusey ¶, "a manifest impiety, unless the act of ordination

+ Tr. 80. p. 65.

|| Ib. 85. p. 95,

See the theory fully explained in Newman's letter to Dr. Faussett.
Tr. 71. p. 8.
Ib. 38. p. 10.
Letter to Bishop of Oxford, p. 101.

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