ART. II.-Les Constitutions des Jésuites, avec les Declarations; texte Latin d'après ledition de Prague. Paris: Paulin. 1843.

2. Les Jésuites et l'Université. Par F. Genin, professeur à la Faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg. Paris: Paulin. 1844. 3. De l'Existence et de l'Institut des Jésuites. Par le R. P. de Ravignan, de la Compagnie de Jésus. Paris. 1844.

THE contest between the Clergy and the University in France has elicited from the French press many works of talent and research, in which the claims of the Romish Church have been defended and attacked with an energy commensurate to the hostility of the two great principles for which the priest and the professor are respectively contending. The clergy identify the advocates of the university with what is called Voltairianism: these, on the other hand, retort upon the clergy the charge of Jesuitry and Ultramontanism. Much able writing has marked the progress of the dispute; and, since it cannot be denied that the charge against the clergy is to a great extent true, the republication of Jesuitical works, and the use made in quotation by the university party from the "Constitutiones, compendium theologice moralis ad usum theologiæ canditatorum;" Settler's "Commentary on the Sixth Commandment," and other authorized standards of the society, have told with immense effect. The public have ranged themselves for the most part on the side of the university; and the clever writer, Eugène Sue, taking advantage of the popular feeling, has extracted from the history and present condition of Jesuitism the most powerful elements of attraction for his work, "Le Juif Errant." This work has been proscribed by ecclesiastical authority, and, as might naturally in these days be expected, has been consequently read with increased avidity.

The contest to which we have alluded is not one of limited influence. Its immediate details are, it is true, matter of local interest; but the principles involved in it, and its final issue, claim the attention of all thinking persons. It is one section of the array, which we believe will ultimately convert Christendom into a battle-field, wherein men shall contend for great principles brought into opposition-wherein every class of society shall take its place, and for which each seems to be daily marshalling.

Any one who looks upon the present ecclesiastical condition of the Christian world must be struck with the aspect which

it presents. There is not a land where there is not strife, and that of such a nature as appears to elicit, in every stage which it reaches, some fresh element of hostility, rendering the prospect of a peaceful termination increasingly hopeless. In France, in England, in Ireland, in Germany and Switzerland, even in Italy, the very focus of the absolute principle and strong-hold of Romanism, the same phænomenon is exhibited. The priests are at war with the people, or with their ecclesiastical superiors, and a struggle is going on, remarkable in some instances, though these are exceptions, for the apparent inadequacy of the provoking cause to the magnitude and determination of the forces employed. Thus, for example, in our own land, the clergy and the laity have come into contact in a way at once distressing and profitless. They are at issue upon points which, at first sight, seem by no means commensurate in their importance with the ardour of the contest. The surplice and the offertory; the prayer for the Church militant when there is no communion; the delivery of notices in the Church by the minister instead of the clerk, have become subjects of a controversy, wherein concession on the part of the clergy is regarded as a direct dereliction of principle, and acquiescence on the part of the laity a surrender of Christian rights and liberty! This is the more remarkable, as in very many places throughout the kingdom the surplice has been worn in the pulpit the offertory and the prayer in question have been hitherto used without a remark or fear expressed by the people; and that even in some instances amongst those who, heretofore indifferent in the matter, have suddenly awakened to a newly born indignation and terror of Popery. The cause, however, is not in the fact that conformity to the rubric has been attempted, but in the manner in which the attempt has been made. This has betrayed the existence of principles too nearly allied to the absolutism of the Romish creed to be safe for the welfare of a Protestant community. In the resistance of these principles, the laity have fallen into an opposite error; and whilst the clergy in their claims to obedience have absorbed the Church in the priest, they, on the other hand, have too often forgotten the Head of the Church, in the stand they have made for the preservation of their privileges. Rule and submission, Christian liberty, and the right of protest, have each their true place in the constitution of the Church; but if they be held as claims apart from and in independence of each other, they must come into opposition, and, from the very nature of the case, engender a strife, wherein, at each successive step, the opposing parties are

each removed one degree further from the probability of agreement. This has been the case in a remarkable degree with almost all engaged in the controversy that is shaking the Anglican Church to its very foundation. Truth, as a whole, is composed of many parts, which, in their harmony, make up the beautiful unity of divine revelation regarding men, and give to every one in maintaining them his proper place and use in the Church of Christ; but these very parts, if separated from each other, become as much the elements of strife as they were intended to be, in their agreement, the bond of peace and blessing. They have been unhappily separated, and both parties are found in the position of maintaining propositions, true in themselves, but false in their application when held in independence one of the other. As a natural result, the clergy and the laity have been mutually hindered from estimating their respective claims and feelings, and have been forced into a struggle for isolated privileges in opposition to mistaken rights. There is something amounting to a fatality in the manner in which the question is regarded and handled by those engaged in it; something unaccountable in the way in which the clergy have forced it upon their people; something very fearful in the rapidity with which these have rushed from the resistance of an imagined wrong to the assertion of an irresponsible power, and the positive infliction of an injury. Of the first, the instances unhappily abound; of the second, the unprincipled invectives of the Times and its correspondents, with the violent speeches made at public meetings, are sad examples. There are some who regard the contest as a passing storm, which shall purge the spiritual atmosphere in which the Church breathes from the accumulated vapours of many years' ignorance and indolence. They fondly hope that, these being dispersed, the light of truth in its fulness and the stillness of peace in its blessedness will follow, and that the Church, refreshed and revived, will rise with renewed vigour to the work which is set before her. In some respects we do not think so: regarding the strife that is in the Church, in connexion with all that is passing around us in the world, we do not anticipate, at least in this dispensation, this peaceful termination. Our thoughts turn instinctively to the signs in the moon, to the darking of her light, to the falling of the stars, and the shaking of the powers of the heavens, solemnly predicated by our blessed Lord as amongst the portents which shall precede his second coming; and, in casting a glance at the universal ecclesiastical commotion of all Christendom, we can come to no other conclusion, than that the strife in our

own land is but one phase of it; and that the motive cause which has brought the clergy and the laity into sad collision, must be traced to something more universal in its application than the wearing of a surplice in the pulpit, or the use of the offertory. If it be so, we are upon the eve of a contest for principles, which, having been commenced in the political, in the French Revolution, remains to be finished in the ecclesiastical, in the struggle throughout all Christian lands between the priest and the people, not for political rights, but for doctrinal truths.

The two great principles, which are at issue throughout Christendom, are the aristocratic and democratic. Of these, in their separation and antagonism, and in the Church, Rome and the Reformation are severally the exponents. Their true union and proper place were ordained in the constitution of the Church Catholic, such as it stands revealed in the Scripture, and such as it was before the heresy of Romanism existed. When that heresy first arose, the aristocratic principle degenerated into tyranny, and, as a natural consequence, the democratic rapidly passed from righteous resistance to lawless assumption. As States became Christian, it was to be expected that the principles which obtained in the Church would be diffused throughout society. Peace and protection created a sphere within the Church for the developement of those human passions and infirmities which unhappily there, as elsewhere, are ever ready to break forth, and what was given to the Church as a trust by the Lord, was speedily converted into an instrument of personal aggrandisement by her ministers. Authority, which was committed to his servants for the blessing of the flock, came to be regarded as a privilege attaching to the man, and not to his office, and those to whom it was committed claimed its attributes as a matter of personal dignity, and its fruits, in temporal wealth and honour, as their legitimate portion. Thus the priest soon became the master of the King, who had ensured peace and security for him in the exercise of his holy function, and the world groaned under the curse of the monstrous doctrine, that temporal as well as spiritual power was the right of the Church. The polity of the ecclesiastical ruler served, as a matter of course, for a model to the Prince; the usurpation of one was quickly imitated in an exaggerated estimate of his privilege by the other; whilst the spirit of resistance, which ecclesiastical oppression had provoked, speedily found another and ample form of developement in an opposition to temporal grievance. Thenceforth the aristocratic and the democratic principles became

antagonistic, both in Church and State, and produced, and are producing, as might be naturally expected, their proper fruits. We have seen the Reformation, the inevitable result of Romish tyranny; we have beheld the French Revolution, the consequence of the wrong-doing of princes and the abuse of political power; and we are now witnessing a struggle, going on throughout Christendom, wherein the ostensible and local objects contended for are not the real subjects of strife, and whose final termination no one, by the force of human sagacity alone, can forsee. The separation of two great principles, which were ordained by God to be in their unity the source of blessing to all, has forced men into positions wherein none seems able to consider or contend for truth as a whole, and wherein all the lessons of the past seem disregarded. Two divisions of society are striving, in one form or another, for the mastery of one of these principles, and this in the teeth of divine revelation, and that truth which all the experience of time and history ought to have taught, that social happiness and political well-being can only be secured by the union both of the aristocratic and democratic, and their right adjustment towards each other.

In one respect the contest is unequal. Whatever of nobility of thought and high imagination, whatever of generous sentiment or poetic dreaming, may be allied to the one party-the strength of nations and the voice of the multitude are with the other. The people are not, as heretofore, the resisters, but the aggressors; and the question amongst men is not for the maintenance of the democratic principle, but for the preservation of so much as is righteous in the aristocratic.

It is clear that the Church of England is not, in the sense in which many of the Protestant sections may be so considered, the offspring of the Reformation. She had an existence in this country prior to the introduction of Popery, and she never thoroughly submitted to Rome. When Augustine came into England, he was resisted by the remnant of the British Church in his endeavour to impose the yoke of Gregory upon the priests of Bangor. The Anglo-Saxons did not completely recognize the supremacy of the Romish Pontiff, nor admit the doctrine of transubstantiation; and it was the knowledge of this, doubtless, that induced Alexander II. to favour the enterprise of the conqueror, hoping by that means to receive in return the obedience of the nation, which, in its unconquered condition, had refused to acknowledge his authority. The submission of England to Rome was the act of her Norman conqueror, and not of the people; and it may well be conceived, that, the bulk of the population being Saxon, these regarded