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No. X.-The English Cathedral of the Nineteenth Century. By A, J. B. BERESFORD HOPE, M.A. D.C.L. With Illustrations. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street. 1861. IT has been said that many of our best and even standard works have owned an occasional and accidental origin. Their authors did not, after the German fashion, sit down of a set purpose and with prepense malice to write a formal and systematic treatise. Some local controversy, some chance occasion, some incident or accident of the day, stirred the writer's mind, and perhaps what is in fact, and for all practical purposes, an exhaustion of a single subject is the result. Especially has this peculiarity of our literature been observed in the later English theology. A threatened conversion or perversion of a single and not remarkable woman, set Laud to write on what at last came out as a complete work against the claims of Rome, though it still bears the oral form of the original dialogue. Hooker's masterpiece grew out of a very small purpose. Almost all Bull's works were occasioned by small circumstances. Wall's volumes grew out of a personal dispute. The book before us resembles in this respect of its genesis many books with which it would be an honour to compare any production of a living pen. From a letter in a newspaper and a lecture delivered before a local Society, has grown Mr. Beresford Hope's volume, which, as far as its title promises, may be said to be complete. There is something satisfactory in a volume of this informal character, and the reader seems to be present as at some process of nature. There is the germ gradually developing its organs and accessories: there is the island slowly rising from its nucleus of rock or coral, and gradually clothed with vegetation: there is the molecule stage by stage rising into higher organization. A book in which you can trace the natural developments of this sort has a natural aspect. It predisposes the reader in its favour. Mr. Beresford Hope is a natural writer. His first thought can be traced, a solid unity and round it is a natural accretion of subjects fairly growing out of it. His subject is the English Cathedral of the Nineteenth Century, and he is led to examine it in its two aspects, the material cathedral and the moral cathedral.

At first sight there seems to be here not so much a comparison of terms as an ambiguity. But the same may be said of the term Church, which the systematic writers treat under its double aspect, Ecclesia in sensu morali, and Ecclesia in sensu

materiali. Our American cousins, with an affectation of precision, have avoided what they consider an ambiguity by inventing the ugly term 'Church edifice' for the material Church. The germs of Mr. Beresford Hope's double treatment may be found in the two primary documents out of which his book was moulded. The moral or social or political use of a cathedral he treated first of all in a very able and comprehensive letter which he printed in the Times newspaper in December, 1857, under the popular title of The Work of the Church among the Millions, reprinted at p. 6 in the present volume: and the sketch of an ideal English Cathedral in its material aspect he elaborated in a lecture delivered last year before the Cambridge Architectural Society. These two documents are the foundation of the present work, which treats the cathedral as a building and an institution. In this notice we shall follow this division.

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Mr. Beresford Hope has earned the right to instruct us on this subject under either of its aspects. Skilled above the ordinary accomplishments of an amateur in architecture, the present author has added to an inherited taste a vast amount of information patiently gathered and luminously surveyed in practical art. But Mr. Beresford Hope is no dilettanti student. He has shown by a life of service to the Church of England, that he is not a mere æsthetic and pedantic art-critic. He has not worked at architecture as men do in entomology or botany. He values the material Church but for its spiritual significance and practical use. In his life and works he has earned a title to discuss subjects of this grave importance. He knows quite as much of Church work, Church necessities, and Church grievances, as he does about middle pointed and French pointed. His book is concerned with Church extension in either sense of the term; and his eye is as keen to detect a blunder in administration, as a solecism in mouldings or tracery.

To express summarily his view on the adaptation of Church work to large towns, his thesis is, that a large church, with a staff of associated workers, is the better method than the planting of little independent benefices by the sub-division of parishes. He is perhaps somewhat reticent and chary in announcing this view in all its boldness; but this is what he means. The form in which he finds this more practical organization for town missions is in the cathedral. Of course we are thankful for the inquiry in this form; but it seems to be somewhat a forced and strained necessity to connect this subject with the cathedral only. A cathedral is not necessarily a large church; nor by the force of terms does it imply any Church work at all. A Dean and Chapter, or Canone, or associated

clergy, are not necessary to a cathedral; and we could have all the work done which Mr. Beresford Hope wants done, without a cathedral at all. In other words, a cathedral need not be a large church; and a large church, and large work, frequent and solemn services, and a body of working clergy, does not necessitate a cathedral. A cathedral is merely the church in which the bishop's house or cathedra or a little chapel is fixed. This may be a wooden hut, or a canvass tabernacle; and a centre of missionary work may be in a town which is not a city. As a mere matter of history, Mr. Beresford Hope is right in tracing the evangelization of a country from certain defined episcopal centres, each of which implied of course a cathedral, because a bishop must set up his throne somewhere; and he is correct in observing that these episcopal centres threw out parochial divisions, and the scattering, as it were, of independent parish priests. But a cathedral can only effect what our author requires to be done when it is also a collegiate or chapter church, and the collegiate church is not necessarily an institution in any sense to be identified with a cathedral. A collegiate church is in fact what Mr. Beresford Hope requires, though for convenience sake he treats it under the common term cathedral. We do not by any mean intends to say that this distinction has not been present to the writer's mind. But his title hardly does justice to the fulness of his materials. The book contains much more than it promises; it not only says, as the late Lord Herbert said in a valuable pamphlet, how existing cathedral institutions may be utilized, but what is the especial way of dealing with the want of the times. This is shown by the origin of the letter to the Times. It was occasioned by the opening of Westminster Abbey, followed by that of the Cathedral of London, for what are called special services. These special services were the answer which churchmen made to the taunt that so many thousands followed Mr. Spurgeon; and were the alternative offered by the existing system to the Exeter Hall services, to which Mr. Edouart offered a wellmeant but technical resistance.

At this point and crisis Mr. Beresford Hope writes his letter to the Times. It is a very characteristic and able one. Mr. Beresford Hope's mind is a political one, and his parliamentary training has taught him that art, so difficult for very earnest persons like himself to acquire, what not to say as well as what to say. He had a difficult work before him in his letter, which was not only to discredit the Spurgeon mania, not only to say but little in favour of the Westminster Abbey services, then in the first flush of their popularity; but, with an eye to conciliate the readers of the Times, to say what he could even for Lord

Shaftesbury and the Exeter Hall committee. We must congratulate so good and tried a churchman on his success in this delicate task. What he says in substance is, that the desire to hear great preachers was not an unnatural thing, or one to be disregarded; that the desire shown by the originators of the Exeter Hall services to bring religion home to the masses,' was in itself a most commendable thing; but that it was not fair to leave such a work to the desultory energies of an accidental committee. That the Church itself was the best committee, and the diocesan and cathedral idea the natural centre, from which extensive operations, such as great town missions, including special services, should be derived. That the proper constitution of the Church was a balance of the cathedral and parochial systems. That the strict incisive theory of the parochial system would be sure to break down, as it had broken down, in large towns, and that instead of attempting to go on with the subdivision of parishes, it would be better to think of a co-operative agency and a consolidated mission and associated clergy. Not that all of this was said by Mr. Beresford Hope in his letter; nor is every word of it to be found in his published volume. But here is an extract which may be taken as a favourable specimen of his matter and manner:—

"When we consider the condition of spiritual destitution to which the combined action of a rapidly increasing population and an unelastic law of parochial subdivision and endowment had reduced England at the commencement of the century, and compare it with the activity which characterises, in various measures, almost every part of the Church at the present day, we can only exclaim, "It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes." But it would be a foolish and hurtful optimism to suppose that the actual system was the complete panacea for all the spiritual wants of the nation. Excellent as the parochial system is in so many ways, it yet must tend, if unmodified by other agencies, to a disjunctive and separatist, rather than a co-operative and harmonising order of things. The church with its incumbent, the school with its teacher, are admirable, each in its own sphere; but if neither of them is to be drawn upwards in itself, nor towards its own similarly-placed neighbour, by the proximity of some more exalted exemplar, each will be apt to trail upon the ground within a limited circle. If there is no harmonising principle at work to blend the local idiosyncrasies of each little centre, every such small community will be apt to become a law to itself in defiance of its neighbours, or else to lose heart and energy from the absence of that encouragement which a superior and regulating organisation can alone afford. I need no further proof of my position than the practical working of that well-known measure of ecclesiastical reform, Sir Robert Peel's Act. This act was passed to remedy an order of things which called for legislation, and it has proved in many respects a blessing to the Church of England. Greater facilities were unquestionably needed for the subdivision of parishes than already existed, and these the act provided upon the broad and intelligible principle, then for the first time admitted into our Parliamentary legislation for ecclesiastical matters, that the creation of the cure of souls was of more importance than the completion of the material fabric, and that the new autonomy ought, therefore, to date from the endowment of the incumbent, and not from the building of the

church. That Sir Robert Peel's Act has, however, proved an unmixed blessing, no man, unconnected with the Ecclesiastical Commission, would, I should think, be bold enough to asseverate. The week's contents of the wastepaper basket of any person supposed to be bountiful towards Church purposes, would give the most complete and pointed reply to such an assertion. There are, in truth, few more melancholy records of difficulty and privation, manfully, I believe, and Christianly borne up against as the general rule, than that interminable series of circulars, printed and lithographed, by incumbents of destitute Peel districts which are ever passing and re-passing through the postoffice. The same story, with a few variations, runs through them all. The church is either unbuilt, and Divine Service performed in some wretched, pestilential, unsuitable hole, or else it has been built with a debt which is breaking the backs of all who have taken part in that good work. Then comes in the regular reference to the church-rate, and we are either informed that the rate has been refused for years past, as the new church stands in a populous place, or else it is levied for the benefit of the mother-church, and the new institution gets nothing at all, or much less than its right proportion. Then there is no school, or the school also is insolvent, while the incumbent finds himself reduced to that most painful and detrimental of actsnamely, to proclaim the personal indigence of a gentleman and often of a gentlewoman to the ears of strangers. In the meanwhile, the poverty-stricken district cannot be effectively worked, even in proportion to the means which it has scraped together. A morning spent in posting urgent appeals even in behalf of God's house, is a bad preparation for preaching God's word in that house. Besides, the single-handed clergyman is physically unable to work his natural resources to the uttermost. The best head and the best lungs must often flag, under the incessant physical fatigue of public ministrations in a populous district carried on without change or assistance. The clergyman soon discovers that his public services, drawn from a jaded and insufficient source, are becoming vapid and forced, and he feels that the attendance runs the risk of speedy diminution. If we add to this the wear and tear of home visiting and such ministrations, the toil of keeping up the schools, and the petty harassing details of clubs and other miscellaneous calls upon the clergyman's time and energy, we cannot hesitate to own that the underpaid and unassisted minister of a Peel district in a town, who tries to do his duty, stands in a false and impossible position, and that his success or failure is no criterion of the real strength of the Church of England if properly set in motion. The evil is increasing day by day; and if the religious world is not timely wise, there may some day be a terrible crash and collapse of character and influence, not to say a general catastrophe of material reverses. The Church is on its trial in more ways than one in the Peel parishes, for in no long time the authorities will find that it is impossible to persuade men of education and proved character, such as the ideal Church-of-England clergyman ought to be, to shipwreck fortune, health, and usefulness in whirlpools so obscure and so repulsive as the bankrupt districts; and the result must be that we shall find a body of clergymen without education or social standing foisted into the ministry as stopgaps for the destitute localities. I need not say how grievous a misfortune both to Church and State would be this deterioration of the clerical standard. The evil may perhaps take the form of there growing up two castes of clergymen : one will be the incumbents of vicarages and rectories, men of education, influence, and social standing, out of whom dignitaries will be ordinarily chosen-and the other will be the incumbents of district churches, "literates" who enter holy orders without a reasonable hope of any better material position, and all whose associations, social and professional, will tend to keep them apart, in an attitude of ignorant and dissatisfied hostility, both from the gentry and the universitybred incumbent of the old parishes. If this state of things should unhappily