ART. II.-MAURICE: THE CHURCH A FAMILY.

The Church a Family: Twelve Sermons on the Occasional Services of the Prayer Book. Preached in the Chapel of Lincoln's Inn, by Frederick Denison Maurice, M.A., Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn, and Professor of Divinity in King's College, London. London: John W. Parker, 1850.

THE remedy proposed in this book for all the practical evils of Society, and for all the speculative divisions, weaknesses, and ungodly workings of Religion, is the simple view that the whole Church is one Family, of which God is the Father and Christ the elder Brother, the first who has attained to and manifested a true sonship,-along with the natural fruits of this view, in genuine efforts to bring every member of the human family into sympathy with God's spirit and Christ's life; even as in a single Christian family no one is excluded, or permitted to exclude himself, from the love and fellowship of the rest, whatever may be the peculiarities of his temperament and disposition, or whatever the resistance of his errors or his sins. Christendom is a Church, not a sect: God's children form a Family, not a School. This is a noble, and truly catholic, representation; and we must not complain if it is accompanied by some limitations and technicalities, arising out of the position from which Professor Maurice takes his view. His object is to show that the Church of England is founded upon this view, and if he first infuses this spirit into the Church and all her Services, and then thinks he finds it there, this is the genuine operation of a noble heart unconsciously larger than the system under which it has grown, and to whose careful nursing and holy guidance it reverently refers all that it has. A tender and grateful spirit will bring hallowed and time-honoured institutions into harmony with itself, by attributing to them virtues which they have not, rather than leave them behind, in scorn and contempt, with a hard clearness of perception as to what they really are. Mr. Maurice has nothing of this hard clearness, rather is he chargeable with

that sympathetic softness which suffuses with its own colours whatever it lovingly looks on. He could not well bear to think of himself as wiser, of larger charity, of more spiritual discernment, than that venerated Church which has nursed, watched, trained, employed, and consecrated all his life, within which he has found his school, home, temple, mission. We greatly prefer therefore when he speaks of Christianity as he receives it immediately from Christ, and of the direct aspects of God and Religion to his own spirit, than when he attempts to make the Church of England the adequate exponent and representative of this his Christianity. In these attempts we find his great love working in much, and often painful, ingenuity, laying a main stress upon slight hints and transient indications of a Catholic fulness, and passing by the emphatic and distinctive character of a Church Service expressly excluding that Catholicity. Thus in the Baptism of Infants he sees only the recognition by every spiritual man of the spiritual nature of every child, and sets aside, without however denying, the Church's doctrine that the child's spiritual relation to God is conferred upon it by Baptism. And in the Service for the Burial of the Dead, he sees in the hope that God has taken the vilest to His own rest only an assertion of the indestructible nature of God's fatherly relations to every human soul, of the imperishable bonds of a divine Family, and yet passes by the fact that the Church will not perform this service, nor assert this hope, for the excommunicate or the unbaptized. Nay worse, he apologizes for the ban of 'excommunication' that it is obsolete, if indeed it ever had existence,—whilst he says not a word of the ban of 'Baptism,' which is not obsolete, but in active force. It is yet more painful to find Professor Maurice stating with admirable clearness all the objections, whether on grounds of self-consistency or of intrinsic truth and generosity, to which his Church and her Prayer Book appear to be open, stating them with a boldness and precision which would seem to scorn a moment's rest unless they could be triumphantly answered, and then substituting some broad and generous statement of his own for a satisfactory answer, and bridging conflicting statements by throwing wreaths of mist across the chasm. In a work published some short

time ago, with the object of proving the Prayer Book to be the best protection against Romanism, he tells the lawyers of Lincoln's Inn that he could not rebuke their besetting sins, and preach simple honesty, singleness of eye, and truthful speaking to that tempted race of men, so little nice about means, so willing to be the devil's advocates, the defenders of injustice and falsehood, not only so far as to say on their behalf all that with truth can be said, but to the extent of fighting for their victory with any weapons that will only succeed, unless he himself could make it appear that he stood absolutely clear of the inconsistency, the double dealing, the playing of fast and loose, attributed to Clergymen of the Church of England in their attempts to reconcile the Church's views and declarations on the efficacy of Baptism and on the efficacy of Faith. The statement of the difficulty was so complete that we felt confident that the answer, if not satisfactory, would at least be definite and intelligible. We sought for it in vain. We are as ignorant of Professor Maurice's principle of harmony, as we were before we read the volume which professed to unfold it. We only know that he holds some profoundly spiritual and generous views of the filial and original relations of human nature to God, and that he also uses some vague and mystical language upon the operation of the Sacrament of Baptism in conferring those relations. How he harmonizes the two, we were unable to discover. Professor Maurice stands above all suspicion of knowingly disposing of an objection to what the Prayer Book does say, by saying himself something so satisfactory, filling the minds of his hearers and readers with such full and clear light that they are disarmed and given up to him, and then in the diversion thus created tacitly leaving them to the impression, or by some shadowy words producing it, that the satisfying and disarming statement comes from the Prayer Book as well as from him. Yet this is the effect of much of what he writes; and truthful in will and purpose as we believe him to be, we cannot but think that it is a perilous ordeal for himself. What a noble Christianity would come forth from him if he stood free of all Churches,-if he was secured from all necessity of reconciling the intuitions, and discernments of his own spirit in its intercourses with God and His

gospel, with any fixed positions! Who does not sigh and pray for the liberation of the Churches from all conditions and bonds, except that bond of love which makes the whole Church a Family of God, with Jesus for the perfect type of the human children of a Heavenly Father! But we tell Mr. Maurice that he will never succeed in putting this new cloth, new alas still, upon the old garment of the Church; he will never succeed in pouring this new wine, of which all are to drink, into the old bottles of her formularies. So grand and glorious an addition will break through her feeble framework: a spirit so comprehensive will burst her narrow moulds. Yet such attempts to show her at peace with the widest spirit and the largest truth are natural in her devoted son; and by the failure of such attempts he will do her and the world good service, though by a way that he thinks not of.

The object of these Sermons is to exhibit, that in the familiar institutes of its Society, the Church of England has witnesses and remembrancers that we are members of a divine family, and these institutes he finds in the occasional Services of the Prayer Book-the Services for Baptism, infant and adult; the Catechism; the Forms for Confirmation, for Marriage, for the Visitation of the Sick, for the Burial of the Dead, for the Ordination of Priests and Deacons, and for the Consecration of Bishops; and the Commination. Here he finds "the harmonious exhibition of the Church in its character of a divine family, wholly spiritual in its constitution, yet leavening and directing all the relations, toils, sufferings, enjoyments, offices, punishments, which belong to us as citizens of an earthly country." Here we ought in fairness to add, that he does not represent these Services as perfect in themselves, nor as the ultimate ground upon which anything rests, but as institutes by which the Christian conception of a divine family may be sufficiently realized. It was the total loss of this conception which, he justly thinks, reduced Judaism to its wretched condition, and caused Christ to stir only hatred in the hearts of Pharisees and Doctors, when he offered them a Father:

"The Pharisees who taught the people to say, 'Corban, it is a gift,' and so to break the law of honouring father and mother,

were laying the axe to the root of family life by their teaching. Their acts, their character, the rewards which they held out to men, did it still more effectually. For all these were selfish. Individual acquisition of prizes in this world, or in the world to come, took the place of the feeling which had been so strong in the old prophets, that every blessing was a common blessing, that being all children of Abraham, all heirs of the same covenant, there could be no strife or rivalry; each Israelite must be a sharer of the mercies which God had promised to the whole people, if he did not wilfully refuse them by choosing to separate from it. Most of all, the sectarianism of the Pharisees made the very name of an Israelite family a contradiction; it was the glory of belonging to a school, not of being signed with the sign of the covenant, which they coveted, and upon which they valued themselves. Altogether different as was the Jew from the other people of the earth, though never so exclusive and contemptuous as now, though never so much boasting of Abraham as his father, he was essentially imbued with the tempers and practices of the world,-with those tempers and practices, that is to say, which are opposed to the very idea of a human family and of a divine family.

"Accordingly, if we trace the history of the conflicts of the Jews. with our Lord through the four Evangelists, we shall find that He was always presenting to them the name of a Father, and that this name was always utterly unintelligible to them; when it came forth actually and livingly before them, was fearful, even hateful, to them. "They knew not that He spoke to them of the Father,' says St. John. He hath not only broken the Sabbath,' said the Jews; but said also that God was his Father, making Himself equal with God. 'I and my Father are one,' said Jesus; then took they up stones to cast at him.' 'Art thou the Son of God?' said the High Priest. When Jesus answered, 'I am;' 'then rent he his clothes, saying, What need we any further witness? Ye have heard his blasphemy; what think ye? And they all judged him to be guilty of death.' On the other hand, study all our Lord's discourses to the multitude, still more all His utterances to His own disciples, all His announcements of the end for which He came into the world, all his descriptions of the kingdom which He would establish in it, and we shall see how His own Sonship lies at the root of them all, how from first to last He proclaims Himself as the elder brother of a family established already in heaven, thenceforth to adopt the dwellers upon earth as its members."

Exactly the same danger, of forgetting that God is a Father, and that the Church is one Family, has beset Christianity since the Reformation, substituting for a