adopt the distinction that it is a call-whereas we name the other a whisper-a summons which leaves no choice but to obay, and over-ruling all other respects. We only submit that those who are always watching for this call, however obedient they are to the summons when they believe themselves to hear it, are not the especial votaries of conscience. They are under another and, as they believe, higher rule; their minds in a different frame. It is, indeed, often loosely taken for granted that no one will make great sacrifices except for conscience sake, and therefore that those most defer to conscience whose sacrifices of this world's good things and the gifts of Providence are the greatest; but that this argument will not hold, we have only to consider that many terrible and lifelong, and yet deliberate sacrifices certainly are made and maintained in actual defiance of conscience under the simple direction of temper, pride, and self-will.

To pursue the subject. It seems to us that the popular saint of every denomination is less conspicuously directed by conscience than by this external director, prompting to new, difficrlt, supererogatory action. For one thing its results are more picturesque and telling. A man may do his duty for a long time together, and present no striking effects. A saint is not a saint with men in general, unless there is some virtue run into excess; some touch of the extreme, the transcendental, the picturesque, or it may be the grotesque; something that shows the strong workings of will, and devotion to a fixed idea. Now conscience, strictly and properly so called, we may say never of itself suggests courses of this nature. The steady conscientious man must lay his account to look humdrum by the side of these romantic personages. A man is not a saint with the multitude if his line of action, his tone of thought, or his virtues, can be understood. They are willing to allow the elect and preeminently holy of mankind every distinction but the practical one of weight. But why do we say the 'multitude?' Has not Dr. Newman just now distinctly pronounced the saints as suchnot men to be imitated, only to be admired? It never surprises 'me,' he writes, 'to read anything unusual in the devotions of ' a saint. Such men are on a level very different from our own, and we cannot understand them. . . . I am speaking generally of all Saints, whether I knew them or not; and I say they are beyond us, and that we must use them as patterns, not as copies.' The last distinction strikes us as more neat than intelligible; but if it be so, if we are not to take the saints as copies that is, if we are not to imitate them-it is because these men chose for themselves a rule which necessarily prescribes extremes. Surely the man, though he be canonized for it, who gives

himself up to extremes, defies prudence and the precautions of reason, and disregards, it may be, some whispers of conscience in an eager pursuit of some extraordinary higher motive of action, if he be not a useful copy, neither can he be a pattern in any practical sense. We cannot take in the distinction. Now every one who uniformly takes his conscience for his guide, is an intelligible example; we may make him our pattern, we may copy him in all matters in which we can establish any parallel between his case and ours. S. Paul, as being conscientious in the received meaning of the word, offers himself as an example to small and lowly as well as great. He knows nothing in himself why, where he does well, others should not follow in his steps; he tells them to do so. We dare here but hint at the great Exemplar, who came to be an ensample for us all. Into whatever denomination the Hon. George Spencer had settled, it is beyond a doubt that he would have been declared one of its saints; and it does sometimes seem a chance where he would settle. The only thing clear is that our own Church was not a congenial home for his very eccentric energies. His whole soul revolted from moderation, from balance of any kind. kind. And it is this characteristic, rather than certain really noble qualities, which gained him his reputation for sanctity amongst his admirers, reverers, and associates:-we may as well add himself also. For his immense vivacity of nature, his ceaseless activity, his readiness to give up those pleasures and alleviations so indispensable to most men, and his freedom both from sensitiveness and thought as such, all conduced to establish in him an abiding self complacency; which indeed irritates nobody, which we acquiesce in as an equivalent for the bodily ease and comforts of which he divested himself, but which shows itself-as do all his other qualities-with a very bold distinctness, apt to condense itself into sayings. It was something for a man in these days of curious and often morbid introspection, to announce to his fellow Passionists, 'I don't intend to go to Purgatory, and if I do I must know what for!' It was possible for him in this nineteenth century to pursue his argument-to the awe and self-reproach of his brethren, who lamented so many imperfections that it seemed presumptuous to attempt to escape 'scot free,' 'Well, nothing can send us to purgatory but a wilful, venial sin; and a religious man ought to die before being guilty of the least wilful fault.' We seem as we read this and a great deal more to understand something of medieval saints, with every moment of their life marked out by rule; and thought, as opposed to prescribed meditation, treated as idleness or worse. But we in our Church must occasionally pause, weigh, and reflect; set argument against argument, and balance text with text. We

may not rush headlong in any direction. Something always pulls us up. We are required perpetually to use our judgment, to consult our conscience, to admit difficulties, to own shortcomings. Nobody can safely relieve us from the task of thought. And all this intellectual work is equally opposed to a man's feeling himself a saint, and others thinking him such. No one can follow out a train of ideas or indulge the soul in restless inquiries without stirring up opposition in others, and being sensible in himself of conflicts, vacillations, and error. The popular exponent of sanctity we see must in a manner be superficial, leaving the heavy burden of thinking, owning two sides to a question, and seeing difficulties, to others: acting out his own view with a certain thoroughgoing extravagance which no profound thinker can carry through honestly and maintaining his self-respect. To Father Ignatius suspense and uncertainty were simply abhorrent. He really did not mind to what renunciations certainty led him, and indeed he regarded ordinary self interest as naturally leagued with the side of wrong, but the presence of a doubt must be exorcised at all cost, and every principle once embraced pursued, helter-skelter as it were, to its extreme-as though it was the only truth his mind could embrace. Thus his principle of resignation led him to thank God' not only for trials, but for his own gross imprudences and the mischief others incurred by them; and his acceptance of the dogmas of the Church of Rome into an adoption by choice of those practices most opposed to his previous teaching and convictions. He slips with a facility perfectly amazing, and yet with every appearance of sincerity, into a system of accounts with Heavenso much self-denial, so much merit-while his ardent zeal in procuring the prayers of the whole world for his country assumes just the same air of a transaction. He could not accept the Church of Rome's language towards the Blessed Virgin without first forcing it to its logical extreme, then utilizing it, and putting it, as it seems to us, to the most prosaic practice. England was to be converted through a system of 'Hail Marys; the lukewarm saying it once a day, the zealous three times, till he won for those who carried out his programme most strictly, especial Indulgences from the Pope, and so seemed to turn the tables on the less ardent. This elaborated scheme he carried out with such an entire reliance on the machinery of his adopted Church that we believe he felt more outwitted than scandalized by the old Irishwoman, who accosting him with Father, I say the three Hail Marys every day for England,' was eagerly entreated by him to use her influence with her neighbours to do the same, and got for his answer, Me get people to pray for England! I pray myself three times for the sake of the

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Indulgence, but I curse them three hundred times a day for it, 'lest they might get any good of my prayers.' He was in fact intensely practical. What some people are in things material, he was in matters of faith. What was the use of an article of belief or a pious opinion, if you could not do something with it and work it to the utmost limit it could be made to go? In the same sense he was ambitious. Having, at the age of twentyeight, while Rector of Brington, made the prayer, That I 'be led to suffer and to do many and great things for His sake,' he was ready to quarrel with our Church for no other reason than that she did not offer room-none that is that would appear such to his temper-for these aspirations, and was at once open to the advances of any communion which should propose to him a wider field for picturesque self-sacrifice. None, however, could have fallen in so entirely with his nature as that which on the first hint recommended itself to him. The Church of Rome certainly allowed him a larger scope than he would have found elsewhere; and eccentricities which would have embarrassed any sect, and been regarded as excesses needing check and discouragement, procured him in the home of his adoption such a reputation for sanctity that his biographer has clearly hopes of his ultimate canonization: an anticipation which would in no degree have surprised Father Ignatius himself; not from any deep seated pride, far from it, but simply that he would not have been able to see what more he could have done to deserve it. Even on earth he had thought it a very natural thing that his touch should heal; and the hint that 'miracles are recorded to have been performed by his relics,' would have taken him as little by surprise as the most ardent of his admirers. He had indeed a very distinct idea of what humility was. It consisted in such acts as 'praying that he might break down in his sermons,' in scrubbing down the stairs of his convent at the bidding of his superiors, in walking about barefooted in the habit of his order, in enduring the comments of all the little boys, in begging from door to door, and in travelling third-class. We are not disparaging these instances, but as tests they argue a mind not much given to self study, or to theorise on the subtle perversities and contradictions of human nature.

This book does not set forth the Hon. George Spencer as a man of intellect, nor does he ever show himself in this light: probably no memoir can on this point do him full justice. He was one of the men who are intellectually their best in conversation that is as long as they can keep clear of hobbies. But he had-what is more than intellect an extraordinary life and vivacity of nature; that quality which enables a man to make the most of every other capacity, and which, moreover, when joined to an amiable temper makes him loveable. There is no

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indication of our hero having any enemies. He excited no bitterness, and even when he became so great a bore (which he evidently did) that men avoided close quarters, they loved him at a distance, and could honestly, when he was gone, speak in terms of heartfelt eulogy. He was a man, too, in one sense, of independence of mind: he was not one of a crowd of converts: he was never cowed by another mind; in fact, intellect, as such, had not the smallest weight with him. When he thought he had a work to do, others could no more divert his will than they could the instinct of beast or bird. Indeed, the attempts to do so from highest quarters remind one of interposing a foot in the course of some busy insect;-it neither stops nor turns back, and only recognises the hindrance by running round it at advanced speed. Energy then, life devoted to a cause, constitute him a legitimate subject for biography, though whether English Roman Catholics as a body would care for its wide dissemination amongst Protestants, is another question. Some of them, we suspect, will wince at parts; for the biographer is as averse to compromise as his subject, and there are passages which placed side by side with others from Dr. Newman's last letter to Dr. Pusey, throw a peculiar light on the boasted unity of the Church of Rome. Take for example the following charge of meanness:

'Another peculiar characteristic of his spirit was his great devotion to the Blessed Virgin. He set more value on a Hail Mary than any conceivable form of prayer. He went so far in this, that he had to be reasoned out of its excess afterwards by one of his companions. He did everything by Hail Marys; he would convert England by Hail Marys; and in the year 1850 he obtained a plenary indulgence for the three Hail Marys for the conversion of England. When any one asked him to pray for them, he promised a Hail Mary. This was very praiseworthy in him, as we know how hard it is even for some to go heart and soul into the Catholic instinct of devotion to the Mother of God. They must have their qualifications, and their terms, and their conditions, as if, forsooth she ought to be obliged to them for acknowledging her privileges at all. The worst of it is, that Catholics often tone down their books of devotion and expressions to suit the morbid tastes of ultra-Protestants, or the fastidiousness of some whitewashed Puseyite. It may be thought prudent to do so; but it is disgraceful, mean, and dishonourable, to say the least of it.'-P. 384.

To dismiss Mr. Spencer's biographer, Father Pius, at once, we may say that his book is a vehement and petulant attack on the Church of England, and that the writer seems, to be either very ill-informed, or very unscrupulous.

George, youngest son of Earl Spencer, was born the 21st of December, 1799; his years, therefore, counted with the years of the present century. It is worthy of mention that in his autobiography he declares himself to have had no idea of an Almighty Being, or the least apprehension of the existence of anything beyond the sensible world around him till his six-year old birthday. Then his sister's Swiss governess, with tender