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from other causes surely fail. There is a period in the life of every country, as of every individual in it, when the exercise of direct parental authority is no longer necessary or possible; when the community, like every man of mature age, is, if not the best, practically the only possible judge, of what he shall do or attempt within the limits of law. There is a distance beyond which the wisest and best parent cannot usefully attempt to control the actions of a son of mature age and fully developed powers, bodily and mental-a distance at which it is still more impossible for any Government to interfere directly in the administration of a country containing a population of hundreds of thousands of such sons, whom, if they were living in England, no one would dream of controlling, as to their actions in matters personal and political, within the limits of the law.

When responsible government was given to the Cape Colony, the question was, 'Has the colony arrived at that stage of material, social, and political development which renders the exertion of direct parental authority by the mother-country inexpedient or impossible?' The English nation deliberately answered this question in the affirmative. It renounced the direct parental, while it retained its sovereign authority. The decision was accepted by the colony and has been since acted on. It appears to me-it will appear, I think, to any unprejudiced judge that it is just as impossible for England now to retract this gift and to subordinate the colony to official management of its African native affairs from London, as it would be to expect any colonist of mature age who has been ten years his own master in the colony to return voluntarily to direct parental leading strings in England.

The die has been cast, the son has gone forth his own master, for good or for evil; he may fail of success, or he may perish; but return to the schoolroom and to a state of pupilage is not a possible remedy for ill-success in life. The parent may and ought to afford sympathy, and can aid in a variety of ways, but not by attempting to reassert such parental authority as the child has outgrown.

In the above remarks I confine myself as far as possible to facts which admit of no question. There are many other topics which have great importance on every bearing of this question; such, for instance, as the injurious effect of the possession of firearms on a vain semi-civilised or uncivilised race-the consequent warfare which has afflicted the country, as the revolutionary fever of eighty years ago affected Europe, or the insurrectionary fever of 1857 affected India. There is also a still larger question in the bearing of some form of union on the management of the races of South Africa.

But these are more or less connected with matters of opinion. I have desired to confine myself as strictly as possible to matters of fact; and want of space, moreover, forbids further discussion of such subjects at this moment.

December 20, 1880.

H. B. E. FRERE.

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THE greatest novelist of our generation, on whom the grave has just closed, has described in a powerful story one of those ignoble persecutions which from time to time disgrace English life. It is not the persecution of the strong by the strong, or the intelligent by the intelligent; the result of a keenly contested fight between incompatible principles and convictions on each side, equally deep and serious. It is the rising up of all that is poorest and basest in human nature, its cowardice and selfishness, its ignorance, its cant, its coarse vulgarity, its vice, its hatred of good, against sincerity in religion and earnest effort to raise the standard of living. A new clergyman appears in an old-fashioned country town, where all is sleepy and easy-going, and which, beneath its sleepy ease, is full of wretchedness and sin. He preaches as if he believes what he says, and he acts as if his words were true. He is a man of energy and purpose; and his preaching, and the interest which it excites, and his practical measures, begin to make a stir in the dull little place. Its privileged sloth and stupidity, its idle gossip and lazy spite take the alarm, and band together against the disturber. Its worldliness and its wickedness are frightened and provoked into fury, and take the attitude of indignant championship of honesty, morality, and pure religion.

The opening chapters of 'Janet's Repentance,' in George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, describe the character of the opposition VOL. IX. No. 48.

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raised, and then the measures taken to make the place too hot for the man who wishes to change the religious ways of Milby. As the obnoxious innovator touches consciences and attracts confidence, the town becomes divided into Tryanite and anti-Tryanite. The opponents of the movement are well-to-do and powerful persons in the place. There is the keen, self-confident, overbearing attorney, brutal and drunken at home, the unresisted bully and tyrant abroad, with all the threads of business in the country round him in his hands, 'who, as long as his Maker grants him power of voice and power of intellect, will take every legal means of resisting the introduction of demoralising, methodistical doctrine into this parish.' There is the rich miller, whose education and value for education are not in proportion to his balance at his bankers', and who will not stick at trouble to put down proceedings which are sure to ruin the morality of servant-maids. There is his better-read neighbour, who talks about Hobbes, and who holds seriously that this sectarianism within the Church ought to be put down; ' that the unpopular religionists are not Churchmen at all, are no better than Presbyterians.' And so the list goes on, including the sarcastic general practitioner and the sleek churchwarden, with much zeal but a rather loose reputation. The controversy is a wide one: but the minute point around which the struggle rages is, whether or not a new Sunday evening lecture shall be started in the place by the unpopular clergyman. And the story proceeds to relate the efforts made by these worthies to avert the threatening mischief; how a memorial is got up to the non-resident rector to disallow the proposed innovation; how a deputation waits on him, and brings back a favourable answer; how a popular demonstration, organised by the all-powerful attorney, in favour of Sound Church Principles and no Hypocrisy,' welcomes the delegates on their return; and how the leader of the agitation announces to his sympathising fellow-citizens the success of his mission. He assures them of the pleasure which it gives him to witness the strong proofs of their 'attachment to the principles of our excellent Church.'

The pulpit, from which their venerable pastor has fed them with sound doctrine for half a century, is not to be invaded by a fanatical, sectarian, double-faced, Jesuitical interloper. We are not to have our young people demoralised and corrupted by the temptations to vice, notoriously connected with Sunday evening lectures. We are not to have a preacher obtruding himself upon us, who denies good works, and sneaks into our homes perverting the faith of our wives and daughters.

Dishonesty and unfaithfulness to the Church, priestly meddling, and the mischief to morality and the peace of families caused by the new religious methods, and by the intrusion of ambitious and domineering clergymen; these are what are urged by the opponents of innovation at Milby.

George Eliot's story belongs to the times of the Evangelical movement. The doctrines against which the parishioners of Milby are called upon to rally to the Church are the 'methodistical' doctrines of Venn and Simeon. The object of obloquy and persecution is an Evangelical clergyman, fervent, self-denying, indefatigable, with narrow views of the world, and probably not always judicious, but pure and high in his standard of life, and with the root of the matter in him in his genuine sympathy for the sinful, the tempted, and the suffering. The story could hardly be written with any probability of an Evangelical movement or an Evangelical clergyman now. Evangelical religion has lived down this kind of opposition. But nevertheless it could be written, with great truth, as a type of things that have been going on during the last ten or fifteen years. The characters, so powerfully drawn in 'Janet's Repentance,' have not disappeared, nor the occasions which lead them to show themselves. The fierce blind antipathies, the implacable bitterness, the insolent and brutal bullying, the dense and blundering ignorance, the detestable hypocrisies, there described, still trouble actual English life. They have found and fastened on another quarry. They are still loud against dishonest and disloyal clergymen. They are still sensitive to pestilent heresies which threaten the soundness of the Church. They still appeal to the good old times before changes were heard of, and complain that they cannot recognise, under the newfangled fashions, the churches and services to which they were accustomed. They still raise the cry that clerical influences corrupt morality, and clerical claims endanger the peace of families. And as it was in the Evangelical days, good men are not always wise, and earnest men are sometimes extravagant. But another set of people have drawn on themselves the unpopularity which the Evangelicals first provoked. If the story were written of our present times, Mr. Tryan would be drawn as a Ritualist.

But if the story were written now, a fresh element would have to be added. Mr. Dempster, the shrewd attorney, would hardly have been equal to himself, if the law had not occurred to him as a means of annoyance. The disciples of Thomas Scott and Romaine were frowned upon by bishops, mocked at as 'saints' by the world, charged with Calvinism, Antinomianism, and Dissenting tendencies by controversialists, worried and insulted by lazy pluralists and parish despots; but no one had the thought of putting down their obnoxious proceedings by the help of the courts. The new feature in the opposition to a strong but unpopular religious movement, and one which has brought us to the brink of a grave constitutional question, is the active recourse to the tribunals-not to prohibit false teaching; resort to them has been given up, since they have clearly evinced their inclination to be neutral in questions of doctrine-but to arrest and suppress, by the strongest measures, a certain list of ontward practices in divine service, which are supposed to indicate the ideas and leanings of a party, and which no pains and no expense have been spared to get declared illegal, and, which is not the same thing in popular parlance, unlawful.

In much of all this there is nothing strange. Every strong religious movement, challenging what is accepted and customary, and calling on people to change their thoughts and their ways, must expect to provoke equally strong opposition; and when once opposition begins, it will be with each set of opponents according to their kind. Puseyism' and 'Tractarianism,' to recall nicknames which are now half forgotten, of course had to meet what had once been the lot of Methodism' and 'preaching the Gospel.' The teaching signified by those names was not only argued against and rebuked by the learned and the dignified; it was insulted, misrepresented, vilified, slandered by the ignorant, the vulgar, the malignant. Like all movements, it had its weak points, and its injudicious and extravagant exponents; of course it paid heavily for its follies and faults. Severe blows were dealt it: it was for many years under a ban, on the part of authority and in the eyes of the public. But the attempts to put a legal stigma on 'Tractarianism' were feeble, and failed. It was left to fight its battles as it could; to carry on controversy with divines in the schools; to live down popular stupidity and coarseness in the market-place or the vestry; and it has become quite a respectable thing now to be an 'old Tractarian.'

But the case has been different with 'Ritualism.' The great awakening in the Church, sometimes identified with what is called 'Tractarianism,' but which was certainly wider in all directions than the range of that movement, turned men's thoughts to the enlarging and deepening their religious ideas, and to the elevation of their standard of religious life. Newman's Parochial Sermons represent with singular and typical exactness the belief, the teaching, the aims of the High Church school, which was at the head-was, at least, most energetic and conspicuous in the general quickening of the Church. They addressed the thoughtful, the refined, the educated, the scholarlike, and they did their work. But there was something more to be done, and something more naturally followed. The Church is not only for the refined but for the multitudes, and it does little if it does not enlist the interest and sympathy of the unlearned and the half-learned, the men with scanty leisure and much worldly business. The attempt to popularise followed the work of the theologian and the moralist. In such an attempt two things obviously occupied a foremost place: preaching and solemn worship. In the next chapter of the history of the Church movement, these were the marked and distinguishing features. The men who made the attempt boldly and systematically soon got a nickname; they were called 'Ritualists;' and if the wave of interest in the objects

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