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be attended in its consummation with evils of the greatest magnitude?

A straight, an obvious course lies open before us. It is recommended no less by a true conception of our interests than by rights and obligations pressed home on our sense of duty by a just apprehension of worse. We are free to enter upon it, or rather to persist in following it, without any immediate sacrifices, even of a financial kind, and with no greater difficulties to encounter than must ever attend upon a course of diplomatic action limited by its object rather than by time, and applied, in concurrence with other Powers, less in earnest perhaps than ourselves, but engaged ostensibly, as we are, to the complicated affairs of a distant empire and a mistrustful government.

Should doubts remain, let the alternative, such as it is described above, be fairly and carefully weighed. Let it be weighed in connection with our special engagements. If there be any ulterior consideration, which ought to tell powerfully on the scale, it is this. A course of policy directed to the maintenance of general peace by means of an improved administrative system throughout the Turkish empire under the concurrent operation of the Porte and her allies, even if it were to fail as to the ultimate intention, would in its progress work beneficially for Europe, and more especially to the relief of millions in Turkey who are still exposed in various degrees to the joint effects of misgovernment and fanaticism.

We have not been deterred by distance or expense from seeking to correct by force of arms the perverseness of China and Mexico. In both instances we have acted in concert with allies, who, not unfairly, may be thought open to other motives of policy than those which determine our own conduct. In the case of Mexico we seem to be influenced, more or less, by the hope of contributing, directly or indirectly, to the settlement of that country on some institutional basis fitted to raise it from its present calamitous and humiliating condition. Our Government might, surely, be charged with inconsistency, to say no more, if they continued to withhold from Turkey that measure of peaceful but steady assistance, which so many powerful motives enjoin as being imperatively required for the purpose of realizing those indispensable reforms, to which they have devoted from time to time so much official correspondence and so many desultory suggestions..

We have not space for going, as we could wish, into an examination of the official correspondence to which the heading of our present article refers. We observe with satisfaction that, if

the

the required, reforms have not been constantly pressed upon the Ottoman Government with equable perseverance, they have never been left entirely out of sight, and that of late they have been urged with serious and active attention under more impressive instructions from the head of our Foreign Office. It appears that in Downing Street, and also at Constantinople, the social and administrative improvements effected in Turkey during the last twenty years are substantially acknowledged, that the importance of following them up under foreign advice is partly at least appreciated, and that no concealment is practised with respect to the consequences of neglecting them. It is but reasonable that precedency should be given to reforms in the financial department, as constituting the necessary basis of improvement elsewhere; but they are only a part of the general revivifying system commenced at Gulhané, and completed with the pacification which closed the Crimean war, a most essential part, no doubt, but still only a part, of the Imperial Charter, the whole of which, in our point of view, is needed to rescue the Turkish empire from its actual evils and eventual perils.

It

Since the preceding paragraphs went to press many of our readers have, no doubt, seen, in common with ourselves, both in public journals of high reputation and in the reports of Parliamentary Debates, more than one remarkable statement, confirming our impressions as to the capacity of the Turkish Empire for improvement, with the aid of European, advice and concurrence. appears that the agents, to whom we have already alluded, as having been sent to Constantinople for the purpose of inquiring into the real condition of the Porte's revenue, were received by the Ottoman Ministers with cordiality, and allowed in the most unreserved manner to investigate every branch of their financial accounts. Her Majesty's Government, owing to the confidential character of the inquiry, have not felt themselves at liberty to lay before Parliament the particulars reported to them by Lord Hobart and Mr. Foster; but the report has been highly praised by Mr. Layard, when speaking in the House of Commons on behalf of the Foreign Department, and the public is authorized by his language to believe, not only that the Turkish revenue is considerably more than equal to the demands upon it, but also that it is capable of much progressive, and in some respects even of an immediate increase.

The measures of reform suggested with this view are said to be simple, practical, and satisfactory to the Porte. They appear, moreover, to rest on principles long understood and applied with good effect in the greater part of Christendom. We have only

to

to express an earnest hope that the results may correspond with this promise, and that a complete financial reform will be speedily followed by the other no less necessary reforms so often recommended by the Sultan's Allies and proclaimed by the Sovereign himself in the name of humanity, of wisdom, and of justice.

ART. IV.—1. Addresses to the Candidates for Ordination on the Questions in the Ordination Service. By Samuel Lord Bishop of Oxford. Third Edition. Oxford and London, 1861. 2. Duties of the Parish Priest. By J. J. Blunt, B.D. London,

1861.

AILURES of harvests, blights on the food of Ireland, embargoes upon cotton, the want of crews to man our ships, and of soldiers to guard our coasts, the dearth of noble minds to elevate the mind of the nation, and of statesmen to guide its counsels-one loss, perhaps, in its possible results the saddest of all, of that domestic support and comfort so needed by a beloved and widowed Queen in her deep anxieties-with all these various forms of national distress England of late years has been familiar. We are now warned, by voices not likely to be mistaken, of another approaching dearth and failure, and one most formidable, which assuredly requires our attention-a failure in the supply of our clergy. More than one Bishop has signalled the approaching dearth, and even without their practical experience no prophet is required to foretell it.

The causes are obvious and various: some calling for cheerful hope and gratitude, and some for sadness and anxiety.

First and foremost stands the extraordinary resuscitation and development of the English Church, by its own spontaneous activity, within the last twenty years, to which there is probably no parallel in the whole course of ecclesiastical history. Perhaps no statistics in this statistical age would convey such a lesson, and exhibit such a picture of moral influence and energy, as a full and accurate view of the exertions and expenditure of the English Church, within that period, in the multiplication, enlargement, improvement, reconstruction, and decoration of churches, in the erection of parsonage-houses, in the creation ad maintenance of schools, in the increase and decorous performance of religious services, and, we wish it could be added, in the establishment of charitable and religious institutions. True, that this work has been wrought by comparatively few hands; that its extent is still

wholly

wholly inadequate to the real wants of the nation; that the offerings, though counted by millions, bear but a small proportion to the wealth of the empire, and to the mercies which have been showered upon it. This is not at present the question before us, but only the demand which has thus been created for an increased supply of the clergy.

In the mean time this supply has been even diminished by other causes. New fields of exertion have been opened for active and intelligent minds in India, the colonies, the civil service, and especially the army. And the extent to which this has drained the springs which previously fed the Church is to be measured by the number not merely of minds which have actually engaged in these new fields of labour, but of those which even in boyhood have thus been diverted and tempted from the contemplation of Holy Orders as a profession. The improvement which has taken place in the army alone, and the elevation of a military life, as a profession, by the trials of actual warfare, have attracted -as the experience of the heads of our Schools and Colleges will attest-a multitude of the most active, intelligent, and highprincipled minds among the young who, under other circumstances, would have devoted themselves to the Church.

Thirdly, the recent changes, by which the Legislature has divested our two great Universities of their essentially ecclesiastical character, and altered the character of their studies, and thrown open their endowments to secular competition, have necessarily diminished, to an extent very serious to contemplate, both the encouragement and opportunities for the study of Theology.

And lastly, the lamentable unsettlement of young minds, the shock which all religious faith has received from the strifes, the extravagances, the treacheries, the disappointments, the oscillations, of religious controversy, and, most of all, from the poisonous scepticism now disseminated even by teachers and authorities within the Church itself,-all this has so disturbed, and perplexed, and disheartened the most earnest and acute of young minds, that they dare not devote themselves to the Ministry. Would to God that we could stop here! Would to God there were no grounds to believe a statement recently made by one not unlikely to be cognizant of the fact!

'The doubts,' says Mr. Hughes, 'which have now to be met, have, as was sure to be the case, taken more hold on our younger men than on any others amongst us. For many years I have been thrown very much into the society of young men of all ranks. I spend a great part of my time with them. I like being with them, and I think they like being with me. I know well, therefore, how rare anything like

a living

a living faith-a faith in and by which you can live, and for which you would die--is amongst them. I know that it is becoming rarer every day. I find it every day more difficult to get them to speak on the subject they will not do so, unless you drive them to it.'Religio Laici, by Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's SchoolDays,' &c., p. 9.

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Now there is one very awful point of view, in which the failure in the supply of our Clergy will be contemplated by those who see in this world a vast battle-field between the powers of good and the powers of evil, and in the Clergy the chiefs and leaders under whom that warfare is to be waged. But such a view is too solemn for these pages. We propose rather to regard it as it would be regarded by an English Statesman, calm-minded, practical, and sober, but not superficial; one who really understands both the theory and the working of that English constitutional system, under which the vast fabric of the British Empire has grown up and been developed, and maintained upon the foundation of a rock, while all the other kingdoms of the earth have been convulsed or shattered into ruins. Let us consider what is the real work and function which the English clergy (the parochial clergy especially) actually perform in that vast complication of organised machinery by which this nation is really-governed and preserved. At the present moment there is a general recognition of its utility. Calumnies and abuse of the clergy have become a less favourite topic for popular oratory. A proposal to expel from our country parishes and our town districts all our Rectors and Curates would meet but a feeble response. And this pause and respite from attack is due partly to the absence of any political antagonism at present between the clergy and the populace, partly to the moderated tone of religious controversy (to whatever cause that moderation is to be assigned), but chiefly to the earnest yet temperate activity of the great mass of the clergy in the discharge of their duties, and to a general recognition of their value and necessity. And this value and necessity, in the view of a sound political philosophy, is probably the following.

The individual man is almost powerless for good. Till he gathers his fellows round him, concentrates, and apportions, and distributes their labours, subordinates them to one direction, and so forms an organic body, he can do nothing. The wealth, the might, the majesty, the liberty of the British empire are due not to the mere aggregation and activity of monads or units of mankind, but to social bodies, to their internal constitution, their multiplication, their adaptation to their ends, their subordination to each other.

And

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