mould the national character. Before that, there were the feudal traditions, and the influence of the Church in many places. There has been a great deterioration of the national character within the last fifty years.

"The Church has certainly made considerable progress since the year 1840, but I cannot say that it has been wholly satisfactory, nor so great as it should have been. We have suffered, as well as profited, by the close overshadowing of the great Church of England. It has made our Church's administration very unnational, and thereby has deprived us of any help from feelings which ought to have been enlisted on the Church's side, but which have gone to strengthen Presbyterianism. I do not think that any blessing followed on the decision of 1863, to deprive our national Liturgy of authority, in order to gain admission to English livings. Still, progress has been made. The laity take more interest in Church work; there is more of a corporate and less of a congregational spirit; and I hope the laity will soon receive more privileges as to voting in synod, from which I augur good.

"The Drummondite schismatics have no footing in Scotland. Their influence for evil lies in their dividing the sympathies of the Church of England, and making the Low-Church party dislike us. They also supply an argument to the expediency party among ourselves, to give up somewhat more of the truth in order to persuade them to come back. But I do not think this will be done.

"You ask about the character of the town congregations. This is very different north and south of the Forth. In the north, they embrace a sample of all classes; but in Edinburgh and Glasgow they are principally confined to the gentry and to the very poor. Presbyterianism has quite failed in dealing with the lapsed masses. Indeed, the ministers neglect them altogether, leaving them to an inferior grade called city missionaries, and consisting of men who have not been able to get on in the ministry.

The

"One marked feature about recent Presbyterianism has been the great spread of translations of German theology. I suppose you know how barren Scotch Presbyterianism has been of theologians; and yet this cannot be due to any outward causes. livings are good, and the work makes little demand upon their time; but it is generally remarked that they are not a learned body. I am afraid the Church also has fallen off in this way, since the great influx of English influence. Fifty years ago we had more writers than we have now, though our numbers were much smaller.

"I fear that a good deal of harm has been done by the primary charge of the Bishop of Brechin, sixteen years ago. In it he advocated the new doctrine put forward by Mr. R. Wilberforce, and thereby divided the High Church party into two portions, which have never acted together cordially since. . . ."

The Holy Communion; its Philosophy, Theology, and Practice. By John Bernard Dalgairns, Priest of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. Third edition. New York: The Roman Catholic Publishing House.

UDGING from some hints in the preface to the third edition,

JUDG

we infer that this work has become somewhat of a standard book on the great subject of which it treats. Its divisions are indicated in the title. We have never met with any work which so clearly and intelligibly exhibits the type of religious life and inward experience which dogmatic Roman Catholic teaching generates; and it is in this view that we propose to examine it. The author, we infer, is a pervert from the English Church, and there is an English manliness in his discussion which would hardly be met with in any one who had not enjoyed the benefits of an English university education.

Thus we have in this work this advantage,-that the author goes into the question philosophically, and more thoroughly than usual. He is not satisfied with merely repeating the commonplaces from Aquinas and Aristotle about substance and accidents, but deliberately, and in a scholarly way, attempts to show what there is in the modern forms of philosophical thought which bears upon the doctrine of the real presence as set forth by the decree of Innocent III., and maintained by Roman theologians ever since his day. In this we pro

pose to follow him, with an inquiry into the justness of his conclusions, as compared with what may be regarded as the teaching of Anglican divines. We shall then consider the bearing of this doctrine upon the religious life to which it naturally tends.

I.

.

The dogma of transubstantiation having been decreed, it devolved upon St. Thomas Aquinas, the great doctor of the thirteenth century, to formulate a philosophy by which it could be sustained. The philosophy then recognized was that of Aristotle; and our author proceeds to give a résumé of it, as he supposes it to have been taught by one of the disciples of St. Thomas, lecturing at Oxford, and we quote accordingly:

"Matter was not considered to be an actual force, gifted with certain determinate properties by God. It was a mere dead, inactive element, with no quality at all of its own, but capable of becoming the subject of any qualities whatsoever on the infusion of certain occult entities, called in scholastic language, forms. It is difficult for us to conceive a system so utterly at variance with our modes of thought; but we must simply accept it as a fact, that such was the opinion, universally taught by our ancestors, in the schools of Paris, Oxford, and Salamanca, and all over the face of Europe. . . They imagined that each successive change was caused by the infusion, from without, of the new quality which it assumed. Each quality they looked upon as a separate form, perfectly adventitious to the matter. Hardness, fluidity, color, sweetness, shape, gravity, even extension, were each a separate entity, which was, so to speak, imposed upon the matter, not natural to it. Of these forms, some were accidental, others substantial; but all were equally separable from, and foreign to, the matter to which they belonged.

. . All qualities were looked upon as grouped around the quiddity or substance of the object; and, consequently, separable from the reality, as well as the idea, at least by God's power, even if inseparable naturally."

Upon this basis of philosophy, the teacher (pp. 26, 27), a lecturer at Oxford, is supposed to discourse as follows:

"See now what Jesus does in the Blessed Sacrament. Never, for a moment, does He lose His absolute power over the creatures of His hand. The activities of all nature's varied forms are by His permission, nay, are rather the results of His presence; for when we say that He is present everywhere, we do not mean that He is

there as a spectator. He is there by essence, presence, and power; and with Him to be present is to act and to give out virtue.. The substantial form which united with the matter, is erected into an individual substance, as well as each accidental form which gives gives color, substance, shape, taste, or any other quality, all those are but the result of the activity of Him who is ever at work, yet ever at rest. Why, then, can He not, with a word, take away the substantial form and matter of bread, and leave only the accidental forms, which He himself gave them? Why can He not, with one and the same word, substitute the substance, that is, the matter and substantial form, with all the accidents of the body of Jesus, for the bread, which was there, by a miraculous exertion of force, which we may well call by the name of transubstantiation" (p. 29).

But there is still another question:

"How is it that the body of Jesus can be in heaven and on many altars of the earth at once?"

The answer to this question resolves itself into the assertion that we do not know but God may take away from a body the property of extension, a limitation in respect to space. "Let God only reduce a body to the state of pure substance, and it ceases to be extended, without ceasing to be a body. This is what God has done to the body of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament." "Such was the idea of the miracle of transubstantiation taught by the great saint of the middle ages. It is a beautiful relic of a time when men believed in God far otherwise than they do now." We may add, that it exhibits to us the effort of a devout teacher to explain, by a crude philosophy, one of the deepest of mysteries to the apprehension of the understanding; and is no less an example of intellectual curiosity than of implicit faith. This is the philosophy which Innocent III., by his decree, erected into an article of faith, to be believed under peril of damnation.

The peripatetic philosophy has passed away, and been forgotten; but the dogma still stands, and there is the same obligation upon every faithful member of the Roman Church to believe it. But the progress of modern thought does not allow that the dogma should be inculcated, without some attempt at a philosophy to explain it. The introduction of so much German and English culture, as has of late years been added to the Church of Rome, has created a necessity for bringing this cardinal dogma, this shibboleth of Roman Catholicism, into harmony with the forms of modern thought; and this is the task to which Father Dalgairns has addressed himself.