by lingering illness, and gradually faded away, till, on March 17th, 1870, in his 80th year, he died at Lowestoft.

"We will not dwell on his personal history.

...

"Our object in these few lines is to draw out from his comparatively obscure career, two or three points which give it a public and permanent significance.

"(1.) Our experience has brought us into contact with many clergymen more able, more learned, more active, than Mr. Wodehouse; but we can truly say that we have rarely known one, who, without brilliant or powerful qualities, more completely represented the best characteristic type of an English clergyman. He was, first, a thorough gentleman, inside and outside to the heart's core, and to the fingers' ends, combining much of the old-fashioned courtesy of other days, with the easier, freer movement of our own time. With this was united a deep, tranquil, religious feryour, coloured visibly, though not exclusively, by the Evangelical revival of his earlier days at Cambridge, not uninfluenced by the burning zeal of the great Quaker family, whose chief pontiff-Joseph John Gurneyresided close to Norwich, and with whom Mr. Wodehouse lived on terms of affectionate intimacy. But beyond this he possessed, in an eminent degree, that firm hold on the old principles of English Church and State which gave to all his teachings and his actions a manly, upright tone, peculiarly grateful to English tastes and English hearts, and which kept alive in him the ennobling, invigorating, humanizing consciousness at once of the citizen of a free country, and of a large-minded Protestant Christian. These are characteristics on which we dwell with more emphasis, because we fear that they have of late years become rare. But in his case they gave to his whole manner, doctrine, and conversation a peculiar flavour, which none could mistake, through which his week-days and his Sundays, his politics and his religion, were

'Bound each to each by natural piety.'

"It is remarkable to see, on glancing over the list of his published sermons and pamphlets, how large a proportion bore on questions of social and national concern. One, we observe, was an impressive address to the rural population, preached in 1834, the day after the execution of some well-known criminals-an event which always awakened in his mind a deep and general interest. We remember well the pathetic tones in which, passing over the Castle Hill, of Norwich, during the trial of the murderer Rush, he quoted the famous lines of Scott

'And thou, O sad and fatal mound,

That oft hast heard the death axe sound.'

It was no weak or maudlin sentiment in him; it was the full appreciation of the seriousness of those moments when society is called to vindicate the laws of God and man against their transgressors; and to consider how far it is itself responsible for the misdeeds of those whom it condemns.

"Another sermon, which we call to mind, is a fearless protest delivered against the party spirit and corruption, which, even more than in other parts of England, disgraced the elections in the capital of East Anglia. When we call to mind the frenzy with which, in those days, even the children in the streets fought over again the political battles of their parents, the stern satisfaction with which a reprobate vagabond would, on his death-bed, murmur to his minister as his ground for hope in another world' At least I have been true to my party'-when we remember the

stories of the vast sums of money said to be expended between the top and bottom of London Lane during one of the great elections, it is clear that it required no common courage to preach, as it certainly was no common need to have called forth such protests. Surely we may trust that they have not been altogether delivered in vain.

"Other sermons we might quote, containing, in the simplest and most unpretending language, the most enlarged views of the relations of the Church to the Nonconformists in the great common work given to both —of purifying and elevating the masses of their countrymen; views the more remarkable when it is remembered that he sprung from the great Conservative family of the Wodehouses, and was presented to his first preferment by the pillar of the Conservative cause, Lord Eldon. Politically speaking, indeed, he never entirely severed his connection with them. But his sympathies, instead of being narrowed by his Churchmanship, were enlarged by it. The fact is,' we remember him once saying to us, ‘it is impossible to read the New Testament and not perceive that whatever Christianity has since become, it was in its first start a large liberal scheme 'for the good of the world, comprehending all that it could possibly touch, and asking the help of all who could possibly co-operate with it.'

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(2.) It may be inferred from this, and it may be positively stated from our general recollections, that if ever there was a clergyman who could have pursued at ease the blameless, even tenor of his way, beloved as he was alike by the higher and humbler classes, it was Charles Wodehouse. It is this which gives so instructive, we may almost say, so tragical an interest to the other side of his ministerial career, to which we now turn.

"Soon after his promotion to his Norwich canonry, which took place while he was very young, he was forcibly struck by the stringency of the forms then in use for a clergyman's subscription to the Articles and Formularies of the Church of England. Three points in particular seemed to him especially indefensible-the Form of Absolution in the Visitation Service, the Address to Priests in the Ordination Service, and above all, the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed. The more he studied these passages, the more he became convinced, not only of their unsoundness if taken in their obvious and literal sense, but of their unwarrantable intrusion into the Liturgy-the two first not having been introduced into the Church before the thirteenth century, and the last being the work of an unknown author, and condemned by many of the most eminent divines of the English Church. From a very early period in his clerical life he set himself to obtain some redress from this grievance. Pamphlet after pamphlet was published by him on the topic of Subscription; interview after interview took place with eminent prelates, asking for an authorized sanction of his deviation from the literal sense of these passages. Petition after petition was laid before the House of Lords entreating for the relaxation of the burden of the obligation either of subscription or of use. To these appeals the bishops, though sometimes expressing kindly sympathy, for the most part, lent a deaf ear. They refused to stir in the matter themselves. When the matter was stirred by others, they did their best to suppress the movement. One prelate there was-happily for Mr. Wodehouse his own diocesan-who threw himself with ardour into his cause, and steadily supported him in his trying position. Bishop Stanley well knew the value of Mr. Wodehouse as a man and a clergyman, and he was determined not to see him sacrificed for the holding of opinions which he well knew were consciously or unconsciously held by hundreds of clergymen, who had not the clearness of head or the uprightness of conscience to acknowledge them. On one occasion on the Bishop's appointment of Mr. Wodehouse

to some post of ecclesiastical importance, forty or more clergy remonstrated against the nomination, on the ground of the objections which he had. expressed to the Athanasian anathemas. The Bishop at once quashed the proceeding by refusing to receive their memorial, unless each one of them separately stated the sense in which they accepted the questionable passages. They retired; and it need hardly be said that the memorial was no more heard of. But the protection of a single bishop was not adequate for the permanent retention of the sensitive canon. The scruple which had thus taken possession of, perhaps, a too susceptible mind, and of which the rulers of the Church at large took so little heed, recurred again and again. He used to say to a friend, My dear, I have no genius-I have no 'scholarship-to fight this battle. I have only one weapon, and that is 'the resignation of my preferment.' That weapon his generous diocesan would never allow him to use. Indeed, as long as Bishop Stanley lived, a less sanguine man than Charles Wodehouse might have been assured that the questions which agitated his mind would not be allowed to slumber.

"But the time came when that hope was quenched. Others succeeded, as kindly perhaps disposed towards him, but with a less keen appreciation of his difficulties; and after a struggle of nearly forty years, he ultimately resigned his ecclesiastical position and preferment, and with it the home and sphere in which else he might have lived and died, useful to all around him, and beloved and honoured to the end.

"It is painful to think that only within a few years after his retirement into privacy and obscurity-but too late for him to profit by it-an Act was passed by the almost unanimous assent of Parliament and Convocation, abolishing the very form of Subscription that had so oppressed his sensitive mind, and which for so many years so large a portion of the Episcopate and the clergy had refused to touch, or even approach. It is instructive, too, to observe that those damnatory anathemas, of which he so long pointed out in vain the vexatious burdensomeness, are every year sinking inevitably and unredeemably under the accumulated indignation of both laity and clergy; and that no one who watches the expressions of public opinion can doubt the near arrival of that day when those unchristian words will be no more heard in our churches, making sad the hearts of those whom God has not made sad, and strengthening the hands of those whose strength is weakness.

"The particular mode in which Mr. Wodehouse worked towards his end may be questioned, but it must have been a satisfaction to him to see that it had not been altogether fruitless. Meanwhile his life remains as a warning to those in the high places of the Church, who having it in their power to retain in its service its best and ablest ministers, either refuse to use that power or defer to use it till it is too late. His life remains also an example to those who remain, not merely in those gentle, persuasive, Christian graces which won their way to every heart, but as a stimulus to all who feel, with him, that the strength of the English Church lies not in its contraction, but in its enlargement; not in imposing burdens, but in removing them. To some, as to him, retirement from a post of honour and duty may seem the best or only weapon that they can use; to others, such retirement may seem to be a step only to be adopted in the very last resort-when the Institution to which we belong has become evidently and hopelessly irreconcileable with the wants of the age. But to all who desire the reform, and hope for the preservation of that Institution, the unceasing struggles of the venerable pastor who now lies in the churchyard of Lowestoft may well be recorded as honourable and edifying incentives in the cause of truth, charity, and honesty, which is the cause of true religion."

It is sometimes said that the scruples of individuals cannot be taken into account in large societies, and that individual protests are of no avail against a powerful majority. In the present case it is not without importance to observe that the scruples of individuals have come to represent the feeling of the nation, and that the small minority has become an overwhelming majority. What may be the ultimate issue of the question remains to be seen. The Creed itself may be long retained as a singular and interesting monument of feelings long gone by, and of an endeavour to state great Biblical truths in the logical forms of an carlier age. But the admissions of its defenders have inflicted on its authority and on its enforced public use a blow which it can never recover; and it is not too much to hope that, whilst every care is taken not rudely to shock the associations of those who cling to it as a venerable relic of former times, and who believe it to be a bulwark of doctrines, dear to Christian hearts, the conscience of the English Church will by some means be relieved of what has long been felt to be a heavy burden, and the aspirations of Jeremy Taylor and Tillotson, of Baxter and of Arnold, will be at last fulfilled.

A. P. STANLEY.

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APOLEON III. has at length in plain truth "crowned the edifice" reared by his own hands. Whether that visit of the Emperor to Rheims-the city of French coronations-from the panic-stricken camp at Châlons, which was so confidently and repeatedly reported a few days ago, were due to any dim, melancholy association with this sad crowning of his work, which will to all moral certainty discrown himself, it may seem something of a conceit to suggest; but that he himself and all his very few honest supporters must see a vital connexion between his régime of power, his policy throughout his twenty-one years of government and his eighteen years of empire, and the sudden ruin which has now fallen upon his plans, can hardly be doubted at all. That ruin is indeed so great, and has enveloped with such awful abruptness the most restless and brilliant of the States of Europe, that it is hardly yet possible for the imagination to grasp the full significance of the events which are already all but accomplished. However stout the defence which France may still make, and however successful its results, there is no manner of doubt that if she extricates herself from this invasion without the loss of territory, even though she consents to pay an enormous fine, she will achieve much more than it is reasonable at the present juncture to expect. In any case, the result of the war