ward protection, he also had a like episcopal or superintending power. Some time, however, expired before the might of human society could do its work in rendering full homage to the institution of God. Not till towards the end of this century were the forms of paganism finally superseded by the Church of Christ. Meanwhile the fourth empire had not done all its work. The Church had grown up within it till her lordly boughs had overtopped the decaying bulwarks of the dungeon which threatened her destruction. But still the mouldering fabric had some service to render towards the immortal plant which had overpowered it, and then its relics must be scattered towards the winds of heaven.-Pp. 252, 253.

Constantine's greatest service to the Church has been said to be that, by assembling the first general council at Nice, he afforded it an opportunity for laying down fixed rules of doctrine and discipline. If this was the judgment of Epiphanius but a few years after the death of Constantine, how much more strongly would the same truth have been impressed upon him, could he have foreseen the events which were coming on the world, could he have known that the age of Constantine was to be followed by that mighty overthrow which ended the supremacy of Rome! For then were the sun and moon darkened, the powers which rule this lower world were shaken from their seat, and the whole fabric of human society was changed. Those countries where the faith bore rule were occupied by savage tribes from the ends of the earth, and the very languages in which our Lord had heretofore been worshipped were done away. Henceforth Christendom was divided among so many nations, that never since that time have its bishops assembled with one consent, for the confirmation of truth or the removal of error; nor is it likely that they will again meet, till they are all gathered to render an account of their stewardship before the Son of man.

:

How important was it that this interval should be duly used, and that a fixed creed, and a concordant practice, should preserve the unity of the faith among the various and unconnected tribes of modern Christendom! The fifth empire was, indeed, to be unlike the other four it needed no human hands to shape it; its principle was not worldly subjection, but community of faith and worship. But how could it be an empire at all, what principles of truth or agreement could survive, unless, before the opportunity of conference had passed away, its principles had received that public acknowledgment of which our creeds are a lasting declaration? These creeds had existed, indeed, before the time of Constantine; they were built upon a basis as ancient as the first century; but during times of persecution they could not be publicly declared, or receive the public sanction of the collected Church. This, therefore, was the great step which it was enabled to take by the protection of Constantine; and this was the crowning blessing which it derived from the preparation made for it by the fourth empire. Pp. 254-256.

The council of Constantinople completed what the council of Nice began:

And thus was the great work of building up the Church into one

system of doctrine finally effected, a work for which God's providence seemed to have exactly provided a season, which, if once passed, could never have been recalled. Already was the Roman state tottering to its fall, and with the death of Theodosius it was finally broken up, never to be rejoined. But so completely was this fourth empire destined to be the precursor, which should vanish at the final establishment of Messiah's kingdom, that it was not till the reign of this prince, the last emperor who swayed from east to west, that the Christian was fully substituted for the pagan worship. The altar of victory, which had still remained in the Roman senate, was in his days finally condemned; "and the gods of antiquity were dragged in triumph at the chariot-wheels of Theodosius." This work had been begun by Constantine, and he had also been the first to make that formal division of the empire to which the measures of Diocletian tended, by apportioning it among his children. But its separate parts had speedily been reunited under his kinsman, the apostate Julian, who had endeavoured, with the integrity of the empire, to revive its ancient faith. Both the one and the other were finally destroyed by Theodosius, who pronounced the decisive condemnation of paganism; and whose two sons, Arcadius and Honorius, receiving respectively the inheritance of the East and West, consummated the partition of the Roman dominions. This, therefore, is the natural conclusion of ancient history; and thus ended the fourth empire-its task performed.-Pp. 269, 270.

"Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them." (Dan. ii. 35.) (Dan. ii. 35.) And now when the fragments of the Roman empire have formed into numerous kingdoms, balancing and controlling one another, and checking the growth of any earthly power which might again aspire to universal empire,—and when the progress of commerce and civilization is making the whole world one common scene of mutual action and re-action," the stone that smote the image is becoming a great mountain, and filling the whole earth.” And amidst wars and rumours of wars, amidst the conflict of opinions and interests, and the wide-spreading pestilence of daring wickedness, it is delightful to repose on the belief that all these jarring agents are working together, unconsciously, to fulfil the great purposes of God, and to bring on the time when the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, and the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ.

An Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, chiefly of England, from the First Planting of Christianity to the End of the Reign of King Charles the Second; with a brief Account of the Affairs of Religion in Ireland, collected from the best Ancient Historians, Councils, and Records. By JEREMY COLLIER, M.A. New Edition, with a Life of the Author, the Controversial Tracts connected with the History, Notes, and an enlarged Index. By FRANCIS BARHAM, ESQ. Nine Vols. 8vo. London: William Straker. 1840.

An Essay on the Welsh Saints; or, the Primitive Christians usually considered to have been the Founders of Churches in Wales. By the Reo. RICE REES, M.A., Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and Professor of Welsh at St. David's College, Lampeter. London: Longman and Co. 8vo. 1837.

AMONG what we cannot but consider the hopeful signs of the times we must rank, not merely the increasing taste for history, in itself, but the increasing tendency in thoughtful minds to view subjects in an historical, instead of a merely theoretical light: for, placed as we are under what may be called an historical dispensation, subject to the laws of time, and manifesting itself in a successive order, we forsake the analogy of our whole being and circumstances, if we long view any important matter in a merely speculative, which has also an historical aspect. Such a course of thought too surely dulls the sense of reality, in regard to any matter not immediately before us, and, weakening our faith, weakens our moral earnestness also; for there is nothing that even the most self-sufficient mind reverences less than its own speculations-nothing that, when the testing hour arrives, it is found less to confide in. Hence we may trace the Divine wisdom and care for us, in presenting to us the record of our salvation in a form so historical, illustrating its transcendent truths with so much of mortal life, and fitting it in with the course of secular history. Hence, too, as a most important and happy supplement to the great universal history, the Bible, comes that of the Church, helping, as it does, to make us feel the reality of Christ and his apostles, by placing them at one end of a chain, of which the other is grappled on ourselves and the things about us. Hence, too, the importance of an historical, instead of a merely disquisitive, vindication of our ecclesiastical position,-it is the only vindication which will really reach the heart, and permanently satisfy us. If statesmen are beginning to feel the emptiness and lifelessness of mere paper constitutions,-if the doctrine is now gaining ground among them, that, not by attempting to create a polity, but by developing and cleansing those elements of a polity which are to be found in every nation that is really a nation, is it to be made great and free,-much more should ecclesiastics beware of representing their Church, even in its less Divine features, as any thing merely coined by the brain of man. Much more should they be anxious to show, that its present

form is the result of long history, and therefore, unless there has been human apostasy, of Providential guidance; and all the more should this be our way of regarding it, when we are assailed by an adversary who knows human nature too well not to array himself with historical interest. Many and many an advantage will Rome gain over the members of our Church, if they neglect to avail themselves of this mode of defence. There is, however, as we have already implied, less risk of this than formerly: Churchmen now know how well they can carry the fight into the enemy's quarters- how signal are the advantages they can gain by studying the early ecclesiastical antiquities of Great Britain. At the same time, the more important the cause is, and the finer and truer our weapon, the more heedful should we be that we wield it worthily. The greater controversial resources are laid up for us in the early history of our country, the less grudgingly need we make a candid concession; and such a concession we may as well make, as it will be our aim at present to show, of a rather favourite argument, which some able and learned defenders of our Church have drawn from the obvious independence of Rome, enjoyed by that of ancient Britain.

It seems then to us that the great body of controversialists in the case of the independence of the Church of this island have never kept sufficiently in view the utter estrangement which remained to the last between the British and the Anglican Churches: otherwise the one party would hardly have insisted upon what is so manifest a forgery as the story of King Lucius; and the other would hardly have founded the argument, to which we have referred, for the independence of the Anglican Church upon the fact of the independence of the British. It may save, therefore, much waste of argument to point out the utter absence of connexion between these Churches, and to show that the succession of the British does not at present exist through the smallest particle of derivation.

From its very origin the Anglican Church kept cautiously aloof from deriving from the British succession in the southern part of the island. Bishops were indeed received from lona, and there was a considerable succession of them in the sees of Northumberland and Mercia; but Rome, which from the first had such influence over the Anglican Church, was extremely jealous of alliance with Churches which maintained so sturdy an indifference towards her. She therefore, at the very outset, forbade all spiritual commerce with the S. British Church, by enabling Augustine, contrary to the canons in ordinary cases, to ordain suffragans without an assisting Bishop, because he was not likely to obtain such help from Gaul (Beda, lib. i. c. 27, § 64). So rigidly was this acted upon, that when Theodore arrived, and found Chad in possession of York in virtue of a consecration at which two British Bishops had assisted, he deposed him; and it so happened that he consecrated to every see, so as utterly to extinguish any derivation from Iona, and to introduce that of Rome only. Thus every the least infusion of

descent from the original native Churches was expelled, and never afterwards received again.

This utter alienation of the Anglican from the native church causes much obscurity in the history of the British Church. Shut up in the western side of the island, with her people in perpetual hostility with the members of the Anglican Church, she is withdrawn entirely from the view of history. We only know that, however distant she kept herself from her neighbour, she could not avoid coming within the grasp of Rome. The first step of Roman influence seems to have been the adoption of the new cycle for regulating Eastertide, which was effected by Elvod, Bishop of Bangor, about the middle of the eighth century. From that moment most probably this influence advanced with steady progress, assisted, as usual, by the distracted state of the country. At length, when we come to historical facts which bring the British Church once again to view through the interference of the Anglican, we find that it differed in no respect of superstitious corruption from the rest of the subjects of Rome. It was independent of the Anglican, having its own metropolitan, but together with it, and with the Scottish, dependent upon Rome.

The first breach in its succession, which was to be replaced by the Anglican, was made by the ambitious Dunstan, who, taking advantage of the successes of Edgar, subjected Llandaff to Canterbury, consecrating, A.D. 982, Gogwgan its Bishop, with the assistance of four Anglican Bishops; and the Anglican succession_has_remained there ever since. The work was completed by Henry I., who, having reduced Wales to a province, and made her princes vassal lords, was led by his policy to make a similar subjugation of her Church. He took away the very fountain of British succession, A. D. 1115, by appointing Bernard, a Norman, Bishop of St. David's by royal mandate, and having him consecrated at Canterbury, to which see he compelled him at his consecration to profess subjection as to his metropolis. The other sees were similarly deprived of their old succession; and thus the Anglican entirely superseded it, so that not a drop of its blood (if we may so say) remained to posterity, the Bishops being sent from England, consecrated by Anglican Bishops.

Thus the old succession was lost. The new successor, however, soon forgot upon what terms he had been intruded upon his see. Bernard himself endeavoured to shake off his subjection to the see of Canterbury, and to resume the independent metropolitical powers of St. David's. He laid his case before the council summoned by Pope Eugenius at Rheims, A.D. 1148. But false testimony prevailed against him, and his death soon after put an end to further proceedings. The business was nevertheless renewed in the third council of Lateran, held A. D. 1179, by Pope Alexander III., in which the canons of St. David protested with great boldness and vehemence against the usurped supremacy of Canterbury, and maintained their metropolitical rights, demanding a commission of inquiry to be issued. Their Bishop, however, Peter, whom the king had