made to the law. The law courts had been appealed to in the recent controversies on doctrine, with the result that, except in very extravagant cases, they practically declined to pronounce on the doctrinal questions submitted to them, and left matters as they were. But when questions of ritual came before them, involving a great number of separate points, some of them apparently of a very minute character, they followed a different course. They pronounced very peremptorily and decisively. They treated the Ritualists' contention as groundless, and their arguments as futile and hardly serious. They prohibited without hesitation, and they marked their disapproval of the claims of the Ritualists by giving, in most of the cases, costs against them.

When once the appeal to the law by the opponents of the Ritualists had been successful, other things followed. Inferior courts necessarily followed the ruling of superior ones. One superior court naturally had regard to the ruling and judgment of a former one. The matter was assumed to be removed from the sphere of argument; and when recourse to the law had proved so successful, it is not to be wondered at that it should become the convenient instrument of controversy. The courts had entered on the task of practically making the law for the Church on the customs of public worship, and they were making it as the party opposed to the Ritualists desired. The Ritualists found themselves in a position in which none of the previous religious movements in the Church had been placed. They found themselves, in matters purely of religious interest, with the law set in motion against them. They saw, too, that under the impulse given, the law might claim to meddle with other things besides Ritualism.

The early prosecutions of Ritualists had been the ventures of individuals. Their success led to an organisation on a large scale, to carry on the legal war. And to make matters worse, a step was taken, which confirmed and encouraged them in their policy. Nominally to expedite and cheapen ecclesiastical suits-a purpose to which the results have been in the oddest contrast-really, as everybody knew, to stamp out Ritualism,' the Public Worship Regulation Act was passed. The authorities of the Church called in the help of the State to scourge the heretics of the hour. An Act of the Imperial Parliament passed to put down certain dresses and lights and gestures of reverence, which those who objected to them sneered at as contemptible trifles.

Throughout the course of the controversy, two inconsistent lines of objection have been taken by the critics of Ritualism. Their doings have been alternately represented as mere 'man-millinery,' and 'tomfoolery? unworthy of a sensible man's interest; and then, as so formidable as to justify measures against them quite without precedent in our later religious history. First their practices were matters

of utter indifference; then they were things which threatened the faith and the Church. I do not see what answer can be made to the Ritualist dilemma. If the things for which we claim liberty are so unspeakably unimportant, why do you not leave us alone? if you are right in taking so much trouble to put them down, it must be because they are important, and it is natural that we should fight for them; but you have no business to abuse us for making a fuss about childish follies when you get Acts of Parliament to suppress them. Of course every one knows that a deep theological antagonism is at the bottom of the dispute. But the Ritualists have a right to say that here they are within the law, and challenge their opponents to attack them on this ground.

The truth is, that the attempt of the Ritualists to find some intelligent basis for the details of public worship ought to have been met in a more patient and far-sighted way by the authorities of the Church. Granting all that was provoking and self-willed in some of the Ritualists, they were not all of this temper; bishops, too, have to deal with other provoking men besides Ritualists. The Ritualists really had something to say for themselves, and they found it hard to get a fair hearing. The bishops, some of them at least, made two mistakes: they failed in the power of imagining a state of things in public worship, of a different type from what custom had made familiar; and they undervalued the men whom they looked upon as their opponents. No doubt to a person accustomed all his life to the old-fashioned English surplice, the proposal to put on a cope or chasuble must have seemed at first extravagantly ludicrous. He would first ridicule it as preposterous. He would then become indignant at it as a puerile attention to trifles. People forget the wise saying, that all ceremonies appear ridiculous to those who are out of sympathy with what they imply. Public sarcasm has not always spared lawn sleeves and judges' wigs; and democratic critics have been heard to speak disrespectfully of the Order of the Garter. If the question of the reasonableness of the Ritualist interpretation could be settled, the question of custom and familiarity would settle itself in due time, like many other changes from the ecclesiastical customs of our youth, and even manhood. But, for various reasons, the bishops as a body-judicious and cautious men-did not at first take in the strength of the Ritualist case, and thought to repress innovations by authority. They had to deal with men who, on their own subject, knew what they were talking about; and the unfortunate prejudice that the whole affair was a dispute about trifles prevented their superiors from feeling this. It seemed impossible à priori that the Ritualists could be right, and their reasons were discussed not on their merits, but on grounds of policy and the general aspect of things. The natural results followed: increasing want of sympathy on one side, increasing sense, on the other, of being treated unreason

ably and unfairly, without real knowledge of their case or considera-> tion for their objects: harsh acts and words on one side; alienation and resistance on the other; till it has come to this, that people accept. with a grave face the idea of putting down gestures and preventing more or less of reverence by the powers of law; and we have had two or three clergymen in prison, and another deprived, for disobedience to the ruling of the courts on these points.

It is a very old maxim that if people try to settle differences by the wrong methods they only inflame them. Litigation is not the right way to settle differences which mean nothing if they do not arise out of deep religious convictions. At any risk, even the risk of cases of non-compliance with their bishop's directions on the part of Ritualists, unable to convince him, and whom he could not persuade, litigation ought from the first to have been steadily discouraged, and the more so when it sprang, as recent litigation has done, not out of legitimate complaints of disturbed parishes, but from party policy and the merely colourable interest of prosecutors like Dr. Julius at Clewer. All reasonable men owe a great debt of gratitude to the Bishop of Oxford for the stand which he made in the interests of the whole Church in a case which presented such a ludicrous counterfeit of the aggrieved parishioner; but the stand ought to have been made more widely and earlier. No one can wonder at the bishops' having been surprised and disturbed at the proposals of the Ritualists. We are all creatures of habit, and occasionally mistake habit for something settled and perpetual in the nature of things. But it is to be wished that they had earlier remembered how often it happens in life that what shocks us at first sight as unreasonable alters its aspect on closer acquaintance and on longer familiarity; and had considered that it might turn out that there was more truth in the Ritualist allegations, and more practical good in the Ritualist recommendations, than at first seemed likely. That this is so, certainly seems to be the opinion of an increasing number of sober clergymen who could not be called Ritualists; and if more of us had had the sagacity to recognise this sooner, some, probably, of our troubles and scandals might have been spared us. I suppose that most of us can trace in ourselves more than one change of opinion and feeling on the points raised by Ritualism. We have all had much to learn, and what we have learned has confessedly raised the standard of public worship in our churches. Such an experience ought to warn us against being precipitate, even when at the moment we are startled and do not approve. Undoubtedly bishops are bound to prevent hasty changes from being forced on unwilling congregations; but the history of the last forty years shows to what extent the feeling of congregations and parishes alters as to what is seemly and necessary for proper care and reverence in divine service.

It may be that the whole question is entering on a new stage. If so, it is to be hoped that the matters involved in it will be discussed

on their merits, and without the complications produced by charges of insubordination, lawlessness, and rebellion, which have confused and embittered it hitherto. It is really time to say that to talk of anarchy in the Church is a misleading and dangerous exaggeration. The clergy as a body, even those few who differ sharply and painfully with their bishops, are honestly loyal, and earnestly desirous both to receive guidance and to render obedience; and this is not anarchy. In the strong cases of difference, where clergymen have acted on their own responsibility and taken the consequences, real and important constitutional questions are raised, on which they may be right or wrong; but these questions could be fought out in no other way, in our present circumstances, than in the way of resistance; and in spite of the vehement and often inexcusable language used on all sides, there has been no intention, in the great majority of these cases, of impairing episcopal authority, or of setting at nought the law. It is indeed one of the wants of our time to strengthen episcopal government; but this must be done by reasonable methods; and the vow of canonical obedience must not be taken, any more than the woman's vow in marriage, to mean unlimited submission in judgment and conduct. But if appeals to law go on, we must remember that law is for all of us. It will not do to be throwing about charges of lawlessness while we ourselves ignore the law. Even on the theory of the opponents of the Ritualists we none of us knew what the law was, till the Court of Appeal declared it. If that law is accepted, it must be accepted in earnest; it must be accepted by all, in high station or low; it must curtail the liberty which some of us prize of being content with elastic customs which are not law, but which it would be disagreeable to change. And more than this, this view introduces a principle of strict and rigorous exactness in carrying out rubrical law, which may create unexpected embarrassment, from the peremptoriness of some directions, and the looseness and imperfection of others. And the persons who will have to enforce this legal strictness will be, not aggrieved parishioners, but our ecclesiastical superiors.

R. W. CHURCH.

THE TRANSVAAL.

THE Transvaal is singular, even in the most unhistoric regions of South Africa, from having no authentic history beyond the memory of men now living; it has nevertheless, during such brief period, passed through more revolutions than many ancient states during their whole existence, involving four almost complete changes of ruling races, Bechuanas, Zulus, Dutch, and English.

Men now alive can remember when the greater part of the Transvaal was thickly peopled by Bechuanas, a nation far in advance of their Kaffir and Zulu brethren of the great Bantu family, as regards all the arts of life. Fifty years ago the Bechuanas had been so harassed by Zulu invasions, especially by the great inroad of Moselekatze, that those who escaped massacre had fled towards the Kalahari Desert to Secocoeni's country and to Basutoland. English sportsmen, in 1836, saw elephants, rhinoceroses, and giraffes in the fertile valleys among the recent ruins of populous Bechuana villages where now stand Pretoria and Potchefstrom. They visited the camp of Moselekatze, the Zulu chief, 'the Attila of South Africa' as he was called, the cause of the more recent devastation, just as he was encountering the 'Vortrekkers,' the leaders of the great Boer emigration, who, after many reverses and much severe fighting, finally drove him to the north-east, where he died, leaving his son to rule over his people, the Matabele (Zulus), who had finally settled in the land where they now dwell, 600 miles north of Zululand.

The tendency of the Dutch Boers in the Cape Colony to emigrate beyond the colonial boundary appears to date from the earliest years of Dutch settlement. There are on the statute book of the Dutch governors various regulations which aimed at repressing this tendency. Some of the colonists, after settling for years on what was then the frontier of the colony, were in the habit of seeking, in the then unexplored regions beyond the colonial boundary, a land of less administrative restraint on their wanderings. Efforts were made to restrain this tendency, by legal penalties; but nevertheless a steady emigration of the more enterprising inhabitants of the colony had been going on for generations when it received a sudden fresh impulse from the emancipation of the slaves in the old colony. Little discretion