The character of the last dismal century, Mr. Pattison has drawn with sufficient vividness: but that century armed the Church, (as we shall be presently reminded,) on the side of the "Evidences of Religion;" and if it taught her the insufficiency of such a method, the eighteenth century did its work. Above all, _it produced Bishop Butler_.--The previous century, (the seventeenth,) witnessed the supremacy of fanaticism. It saw the monarchy laid prostrate, and the Church trampled under foot, and the use of the Liturgy prohibited by Act of Parliament. The "Sufferings of the Clergy" fill a folio volume. But this was the century which produced our great Caroline Divines! From Bp. Andrewes to Bp. Pearson,--_what_ a galaxy of names! Moreover, on the side of the Romish controversy, the seventeenth century supplied the Church's armoury for ever,--Stillingfleet, who died in the year 1699, in a manner closing the strife.--The sixteenth century witnessed the Reformation of Religion, with all its inevitably attendant evils; an unsettled faith,--gross public and private injustice,--an illiterate parochial clergy:--yet how goodly a body of sound Divinity did the controversies of that age call forth! The same century witnessed the rise of Puritanism; but then, it produced Richard Hooker!--What was the character of the century which immediately preceded the Reformation,--the fifteenth?... A tangled web of good and evil has been the Church's history from the very first. The counterpart of what we read of in Eusebius and Socrates is to be witnessed among ourselves at the present day, and will doubtless be witnessed to the end! But then, in days of deepest discouragement, faithful men have never been found wanting to the English Church, (no, nor GOD helping her, ever _will_!) who, like the late Hugh James Rose, "when hearts were failing, bade us stir up the gift that was in us, and betake ourselves to our true Mother." Mean wilee, such names as George Herbert and Nicholas Farrar, Ken and Nelson, Leighton and Bishop Wilson, shine through the gloom like a constellation of quiet stars; to which the pilgrim lifts his weary eye, and _feels_ that he is looking up to Heaven! When the spirit of the Age comes into collision with the spirit of the Gospel, the result is sometimes (as in the earliest centuries,) portentous;--sometimes, (as in the last,) simply deplorable and grievous. The battle which seems to be at present waging is of a different nature. Physical Science has undertaken the perilous task of hardening herself against the GOD of Nature. We shall probably see this unnatural strife prolonged for many years to come;--to be succeeded by some fresh form of irreligion. Somewhat thus, I apprehend, will it be to the end: and the men of every age will in those conflicts find their best probation; and it will still be the office of the Creator, in this way to separate the Light from the Darkness,--until the dawn of the everlasting Morning!