We are surprised then to find how slightly Mr. Pattison's Essay fulfils its avowed purpose. The learned author does not, in fact, _directly_ "handle" the class of subjects referred to, _at all_: or if he does, it is achieved in a couple of pages. And yet it is not difficult to point out the part which his Essay performs in the general scheme of this guilty volume. With whatever absence of "concert or comparison" the authors may have severally written, the fatal effect of their combined endeavours is not more apparent than the part sustained by each Essay singly in promoting it. While Mr. Goodwin demolishes the Law, and Dr. Williams disbelieves the Prophets; while Professor Powell denies the truth of Miracles, and Professor Jowett evacuates the authority of Holy Scripture altogether--while Dr. Temple substitutes the inner light of Conscience for an external Revelation; and Mr. Wilson teaches men how they may turn the substance of Holy Scripture into a shadow, evade the plain force of language, and play fast and loose with those safeguards which it has been ever thought that words supply;--Mr. Pattison, reviewing the last century and a half of our own Theological history, labours hard to produce an impression that, _here_ also "all is vanity and vexation of spirit." He calls off our attention from the Bible, and bids us contemplate the unlovely aspect of the English "religious world" from the Revolution of 1688 down to the publication of the 'Tracts for the Times,' in 1833[133]. "Be content for a while, (he seems to say,) to disregard the prize; and observe the combatants instead. Listen to the historian of moral and religious progress," while he depicts "decay of religion, licentiousness of morals, public corruption, profaneness of language, a day of rebuke and blasphemy." Come attend to me; and I will draw the likeness of "an age destitute of depth or earnestness; an age whose poetry was without romance, whose philosophy was without insight, and whose public men were without character; an age of 'light without love,' whose 'very merits were of the earth, earthy.'" (p. 254.) "If we would understand our own position in the Church, and that of the Church in the age; if we would hold any clue through the maze of religious pretension which surrounds us; we cannot neglect those immediate agencies in the production of the present, which had their origin towards the beginning of the eighteenth century." (p. 256.) Let us then "trace the descent of religious thought, and the practical working of the religious ideas," (p. 255,) through some of the phases they have more recently assumed. You shall see the Apostles tried on a charge "of giving false witness in the case of the Resurrection of JESUS;" (p. 303;) and pronounced "not guilty," by one whose "name once commanded universal homage among us;" but who now, (!) with South (!!) and Barrow, (!!!) "excites perhaps only a smile of pity." (p. 265.) You