Others there are who honestly admit that these ages, especially their earlier part, are not Protestant, but at the same time contend that neither are they favourable to Roman doctrine. These believe that facts abundantly prove that in the bosom of the Church which was then, the two Churches were to be found, which afterwards disengaged themselves from one another at the Reformation. This is the philosophy of medieval history which, as we learn from the preface to his collection of _Sacred Latin Poetry_,(1) has recommended itself to Dr. Trench, the present Protestant Archbishop of Dublin. “In Romanism we have the residuum of the middle-age Church and theology, the lees, after all, or well nigh all the wine was drained away. But in the medieval Church we have the wine and lees together—the truth and the error, the false observance and yet at the same time the divine truth which should one day be fatal to it—side by side.” For such thinkers the sum of all the history of that period amounts to this: a long struggle between two Churches—one a Church of truth, the other a Church of error—a struggle which, however, ended happily in the triumph of the Church of truth by the Reformation, in which the truth was purified from its contact with error. It is not without its advantages to know what views the occupant of an Irish see so distinguished, is led to take, of the Church to which seventy-seven out of every hundred Irishmen belong, with all the convictions of their intellects, and all the love of their hearts. It seems to us that his theory is not likely to satisfy any party; it goes too far to please some, and stops short too soon to be agreeable to others. But what strikes us most of all in it is the fatal inconsistency of its parts. Of this the very book to which it serves as preface is proof enough. Dr. Trench’s position is this. He tells his Protestant readers that whereas in the medieval Church there was a good church, and an evil, all the good has found its resting place in Protestantism, all the evil in tyrannical Rome. Whatever of good, of holy, of pure, has ever been said or done within the Church, Protestants are the rightful inheritors of it all. From the treasury of the Church before the Reformation he proposes to draw, and to collect in this work what his readers may live on and love, and what he is confident will prove wholesome nourishment for their souls. He would set before them the feelings of the Church during these thousand years of her existence, and would summon from afar, from remote ages, “voices in which they may utter and embody the deepest things of their hearts”. Such, he assures them, are the voices of the writers whose poems have found a place in his book. Now, if we are to understand that the two ante-Reformation Churches stood out quite distinctly, one from the other, in open antagonism, like Jerusalem and Babylon, each having its own position more or less clearly defined, we should naturally expect to find in Dr.