highest, in the due conditions. Says Mivart: "Sir John Lubbock quotes with approval from Mr. Sproat the opinion that the difference between the savage and the cultivated mind is merely between the more or less aroused condition of the one and the same mind. The quotation is made in reference to the Ahts of North-western America: 'The native mind, to an educated man, seems generally to be asleep; and, if you suddenly ask a novel question, you have to repeat it while the mind of the savage is awaking, and to speak with emphasis until he has quite got your meaning."" And Darwin says: "The Fuegians rank among the lowest barbarians; but I was continually struck with surprise how closely the three natives on board his majesty's ship 'Beagle' who had lived some years in England and could talk a little English, resembled us in disposition and in most of our mental qualities." And again: "The American aborigines, negroes, and Europeans differ as much from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, while living with the Fuegians on board the 'Beagle,' with the many little traits of character, showing how similar their. minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate."

THE CATHOLIC WORLD for June has an admirable article on THE REFORMED EPISCOPAL CHURCH, containing a very clear view of its origin, history, and prospects, written with candor from the Roman stand-point, and for that reason exhibiting the various phases of the subject. We take the liberty of presenting most of the article before our readers:

In the autumn of the year 1873 a gathering of Evangelical Christians of all lands and all denominations was held in the city of New York, under the auspices of the Evangelical Alliance. During the sitting of this conference the present Dean of Canterbury (Dr. R. Payne Smith) and Bishop Cummins, an assistant bishop of the Diocese of Kentucky, partook of the Lord's Supper in a Presbyterian meeting-house-an act which gave great offense to many English and American Episcopalians of the HighChurch and ritualistic schools of thought. The authorities of the new sect inform us that the tempest raised proved to Bishop Cummins that all hope of true catholicity in the Protestant Episcopal Church of America was at an end, so he thought it necessary to resign his office. In his letter of resignation, dated November 10, 1873, Bishop Cummins gave three reasons for his

withdrawal: 1st, the progress of ritualism, which he was powerless to stop; 2d, the conviction that the root of the evil was in the prayer book; 3d, the anti-Christian outcry against the united communion. He concluded his letter in the following words: "I therefore leave the Church in which I have labored in the sacred ministry for twenty-eight years, and transfer my work and office to another sphere of labor. I have an earnest hope and confidence that a basis for the union of all Evangelical Christendom can be found in a communion which shall retain or restore a primitive episcopacy and a pure scriptural liturgy."

Immediately after his secession he proceeded to organize the new communion which he had called into existence; a bishop was consecrated in the person of Dr. Cheney, and a new prayer book was adopted, from which all passages supposed to have a Puseyite tendency were eliminated, something after the mode of that which Lord Ebury and the Prayer Book Revision Society have endeavored to introduce into England. Meanwhile the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church, from which he had seceded, held a meeting and agreed that he should be formally deposed. By their canon law, however, they discovered they could do nothing in the matter for six months. The Reformed Episcopal Church was, therefore, well started before the bishops of the other Church had time to degrade their seceding brother-a fact which gave great force to the movement.

It remains to be seen whether it is likely to continue to increase, but there can be no doubt that it has hitherto made great progress. We find from the official report (1879) that it extends from British Columbia and the remote Bermudas to England, that it has five bishops, nearly a hundred clergy, and numbers its communicants by thousands, and that it already possesses a university nobly endowed. It is stated that in England within the last three months the missionary chaplain has inaugurated four Churches, and that its clergy are at work in nine dioceses.

A schism already appears to have broken out in its ranks, for in some announcements we are told that Bishop Sugden is the presiding bishop in England, and in others that Bishop Gregg is the primate. Various recriminating letters have also passed between the contending parties, who apparently are opposed to one another more on the question of jurisdiction than that of doctrine. Attention was drawn to the whole movement in the year 1878 by the charges of two Anglican bishops, (Chichester and St. Albans,) who in pompous language declared that intruders, under the guise of Anglican bishops and clergy, had appeared in their dioceses and performed services that could scarcely be distinguished from those of the Established Church of the country. The appointment and consecration of a bishop in the person of Dr. Toke, who had formally seceded from the Anglican communion after the Bennet judgment, gave rise to much criticism, especially from the fact that his consecrator, Bishop Gregg, had been formerly vicar of a well-known Church

near Birmingham and a distinguished member of the Evangelical party. This proceeding drew down strong denunciations from the Bishop of St. Albans, who solemnly warned the laity of his diocese of the snare that was laid for them. Bishop Toke had been, till within a few months of his consecration, rector of Knossington, a village near Oakham, in the Midland District, and was a member of the committee for the Old Testament revision. Both the Bishops of Chichester and St. Albans, in attacking this new sect, assumed the Catholic argument—i. e., they entered a protest against any one intruding into the diocese of a lawful bishop as ipso facto committing an act of schism, and in high-flown language warned the people against the want of jurisdiction on the part of the new sect. The Bishop of St. Albans went further, for he assumed the complete invalidity of Dr. Gregg's orders, and denied that he had any right to officiate at all. The correspondence is amusing. Dr. Gregg writes thus:

66

"MY LORD: In your charge delivered on Tuesday you not only questioned the validity of my consecration as derived from a deposed bishop of the American Episcopal Church, but you failed to state the real reason for the formation of the Reformed Episcopal Church in this country-viz., the extreme sacerdotalism which almost every-where prevails and will ruin the Church of England. The bishop through whom the historical succession reached me had his consecration directly through the Anglican communion, and had not been deposed when the succession was transmitted through him to the three bishops by whom I was validly and canonically consecrated. That there is a real cause for the existence of the Reformed Episcopal Church in this country is witnessed by the fact that in the diocese of St. Albans alone we have hundreds, if not thousands, of active sympathizers, and those not entirely confined to the laity. The cries which reach me from oppressed * churchmen in many places for an evangelical ministry are indeed distressing, and convince me, much as we all love the dear old Church of England, that when she ceases to be Protestant she must cease to exist. I am, my Lord, etc.;

"HUSBAND GREGG, D.D., M.D., Bishop." In reply the Bishop of St. Albans 'wrote as follows:

"REV. SIR: You assert that the bishop through whom the historical succession reached you had his consecration directly through the Anglican communion, and had not been deposed when the succession was transmitted. I presume that the bishop to whom you refer was Dr. Cummins. My statement was that this bishop, though not yet formally deposed, lay under prohibition from performing any episcopal act, which prohibition was publicly notified December 1, 1873, just a fortnight before he proceeded to consecrate that bishop through whom, as you say, you derived the historical succession. I have authority to state

that none of the American bishops have ever recognized as valid the act of pretended consecration performed by Dr. Cummins, or any act growing out of it. I am, etc.,

"T. L., St. Albans."

It is curious that the Bishop of St Albans should fail to see that according to his line of argument the Reformation of the sixteenth century was wrong. If it is wrong now (assuming, of course, that the present Protestant prelates were real bishops) for Dr. Gregg to start a new Church in England because he considers that the existing one has fallen into grievous error, it must have been equally wrong for Henry VIII. or Dr. Cranmer to have done so; and yet the Bishops of Chichester and St. Albans cannot justify their position without admitting that their ancestors attacked the existing Church of their day. Again, if it is wrong for Bishop Gregg to intrude into their dioceses, on what grounds do they justify the conduct of the body to which they belong in France, Germany, Italy, and over the Continent of Europe? If they declare that the invalidity of Bishop Gregg's orders is sufficient to prevent their regarding him as a bishop, on what grounds can they object to Catholics for using a similar line of argument against themselves? In the debate on this subject by the bishops assembled in convocation, as reported in the Guardian of May 5, 1878, one of that body informed his brethren that Rome invariably ignored all Churches but herself, and that, though Anglicans might object to her line of conduct in partitioning England into dioceses and ignoring the Establishment, she only acted according to precedent, but that such was not the case with any other episcopal communion. Some of the bishops not only objected to the action of the Reformed Episcopal communion, but even ignored the validity of the orders of its clergy. Others, like the Bishop of Winchester, admitted that there was episcopal ordination. The majority, while they repudiated the new sect, were of opinion that the excesses of the Ritualistic party had brought it into life, and that as long. as Ritualism prevailed, so long would the Reformed Episcopal Church continue to develop and increase.

It is an acknowledged fact that a great change has, within the last forty or fifty years, come over the Established Church in England, and that extreme forms of ritualism have been practiced by a large body of clergy which are offensive to many. It is, therefore, not surprising that a Church professing to be a "Reformed Church of England" should by such persons have been deemed necessary. Low-Churchmen do not realize the guilt of schism as High-Churchmen do, nor do they hold the same notions as regards the apostolical succession. They prefer bishops to presbyters, as being more respectable and more convenient, but attach small importance as to the manner by which the bishops originally obtained their orders of jurisdiction. It is probable, therefore, that if Ritualism should continue to increase there will be a large accession to the new sect from the ranks of

the Evangelicals. It is curious to observe the importance that is attached to the question of the validity of orders by Bishop Gregg. He is careful to point out that his consecration was lawfully and canonically derived from the same source as the existing prelates of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, and that he is, therefore, a valid bishop, even in the eyes of the HighChurch party.

"Our Church Record," the official organ of this sect, published monthly, thus writes in the October number for 1879: "Our Church has already ruffled the Anglican episcopal bench, it has disturbed the drowsiness of Convocation; it has fluttered the Church papers, and by God's blessing it will yet before long awaken echoes in the representative chamber at Westminster." ... "Our Church is not intended to be either a proselytizing trap nor a cave of Adullam." . . . "The final result of the solemn meeting of Anglican prelates held in 1878, at Lambeth, with reference to the Reformed Episcopal Church, is that their lordships, having considered the subject of sufficient importance, thought it necessary to obtain special legal counsel in the matter. Their lordships were solemnly advised as to the need of grave caution, as otherwise they might become involved in serious ecclesiastical and legal difficulties, inasmuch as the orders of Bishop Gregg and Bishop Toke are most unquestionably as valid as those of their lordships. The legal advisers even went so far as to state to the Archbishop of Canterbury: 'The orders conferred by Bishops Gregg and Toke are as undoubtedly valid as any conferred by your grace.' The result is of the utmost ecclesiastical importance, and fully accounts for the grave and fraternal silence recently so strictly observed by our bishops' episcopal brethren in the Establishment, and which has proved so enigmatical to the public in general, and the Church public in particular."

The heads of this sect declare that they have separated from the Church of England for exactly the same reasons that the Church of England separated from the Church of Rome-viz., the growth and rapid spread of Romish errors and practices. What the Church of England did at the Reformation, that, they say, the Reformed Episcopal Church has now done. Article XII of its Constitution states that, except where otherwise canonically specified, or where contrary to Evangelical and Protestant principles, this Reformed Church conforms to the laws and customs of the Church of England, and is thus not a new but an old Church. It has undoubtedly found a lodgment both in England and America, and is fast gaining adherents. It adheres to episcopacy but not prelacy, (whatever this may mean;) it accepts the Anglican Prayer Book, minus all passages that it considers sacerdotal; it repudiates any doctrine approaching to a belief in the Real Presence, and is entirely opposed to confession, priestly authority, and regeneration in baptism. It asserts that the Anglican Church has lapsed into something closely allied to popery,