so rich in apostolic gifts as it claims to be? Paul, I think, would hardly feel himself at home in Gordon Square.
Since the above was written, the Census Report has appeared. It has a sketch supplied by a member of the Catholic Apostolic Church. From it we learn that that Church makes no exclusive claim to its title. It acknowledges it to be the common title of the one church baptized unto Christ. The members of that body deny that they are separatists from the Established Church. They recognise the continuance of the church from the days of the first apostles, and of the three orders of bishops, priests, and deacons, by succession from the apostles. They justify their meeting in separate congregations from the charge of schism, on the ground of the same being permitted and authorized by an ordinance of paramount authority, which they believe God has restored for the benefit of the whole church. And, so far from professing to be another sect, they believe that their special mission is to unite the scattered members of the one body of Christ. The speciality of that religious belief—that by which they are distinguished from other Christian communities—
consists in their holding apostles and prophets to be abiding ministeries in the church.
EDWARD MIALL, ESQ.
In these latter days men have come to think that no man has a right to enter a pulpit unless he prefixes Rev. to his name—unless he wears a white handkerchief round his neck, and scorns to get a living except from the revenues of the Church. With them a daw
‘is reckoned a religious bird,
Because it keeps a cawing from the steeple.’
You have been ordained, therefore some mysterious virtue attaches to you. You have ceased to be a man, and become a priest. You live in a different world to what we common-place sinners do. The priest has a different tailor to the rest of mankind. We can tell him by his superfluity of white linen and superabundance of black cloth. We can tell him by the downcast eye and the short-cut hair. We know him not by his works, by the beauty of his living faith,
or the savour of his holy life, but by his dress. The tailor makes us. One dummy it adorns with red, and that is a soldier. Another it dresses in fashionable costume, and that is the star of Bond-street and the lion of the ball-room. Another it arrays in antiquated vest and sober black, and that’s the divine. Manners do not make the man, but the tailor does.
Yet, happily, the world is not given up to universal flunkeyism. We have still some who recognise the god-like and divine in man; women not everlastingly falling in love with new bonnets, or manhood not utterly lost in the contemplation of new atrocities in the way of checks for trowsers or stupendous collars for the neck. Strange as it may seem, it is no more strange than true, that there are some who can see poets in shoemakers or whisky-gaugers; heroism in the daughters of fishermen; philosophy in Norwich weaver boys; apostles in tent-makers or Jewish sailors; and something greater and grander still in the ‘Galilean Lord and Christ,’ the faith in whose divine mission has made Europe and America the home of civilisation, of intelligence, and life. Faith in
reality has not yet died out amongst us. There are still men who dare to take their stand on living and eternal truths—who look beyond the crust, and see the gem within—who see duty urging them on, and become insensible to aught else. Such men make martyrs—missionaries—reformers; on a small scale, such are village Hampdens or Miltons, inglorious and mute. Such men are sure, sooner or later, to have an earnest crowd of devotees, to exercise a powerful influence on their age, to be the teachers and founders of a school.