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ART. VII.-Salem Chapel. Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh.

PERHAPS the Voluntary System has arrived, in our day, at the point where it may fitly be treated by a female pen: that is, Dissent has come out long enough and far enough from that acknowledged period of early enthusiasm, when an idea overmastered the individual bent and temperament of its professors, imparting a common likeness to them all, and has settled into a fact, but no longer the most prominent fact, about the dissentient. The Nonconformist of our time is subject to no strong exceptional stimulant: he is left, undisturbed from without, to the influence of ordinary human motives. It cannot be denied that Dissent is now an institution: thus Dissenters have lost both the sense of isolation and of being a mark for the observation of a peculiarly exacting public opinion. Anything like a distinct and formal religious profession makes the world look for something separate and unusual in the conduct; but when a man once treads in his father's and grandfather's steps, whatever direction these take him to, men do not look for anything very distinctive in the gait. It was no credit to the Church that Dissenters were expected, as such, to be stricter in their walk than Church-people; but no doubt such used to be the case, because each individual Dissenter was thought to be consciously separating himself from the practices of ordinary society. If we had a class of deaconesses in our Church, as is proposed, the world, and probably each one of us, would for some time expect them to be much more austerely separate from the habits of ordinary society than is now looked for from deacons; but the sisterhood being established long enough, the same law, in the course of years, would be seen to apply to both sexes. In the same way, when Nonconformity was young, everybody-meaning by everybody people who do not speculate and reason for themselves, but follow blindly the world's assumption of what is fittingrequired an ultra strictness of consistency to their profession from Dissenters; or why did they dissent?-an expectation the flattering austerity of which has relaxed under the inevitable effects of time and use: so that the world may be said now to hold Dissenters under no stricter ties than Churchmen. It is no longer scandalized or amazed to hear of young Congregationalists dancing, and would scarcely think twice of a family party of them being seen at Lord Dundreary's. No one will dispute that the three denominations, except for a few formulas of separation,

have thrown aside the manners and pretensions of a severe exclusiveness. Now, instead of withdrawing themselves from general society, their complaint and grievance - generally nourished, if not always expressed-is, that they are excluded from it, that society is repellant to them; a charge which, so far as there is truth in it, has very little concern with the religious aspect of the question.

When sectarian aspirations blend with social, and the religious element is more than coloured by the political, when Dissent is recognised as an institution and is subject to the influences of all large mixed communities, it shares the tendencies which Dissenters have hitherto ascribed to a state religion; Dissent is in fact established so far as the world's recognition can make it 80. People are born into it, and have been for generations enough to lose the original sense of being separatists. With the majority, their first ideas have been of belonging to a recognised body, with its own rights and position. In most cases they are without that sense of isolation, active antagonism, and estrangement from the Church, which embittered their forefathers.

People's formal belief, their religious education, the nature of the services in which they join, the language of prayer and of preaching, affects, beyond most influences, their tone of thought, and through that the manner, even where the inner feelings are not deeply impressed, nor the life regulated by them. And born and bred thus, passive Dissenters cannot escape the tone of thought and the manner of their party being evident in their social manifestation of themselves, though their common citizenship may be most prominent to themselves, and, what they would wish, the one thing acknowledged by the world. A large, compact, influential body has a language and a way of seeing things of its own, and is, in fact, its own world, though there may be another outer one, the object of vague desire. It is at this stage that Dissent, as we have said, becomes a theme for the female pen. So long as a man's profession is powerful enough to bend the feelings and will to strict external accordance with its dictates so long as he is an impersonation of his creed—he is an especial subject for masculine sympathy, or, at least, comprehension. A man enters most easily into the fervour of polemics and the absorbing interest of controversy, not to say that his intellect best fits him for nice distinctions, for the subtleties of argument, and for theology as a science; but a woman, if she be quick-witted and observant, at least equals him in detecting private motives under the veil of public ones, in unmasking the real homely influences at work under a lofty assumption, in reducing a pompous show to its frippery component parts. No woman could have delineated David Deans, who had not only

every knotty question of Presbyterianism at his fingers' ends, but let them control every private interest; who at once comprehended and acted up to his principles; but it seems to us that a man could not have surpassed the authoress of the present work in her picture of a deacon under the Voluntary System of our own time. Tozer is as correct a portrait of Dissent, as it is, as the old Scotchman was of the Covenanters in their sternest consistency. We want no more graphic pencil than that which brings before us Salem Chapel, its minister, 'office-bearers,' and congregation: all the sharply-defined distinctness of sect worn off with time, and mere common homely human nature cropping out instead. It may not be, and we dare say is not, the whole truth, but it is truth as far as it goes, and as much of it as most delineators of human character can take in for their own share. We know what exposures of all kinds are worth: anything can be proved, any system convicted, by a novelist who, with temper embittered, avenges himself on a system for wrongs or fancied wrongs. We have read autobiographies which, if they expose a party or denomination, expose the character and disposition of the writer much more. But this is not an exposure, nor, we believe, undertaken with that view; it is simply, as we suppose, a reproduction, for the interest and amusement of the reader, of certain scenes and characters, which, modified and disguised, perhaps, but essentially the same, once occupied a great deal of the writer's thoughts and interests. We suspect literary ladies are beginning to find that a good deal of that particular sort of experience through which their own minds have been trained-but which they had hitherto treated as too familiar, common, and unromantic, to be available as literary stock—is a vein of purer metal than any they have yet sought into. By renouncing deliberate invention, and digging into memory and association, something fresher, more attractive, and in a sense original-that is, newer and more real to the reader, and characteristic of the writer-may be brought to light than anything fancy and effort at novelty can achieve. The discovery has its dangers, but it is through it that we have such characters as George Eliot's Mrs. Poyser, the M. Paul of Villette, the ladies of Crawford, and, let us add, from another school altogether, Miss Yonge's late most spirited and charming delineation, Countess Kate. It is, in fact, evidence of that rarest of all faculties-quick, comprehensive, correct, retentive, seeing-without which all other faculties are imperfect, and make mistakes. An intentional exposure is always done in bitterness of spirit, whether rightly induced or not; but there is no bitterness in these pages. We do not guess the writer to have suffered in her own person, nor very keenly for others, from the state

of things she so ably sets before us, and shows to belong almost necessarily to a system of Church government which makes the flock master of the shepherd. Through whatever means she has acquired her knowledge and opinions, she has learnt as a keen observer, not as an actor; her personal feelings engaged, not for herself, but for her friends. A name has been popularly attached to this work, a name which has been given on apparently good authority to books so various in tone and style, and differing so entirely in literary merit, as fairly to puzzle the reader: but to us it is a mere name, and tells nothing. We are left to guess, as much as though it were anonymous, under what circumstances a writer so very free from sectarian tone should have acquired her intimate knowledge of Dissenting life-how this pure, expressive, and graceful style should have formed itself under auspices not usually friendly to such an accomplishment. Anything is probable rather than that the delineator of 'our connexion' at Carlingford, should have come at her knowledge second hand, and not upon an intimate personal stand of observation.

People who live, and have always lived, outside Dissent do not make heroes of Dissenting ministers, though the pride of Homerton; and though they be white-browed and white-handed' into the bargain. It is not fair perhaps. There is no inexorable reason why a hero of romance should not come out of a Congregational college; why, after duly supplying, during his novitiate, the Shilohs and Bethesdas of the neighbourhood, he should not possess an air of the fine gentleman, which shall make him pass muster with fine ladies; but the notion would scarcely come into any person's mind who had not at one time taken a poetical view of the Dissenting pastorate, and had not actually believed in the lofty eloquence-fervid, yet chastened by a correct taste -of some star of Nonconformity. The story shows a sympathy too keen and real for the difficulties and irritations of a clever mind, over-educated and too refined for the work expected from it, to come from anything but an actual knowledge of the position of Congregational pastors. It is no lukewarm partisanship such as any one might feel in realizing the situation: the picture is drawn throughout from the minister's point of view. We have to make allowances, and, while convinced of the correctness of the representation, to remember that Mrs. Tozer's or Mrs. Pigeon's advocate, equally gifted, might make out a counter case, and show up the minister and the minister's wife.

But no true delineation of human nature can be a harsh one. It is a work that softens the temper even in the doing; and this writer is by nature amiable. She just shadows out a villain, to bring about the melodramatic situations of her tale, but there

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is something positively genial in her real characters, even those who inflict the keenest suffering on the sensitive young minister. The story gives The Interest' a decided lift in social consideration for, if the élite of Homerton look down on the hospitalities of the Pigeons and the Browns, we suspect not a few of our own ministry from St. Aidan's and St. Bees would feel themselves very well off, as well as most at their ease, in scenes here described; whether at the gay profuse tea-parties of the connexion, where we acquire so lively an idea of the wealth and pretensions of its members, or partaking of the more homely hospitality of the back parlour, where, either at dinner or supper, there is always something comfortable, and with housewifery pride it can be said, that' Tozer and me cannot be took wrong.' All that the story professes to show is, that Voluntaryism is intolerable to a man of genius, or one who thinks himself such; and that in educating their pastors to a higher point, which is the aim of their leaders-as, for example, Angel James and Mr. Sortain-Dissenters are creating for themselves a ministry incapacitated, by the very polish and ambition thus infused, for the requirements of their flocks. Clever young men, we are given to understand, will not endure the bondage of a subservience from which, as paid servants of the congregation, they cannot free themselves: this is obvious enough; yet we cannot pity their position without tempering our own sympathy with the reflection, that these same clever young men seem becoming a general crux, and that not only in the connexion,' but universally. The tendency of the whole class is to reject the work of the world, such as it comes before them to do, as something beneath the notice of their large views and comprehensive grasp of thought. As perhaps a representative clever young man, we do not find ourselves caring much for this lady's hero, Arthur Vincent. Not at all on the old-fashioned ground, because he is a Dissenting minister, for she desires to divest him of every conventional feature of the class; and her line is so entirely to trace all public action to latent private feeling, that neither our principles nor prejudices are ever roused to assert themselves. His place is a mere accident. We are to think of him as a man acting on merely natural impulses. We are to recognise ourselves in him. If he denounces Church and State, we know that he, in fact, cares very little about the matter, that wounded love and disappointed pride are the prompters. Always he is guided, unconsciously to himself, by some motive with which points of doctrine or Church discipline have nothing to do. He would be more worth caring for, in our judgment, if he excited our polemical rancour a little more. But our authoress does not meddle with doctrine-wisely, no doubt-but, perhaps, it is too

NO. CXX.-N.S.

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