THIBD RESIDENCE AT CAPE TOWN. 137 



in an overweening spiritual pride, fostered unhappily by political 

 causes, and it is no wonder that the fruit of such a parent stock 

 should be confusion and rancour. How can I help feeling, on 

 looking at this "swarm" of unquiet spirits, that there is one 

 body of Christians (I speak not of her members as men, but of 

 that which she is in idea and in her institutes) which has been 

 wonderfully " kept from the hour of temptation which has come 

 upon the world." I think the Book of Common Prayer, when 

 we consider the time at which it was fixed — its first emerging 

 from the dark cloud of apostacy at the end of Henry the Eighth's 

 reign, and its completion in the dissolute age of Charles the 

 Second — is one of the most wonderful productions, I can hardly 

 say of human appointment, for I cannot but think that as, in the 

 beginning, " the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters." 

 Its inspiration may not indeed be compared to that of Scripture, 

 but ought it not to hold the second place ? Instead, therefore, 

 of complaining that it is a relic of Popery, and crying out for 

 changes here and there, my only wonder is that it has so com- 

 pletely escaped contamination. It may be that " the smell of 

 the fire " has here and there remained on the garment ; but it 

 does not amount to a stain or a hole, and holy indeed ought to 

 be the hands that would alter it. But I am no Puseyite, as the 

 saying is ; I see no reason why we should worship antiquity, or 

 believe that the first three or four centuries enjoyed more divine 

 light than any that have succeeded them. My acquaintance 

 with the " Fathers " is certainly very trifling, and what I have 

 read has been in translation ; but there are many of their notions 

 and practices that would sound strangely dark in the present 

 day, and which indeed cannot be defended either by reason or 

 Scripture. And if mere antiquity is to carry the mind with it, 

 at what age of the Church will you stop ? You must at once 

 swallow the Papacy. But surely it is only necessary to cast a 

 very casual glance at the history of the world to perceive that 

 neither in science nor in religion, nor yet in political freedom, has 

 there been any steady progress. Discoveries, revelations, and 

 institutions have indeed succeeded each other in bright succession, 

 and on the whole there has been a progressive movement in the 

 mind; but it has been by eras, by "avatars," by solitary indivi- 

 duals, or ideas ^standing suddenly out amid the surrounding 

 darkness, brightening to a certain fixed point, and then diminish- 



