rinciple of Church government, and the doctrine, discipline,
and influence of the Church of England, cannot fail to give serious
pain, and sometimes to excite a stronger feeling than pain, in the mind
of every friend to that Church, whether in its spiritual or corporate
character.

He starts with a notion that the fittest engine to redeem England from
the mischiefs and mistakes of oligarchical feudalism was to be found in
the imposing machinery and deception of the Roman Church; overlooking
the great truth that it was not the Romish Church, but the genius of
Christianity, working its vast but silent change, which was really
guiding on the chariot of civilization; but in this broad principle
there was not enough of the picturesqueness of detail to captivate his
mind. It would not suit him to distinguish between the Church of Christ
and the web of corruptions that had grown about her, but could not
effectually arrest the benignant influence inherent in her mainspring.
He therefore leads his readers to infer that Christianity came first to
Britain with St. Austin, and for aught that Mr. Macaulay condescends to
inform us, the existence of a prior Anglo-Saxon Church was a monkish
fiction. The many unhappy circumstances of the position taken up by the
Romish Church in its struggles for power--some of them unavoidable, it
may be, if such a battle were to be fought--are actually displayed as so
many blessings, attainable only by a system which the historian himself
condemns elsewhere as baneful and untrue. He maintains these strange
paradoxes and contradictions with a pertinacity quite surprising. He
doubts whether a true form of Christianity would have answered the
purposes of liberty and civilization half so well as the acknowledged
duplicities of the Church of Rome.

It may perhaps be doubted whether a purer religion might not have been
found a less efficient agent.--i. 23.

There is a point in the life both of an individual and a society at
which submission and faith, such as at a later period would be justly
called servility and credulity, are useful qualities.--i. 47.

These are specimens of the often exposed fallacies in which he delights
to indulge. Place right and wrong in a state of uncertainty by reflected
lights, and you may fill up your picture as you like. And such for ever
is Mr. Macaulay's principle of art. It is not the elimination of error
that he seeks for, but an artistic balance of conflicting