e of charity since the Catholic times; and a divine attributed the
growing selfishness and harshness to the doctrine of justification by
faith. The alteration in the condition of the poor was followed by
severe enactments against vagrancy; and the Protestant legislature,
after creating a proletariate, treated it as a crime. The conversion of
Sunday into a Jewish Sabbath cut off the holiday amusements and soured
the cheerfulness of the population. Music, singing, and dancing, the
favourite relaxation of a contented people, disappeared, and, especially
after the war in the Low Countries, drunkenness began to prevail among a
nation which in earlier times had been reckoned the most sober of
Northern Europe. The institution which introduced these changes has
become a State, not a national Church, whose services are more attended
by the rich than by the poor.

After describing the various parties in the Anglican system, the decay
of its divinity, and the general aversion to theological research,
Doellinger concludes that its dissolution is a question of time. No State
Church can long subsist in modern society which professes the religion
of the minority. Whilst the want of a definite system of doctrine,
allowing every clergyman to be the mouthpiece, not of a church, but of a
party, drives an increasing portion of the people to join the sects
which have a fixed doctrine and allow less independence to their
preachers, the great danger which menaces the Church comes from the
State itself. The progress of dissent and of democracy in the
legislature will make the Church more and more entirely dependent on the
will of the majority, and will drive the best men from the communion of
a servile establishment. The rise and fortunes of Methodism are related
with peculiar predilection by the author, who speaks of John Wesley as
the greatest intellect English Protestantism has produced, next to
Baxter.

The first characteristic of Scottish Presbyterianism is the absence of a
theology. The only considerable divines that have appeared in Scotland
since the Reformation, Leighton and Forbes, were prelates of the
Episcopal Church. Calvinism was unable to produce a theological
literature, in spite of the influence of English writers, of the example
of Holland, and of the great natural intelligence of the Scots. "Their
theology," says a distinguished Lutheran divine, "possesses no system of
Christian ethics." This Doellinger attributes to the st