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36 constitution. This venerable body has its visible centre at Monte Cassino; its rules, method of admission, tenets, and work, cut out. Gregory and Austin were Benedictines. A man may like the Benedictines, and he may, if he thinks it wise, imitate them, but, unless he belongs to the genuine corporation, he has no more right to put O. W. B. after his name, than he has to sign himself 'Alderman.' But to let this pass: Mr, Lyne wears gracefully the habit of the order to which he does not belong, he is good-tempered; and he has shown, by his debût at the Bristol Church Congress, that he possesses the talents of a ready, though not a deep, popular speaker—a fact which he evinced by the adroitness with which he filled so much of his allotted ten minutes with a picture of the spiritual needs of our great towns, which would have been about as appropriate in the mouth of an advocate of theatre-preaching or of a ranter's revival, as in that of a pseudo-Benedictine. Consequently, he has been able to realize a certain amount of evanescent popularity, or, at all events, of toleration, which other pioneers of Church extremes, such as Mr. Brian King, have, from their deficiency in the arts of conciliation, been totally unable to compass. One reason for this may be found in the fact that, whereas they all along professed, and honestly though unwisely strove, to keep within the littera scripta of Church law, however obsolete or unworkable, Mr. Lyne has fairly kicked over the traces and stands on a system which has for its foundation the repudiation of all precedent, order, or law, except the fiat of the 'Superior' of the English Benedictine 'order.' The bare statement of his position will absolve us from the imputation of having put the case too strongly against him. Mr. Lyne is in deacon's orders only, not merely being no priest as yet, but never, we believe, a candidate for priest's orders. He is casually resident in the diocese of a Bishop whose licence he has never held, and who has placed him under an inhibition. He has brought round him a very small knot of young men, several of whom, we imagine, are still in the eyes of the law infants, and he has become, together with his companions, occupant of a house in Norwich, the see of the inhibiting prelate, within a parish, whose incumbent, we fancy, he has never consulted. No doubt the occupants of a house can, within their own walls, dress as they like, say what prayers they like, and call themselves Benedictines or Bonzes as they please. So long as they keep their own doors shut on themselves they influence only each other, and they will be reckoned at their own value by outside public opinion; but when a knot of gentlemen, calling themselves Benedictines, without even so much as a priest belonging to their community able to claim orders (though they be but orders without