nay an indefinite, range of development to pass through; and the resources as well as the energies of thought are vastly greater at one stage than at another, and will yield a proportionally nobler and sublimer theology as the garb of its religion. The unequal stages cannot but exist all together in a complex civilization like ours, exhibiting in considerable classes the whole series from the most rudimentary to the most richly endowed types of intellect. Each of these stand in natural affinity with such elements and aspects of religious truth as are nearest to its possibilities of thought and needs of character; and an interchange of place among them, were it attainable, would produce only disastrous incongruities. You cannot satisfy the soul of a Pascal by setting him to beat a drum and shout a "hallelujah" in a Salvation Army; nor can you edify the actual pious drummer by the solemn grandeur of Pascal's "Thoughts." Modes of belief in regard to our infinite relations are not statuesque forms which can be shaped in fixed moulds and set up like bronze figures in a permanent Valhalla for the veneration of all ages; but pulsating organisms that live by movement, and in movement grow, and in growing feel a widening environment, and breathe a higher air, and meet a flood of larger light. This is the reason why each step of the change should be allowed its place and season, so that we should not "judge one another any more ;" and also, why it is fatal and blighting to embalm the obsolete, and set up as sacred its ghastly mimicry of life.

The Church reform prescribed by these principles is very simple, but very large. Its fundamental rule is, that theological doctrine is no proper subject of legislation at all. Every proposal therefore to shift the boundaries of what is permitted as "orthodox," either by drawing them in against High Churchmen, or widening them out in favour of Broad Churchmen, is unsound and inadmissible; being only a modified application, with a new standard, of the aim at uniformity. Instead of insisting on uniformity, we must freely open our hearts to welcome variety, recognizing it for what it plainly is, the result of a divine law, operative in the development of the human mind and the healthy growth of human societies. Let us leave it to Rome, if she must persist in her old ways, to reproach us with our "variations ;" and, far from repeating it against each other, let us with one voice accept it with joy and say, "Yes, these are our signs that we are on the march and with the moving host of God's providence, and have not stepped aside and fallen asleep while the centuries sweep past. Varieties are the marks of life, the tokens of promise: it is death that knows no change." Far then from excommunicating all theologies but our own, be it ours, as English Christians, to give them recognition as honest and legitimate attempts to interpret divine things, and as genuine expressions of Christian piety, and

then to leave their future to their own natural laws. Such of them as have given pledge of resolute conscience and faithful devotion by foregoing their national inheritance, and at their own cost organizing themselves into voluntary communions complete in their ecclesiastical outfit and embodying their conception of the Church of Christ, should at once be taken into adoption as constituent elements of the Church of England; for all of them are vehicles of divine truth, in terms and tones that speak home to the multiform moods and exigencies of the human soul; they are blossoming varieties of the parent tree of life, under changing skies and in differing soil. Surely this expansion of the national "household of faith" ought not to be any longer difficult, now that even extreme contrasts of doctrine have come to be openly treated as simply differences of opinion, Sacerdotalism and Latitudinarianism finding a common home in an undivided Church. No more is asked than that the same rule of non-exclusion should be applied outside which already prevails within.

If the proposed act of adoption is to accomplish its end, it must be unconditional; each Nonconformist body which has stood the test of time and acquired an historic place being taken just as it is, without disturbance to its orders, its disciplinary usages, its forms of worship, its subsidiary institutions and endowments. Its chapels would be entered on the register of Church of England places of worship. Its ministers' names would appear in the Clergy List, and to every person there mentioned all pulpits would be legally open, and preferment in the Episcopal branch of the Church accessible in every degree. The only condition which this expansion would render indispensable is that reasonable security be taken for adequate education and personal competency for the duties of the Christian ministry.

Is it said that in such a reconstruction all the concessions are made to the Nonconformists, and all the sacrifices demanded from the existing Churchmen? This is true so far as all reparation for past wrong is ipso facto a surrender of some privilege seized, and a return of exiles necessarily dilutes a citizenship which had been monopolized. But from the Anglican clergyman no sacrifice is asked of any personal conviction or ecclesiastical preference. He may receive his Holy Orders as at present; he may retain and profess every article of his orthodoxy; if his fellow-worshippers are at one with him he may not only abide by the Liturgy just as it is, but wear the vestments and assume the postures and head the processions and introduce the music that he most approves. He need not admit into his pulpit the neighbouring Wesleyan or Independent minister, or accept an exchange with him. The only things which he must not do are, to enforce upon others what is permitted to himself, and to deny to others what is permitted to them. Both he

and they would have more liberty than at present; but neither is any longer to hurt the other in its exercise.

As with the individual clergyman, so with the Episcopalian section of the Church. It must be left no less undisturbed in its usages than its new confederates. It may keep its Ordination rite for its own deacons and priests; but it must no longer disown the ecclesiastical equality of those who decline it and enter by another door. Nay, more; the proposed abolition of Subscription applies to it only as a legal condition of entrance into the service of the future Church of England, and not to any voluntary regulations which its Episcopalian branch may approve for its own particular constitution. If its bishops and influential laymen should be unwise enough to reimpose by choice the yoke upon their ministers which had been removed by law, the liberty of usage allowed to the incorporated Nonconformists could certainly not be denied to them. The interior exclusiveness of this or that voluntary society no reform can touch except that which reaches thought and sentiment; all that instituted change can do is to prevent that exclusiveness becoming aggressive.

The complicated problem of Church reform on its financial side I am not competent to discuss. Two things only appear to me clear on grounds of general principle-viz., (1) that to alienate the vast property accumulated through past ages for the spiritual culture of our people and their training in all righteousness, and to throw it into the lottery of possible appropriations, whereof even the best would be inferior, and the indefinite remainder either wrongful private gain or wasteful public loss, would be an irredeemable folly; and (2) that a distinction should be drawn between such portion of the ecclesiastical revenues as may be presumably referred in its origin to private benefactions, and such vested right, immemorial and universal, like that to the tithe, as may be attached to the whole spiritual corporation. The former stands on the same footing as the endowments of the voluntary religious bodies, and, like these, should not be disturbed from their present appropriation. The latter, coextensive in design, may be treated as coextensive also in application, with the ecclesiastical wants of the nation at large, and as available therefore for use by all constituent parts of the expanded Church of England, Episcopalian and non-Episcopalian alike. The adjustment of claims under the extended distribution would need a Commission on which the interests affected should be adequately represented. It would, of course, remain open to any minister or congregation having a scruple against touching a nationally inherited fund for religious use, to decline the allotted subsidy. For a time, no doubt, many of the present Nonconformists would thus prefer continued separation in regard to temporalities, while heartily welcoming the spiritual equalization and fraternal interchange of offices and union in worship.

But the whole tendency would be to a gradual assimilation and fusion in which such arbitrary lines would disappear.

The Act of Uniformity created Dissent, and the repeal of that Act is the condition of superseding Dissent. The measure, however, would open the way for a more immediate change which, not without reason, alarms the imagination of many Churchmen, Take away the Act which secures the use of the Liturgy as it is, and you set the clergy free to cut and carve it as they please, to make up an anthology out of it, to obey or disobey the rubrics; and thus place the worshippers at the mercy of whatever twists may be given to the service by High or Low Church whims. Certainly, no such power as this must be erected into an exclusive clerical right. But the proper precaution against it is simple enough-viz., to vest the new liberty, not in the incumbent alone, but in a local Church Council which shall include, with him, a number of elected lay members, preponderantly from the habitual worshippers, but partly from other parishioners, who together shall secure an adequate representation of the religious feeling of the place. There is no reason why harmony and concurrence between minister and people should be less attainable by such means among Episcopalians than among the existing Nonconformists, whose peace is rarely disturbed by pastoral perversities. If both incumbent and people, being of one mind, desire some liturgical omission or modification which has become permissible, who could wish to force upon them prayers they cannot pray, or professions that are false? Some flexibility has in fact become indispensable to keep the services true to the conscience and close to the affections of a modern congregation. And when once it is allowed, the collective experience of its working in the several parishes of the country would soon accumulate a body of evidence of the utmost value for a future revision of the Liturgy. If ever such revision were entrusted to a committee of divines, they would run into discussions and dissensions about the absolute truth or authority of the phrases proposed, a matter which no committee can determine. What is practically wanted is simply such a selection from the admitted aspects and expressions of religious truth and feeling, as accord with the living needs and capacity of the Christian people. And only by taking the measure of their capacity in free experiments can security be obtained that nothing shall be thrust upon them, and nothing taken from them, to the prejudice of their sincerest piety.

This consideration reconciles me, and may reconcile, I think, a reasonable Churchman, to the temporary loss of entire identity of worship in all the parishes of the land, which might follow from repealing the Act of 1662. If there be any one who denies that we have at all outgrown the standards of the Prayer-Book, and sees no

need of change, I own the advantage he has in being able to preserve collective uniformity and individual sincerity together; and I cannot expect from him any patience with a plan which would leave a travelling Episcopalian uncertain what he may be invited to join in as he passes from parish to parish. But whoever admits the need of revision has to choose between making it at once and authoritatively, by such inclinations and conjectures in the dark as may work and vote in a committee not nominated from heaven; and allowing it to emerge as the result of an interposed period of sanctioned appeal by multiplied experience to the sincere sentiment of the worshippers. By the former method, the transition from one book to another may be concentrated on a single date, when uniformity the first is succeeded by uniformity the second. The people are thus got through the process of change as fast as possible, and safely replanted on what is authoritatively provided for them. But now, after the thing is done, it remains to be determined whether it fits them; and whether, if it fits them here, it will also fit them there—and everywhere; very important questions, which surely should rather precede than follow the revisers' work. By the latter method the materials for answering them are ready at the outset; and are cheaply purchased by an interval of variety which permits a true eye to look beneath the mask of decent but dissembling unity. Nowhere does the nightmare of uniformity, the long agony of Christendom, sit so heavy as on the breast of our Episcopalian Church; and under it, unless soon shaken off, she will sink, I fear, into the sleep of death. years has been her internal divisions; either to hide them or to wipe them out. is a frank and trustful experience of the has always resisted and denounced. Let her not suppose that stability means standing still. It is dead habit and monotony in church that she has to fear. And nothing would so freshen her people and quicken her traditions and routine in worship into living thought and enthusiasm, as to take them into counsel on her spiritual things, and elevate their own convictions and conscience into active factors in her constitution and affairs. It is a consequence of her too Catholic inheritance that their religion is rather given them than wrought out by them, and that the creative spirit finds no interstices of entrance in the ordered and obedient will. Release her from the Act of Uniformity, and she will be immediately thrown upon the very experience which has matured the manly vigour and the spiritual fervour of the religious bodies sprung from the excommunicated Puritans.

Her greatest blessing of late and she is always struggling What she wants above all very variations which she

The reform of which, in supplement of Sir George Cox's exposition, I have spoken in this paper, undoubtedly dispenses with many