proportion than is generally supposed of ordinary English Churchmen-laymen who have no strong bias for or against any party in the Church; who have neither time nor taste for the lamentable party wrestling-matches got up by the (so-called) religious press and societies; but only desire to use themselves in peace, and to hand down to their children, the opportunities for Christian worship and Christian living which have served their forefathers for so many generations-improved and reformed to suit the needs of a new time, but still an inalienable part of the birthright of every English child. I repeat that I believe--and, as one who has had much intercourse with all classes of our society, and has for years been much exercised by this question, have broad grounds for my belief that this class is a far larger one than is commonly allowed. And it would be a great mistake to suppose, because they make no strife or fuss about their religion, that they do not really care about it. It is often assumed, nowadays, that the bulk of our Church laity are mere formalists, supporting religion because they believe the parson to be the most powerful kind of policeman; and ready to welcome whatever form of new worship, or no-worship, may come next, when criticism and science shall have dealt finally with the supernatural and Christianity, so long only as some form or other be left to keep the common folk in order, and their own wives and children quiet. On the contrary, we (for I must rank myself in their number) are thoroughly satisfied that Christianity is in no more real danger now than it was a hundred and fifty years ago, when Dean Swift, and many other greater wits than we have amongst us nowadays, thought and said that it was doomed. We hold in perfect good faith that the good news our Lord brought is the best the world will ever hear; that there has been a revelation in the Man Jesus Christ, of God the Creator of the world as our Father, so that the humblest and poorest man can know God for all purposes for which men need to know Him in this life, and can have His help in becoming like Him, the business for which they were sent into it; and that there will be no other revelation, though this one will be, through all time, unfolding to men more and more of its unspeakable depth and glory and beauty, in external nature, in human society, in individual men. That I believe to be a fair statement of the positive religious belief of average Englishmen, if they had to think it out and to put it in words; and all who hold it must of course look upon Christ's Gospel as the great purifying, reforming, redeeming power in the world, and desire that it shall be free to work in their own country on the most favourable conditions which can be found for it.

On the other hand, there are a number of matters which have been commonly insisted upon in England as part of Christianity,

as to many of which the kind of Englishmen I am speaking of have come to have no belief at all one way or the other. They have no time to spare for such subjects, and do not feel it needful for their higher life that they should make up their minds, for instance, as to the exact quality of the inspiration of Scripture, the origin of evil, the method of the Atonement, the nature and effect of sacraments, justification, conversion, and other much-debated matters. As to another class of ecclesiastical subjects, such as Apostolical succession, and all the priestly and mediatorial claims which are founded on it, they have indeed made up their minds thoroughly, and believe them to be men's fables, mischievous and misleading to those who teach and those who learn-to priests and people alike.

Probably many of my hearers will consider such a belief as this too vague to be of any practical value; but at any rate, as a fact, there it is, and it has to be acknowledged and accounted with as a fact in dealing with this Church question. And, as a rule, while it hinders those who hold it from attaching any exaggerated or superstitious importance to one form or another of Church organization, it inclines them to respect and value that which they find to have been thought out and beaten out by successive generations, and to have brought the nation safely at least, and not without honour, so far. Such a man is therefore generally an attached, though not an enthusiastic Churchman, and in the main for the following reasons:

First, the historical. Our time is not one in which any institution is able to stand on its pedigree only, but it is also one in which we are bound to be specially careful of any wholesome links which bind us to the past, and make our history one of steady and connected life and progress. And from this point of view the national Church is beyond all question the most venerable of our institutions, and as intimately bound up with the national life as the Monarchy or the Houses of Parliament. The latest and best historian of the Conquest describes the England of 1066 as "a land where the Church and nation were but different names for the same community; a land where priests and prelates were subject to the law like other men; a land where the King and the witan gave away the staff of the bishop;" adding that "such a land was more dangerous in the eyes of Rome than one of Jews or Saracens."

And through the long four hundred years' struggle with the Papacy, the same description holds good; and in every great crisis the Church and nation has held together as one community. When à Becket backed the Pope's claim to make Church Courts supreme over the clergy, and to exempt them from the national tribunals, the King answered by the Constitutions of Clarendon, which declared

the Church to be part and parcel of the nation, and the clergy amenable to the civil law like all other citizens; and those Constitutions were supported by clergy and laity alike.

When the King, backed by the Pope, refused the demands of the nation for the Great Charter, it was Archbishop Langton who headed the barons. Two of the three sureties to whom John was bound for its fulfilment were bishops, and the first nine names are those of Church dignitaries. Again and again the identity of the Church of England with the nation was upheld; sometimes by bishops, as when Robert Grostete flatly refused to institute Innocent IV.'s Genoese nominee to an English benefice; sometimes by the King or his Courts of Law, as when the King's Bench outlawed the members of the assembly of clergy, who had come together without the King's writ, and, in deference to a Papal Bull produced by Archbishop Winchelsea, refused to grant a subsidy to Edward I. for his Scotch campaign. The statutes of mortmain, of provisors, of prohibition, of præmunire, all aimed at some encroachment of Rome on the national character of the English Church, were all passed with the assent and by the help of that Church, which, by its very divisions in such crises, proved its national character. It is not necessary to follow the history since the Reformation, for it is part of the case of those of the clergy who seek to sever the connection that it has existed in full force from that time. Even when Episcopacy was abolished during the Commonwealth and Protectorate, the national principle was upheld, and the established Presbyterian Church was even more intimately allied with the State than its predecessor had been. Cromwell had no more thought of severing the connection than Edward or Henry, but desired to make the Church as broad and tolerant as possible.

And so the Church has continued to our own day in theory, and still is to a very great extent in fact, the nation organized for spiritual purposes, and in striking sympathy with and faithfully mirroring the nation in all its varying moods-at times no doubt persecuting, apathetic, unfaithful-but on the whole faithful to her great mission, and exercising a noble and purifying influence on the national conscience and the national life.

If this is at all a true view of the history of the Church of England, the fallacy of the main argument of the English Church Union at recent meetings becomes clear. Appeal is made to some supposed compact between the State and the Church, and it is contended that the Church never conceded to the State the right of control in spiritual matters when that compact was made. This assumes that the State and the Church in England were at some time two distinct corporate bodies, in part at least composed of different persons, and capable of contracting with one another.

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But there never was such a time in England; State and Church never stood in such relations to each other; there never was any such formal contract between them as the Church Union argument starts from. Between the officers of the Church for the time being and the State, there can of course be, and always has been, a contract of service, as there is between the officers of the army and the State. But it is placing matters on a false issue to represent the Church of England as a power bound by treaty or compact with the State of England for certain definite purposes, and competent to annul that treaty when she pleases. A Church with the pretensions of Rome, or a voluntary Church, such as the Methodists, if the nation were to come to them now to make terms, might assume such an attitude and make such claims, but they contradict the very idea of our national Church, as those words have always been understood in England.

Before quitting the historical ground I would just remind you that this modern cry for disestablishment, or the absolute severance of the State from religion, has really no English tradition at all behind it, at any rate since the Long Parliament. In that celebrated assembly it was indeed mooted, but with no success. Dr. Owen, the brother-in-law of Cromwell, and a famous Nonconformist minister, was its most vigorous opponent, and evidently expressed the sense of the House and the country when he protested in the most solemn and earnest words against the notion that they, as rulers of the nation, had nothing to do with religion. From that time to our own the effort has never been repeated, while the greatest names amongst the Nonconformists may be cited as supporters of the direct and avowed connection of the State with religion. Thus Matthew Henry thanks God "for the national establishment of our religion with that of our peace and civil liberty," and Bunyan, Wesley, Baxter, may all be quoted on the same side. Even the leading Nonconformists and reformers of the very last generation had no such policy. Mr. Grote, who may be taken as their representative man on this question in the first Reformed Parliament, advocated indeed sweeping and stringent reforms within the Church, but, so far as I am aware, never hinted at severing the connection between the Church and the civil Government. I need not say that the cry from within the Church herself for this divorce is of even more recent origin.

It may of course be replied to all this, that however strong the historical argument may be, it is after all mainly a sentimental one, which can be allowed little weight in the changed and changing conditions and aims of our time. And I would not press it beyond this, that if thirty generations of Englishmen, who have given us our country as we enjoy it, have insisted on a national profession of Christianity by the State, those who now oppose it

shall at least give us some grounds for believing that the nation will become nobler and better for renouncing that profession.

The second reason for which such men as I am speaking of value the connection, may also possibly be called a sentimental one. but has I believe a very important practical side to it. It is that that connection is a constant and powerful protest against the desire and effort to divide human life sharply into two parts, one of which is concerned with the visible and the other with the invisible, or as the commoner phrase goes, one with secular the other with religious affairs. Notwithstanding the experience of many failures, that desire and effort were never more active than in our time. And, however firmly convinced we may be from the experience of our own lives, and from our observation of all that is going on around us, that no such severance is possible,-that the two realms will assert their independence sooner or later, whatever rules we may lay down for keeping them apart,-still the mere attempt to sever them will always work mischief, and we cannot afford to part, or to tamper with, any witness that they have been joined together from the beginning of time, and will remain so joined to the end, by a law which man cannot set aside. And the connection of Church and State is a standing witness to this law in the highest places, a protest against the notion that the nation can repudiate its highest functions and duties, any more than one of its own citizens can do so. Were the present connection severed, the only result would be, that, sooner or later, probably after much national deterioration and humiliation, the law would have to be reasserted, and the duty accepted again by the nation under new conditions. Therefore, those in whom the love of their country is deepest and strongest, should be foremost in insisting that we shall not give up the highest national ideal because we find it hard to realize.

It is scarcely possible to contend that that ideal is not lowered by severance of the connection. An abandonment of important. functions may be expedient, or convenient, or even necessary, but it must remain a proof of a more stunted and narrower life. And without dwelling on the many ways in which such an abandonment might probably act in England, I think no one will deny that, in any case, it is certain to lessen the interest which religious men take in politics and public life. There is, I know, a school of politicians, not wanting influential representatives in the press, who will exclaim at once, "What a blessing! How smoothly public business would run on in future if we could only get rid of them altogether! They are the bane of public life, at least just so far as they will insist on bringing religious considerations to bear on it. A nation to be great and prosperous can't afford to keep a religious conscience." But I venture to think notwithstanding, from all I have