higher law that those who cared supremely for that which was Christian in Christianity should bear their witness against the faculty of the magistrate, which they believed could do nothing in such a sphere but blunder and mar their work. These various rights, or rather various levels of right, must be recognised by all who desire to read with anything like a philosophical eye the records of history.

In the days in which the State Church was born the work was greatly assisted by the ideas of sacramental grace which were in the ascendant. A Government may arrange a due administration of the sacraments, and a certain pastoral oversight of the people, with tolerable ease; though to secure even these in the sixteenth century was difficult work. But when the preaching of the Gospel by men profoundly penetrated by its spirit is the thing which is demanded, the State provision inevitably and miserably fails. Just as men's ideas advance as to what is demanded of a ministry and what is the true Christian power, the State, if it is wise, will feel that its function wanes, and that the matter must pass into more earnest and instructed hands. It is by no means a question as to the right of the State to take cognizance of the religious condition of the people; it is really a question of its power to do anything but the clumsiest spiritual work.

The advocates of comprehension blame us for our narrow views of the State, which is nothing else but the nation managing its affairs. No doubt there is a vicious view of the State to which we Nonconformists are prone; but our critics should remember what kind of mother the State has been to us for the last two hundred years. But it is a view against which some of us have been earnestly witnessing for years past; and there is a striking change in the ideas of Nonconformist bodies as to the State and its action in these higher spheres, which promises hopeful results. But then, on the other hand, have we not a right to complain of our opponents that they seem unable to conceive of the action of the State, that is, the nation, in these vital questions, except through its representative assemblies and by law? A Government may refrain from putting its hand to the regulation of certain provinces of the national life, not because it feels no interest in them, but because it knows that it could not intervene to profit. The State in England wisely leaves the domestic and the higher intellectual life of the people to other than legal regulation; but not, surely, because these provinces do not fall lawfully within the sphere of its control. Plato would have regulated them all. The Reds would regulate them all. But a wise Government withholds from them the touch of its legal fingers, and leaves them to those higher influences through which flows more freely the breath of God. Is our intellectual activity the less

national on that account? Do we not claim it as one of our chiefest national glories? And is it otherwise in the religious sphere?

Our complaint, then, against our rulers rests mainly on the base and selfish spirit in which to so large an extent they have managed our religious affairs-not wilfully, perhaps, but because the worldly spirit has reigned over their lives; whereby they have given us a Church gorged with ill-distributed wealth, cumbered with worldly trappings, and fed by legal exactions, as the best image of the kingdom of Heaven which they can set before the poor. And this miserable discrepancy between the Church that is, and the Church that might be, that once was to the joy of all men, has raised up a band of witnesses for a purer truth, a diviner life, in all ages; men who believed, as my friend Mr. Dale has contended so earnestly in this Review, that the personal relation of the regenerate soul to God, and personal submission to his will, is the fundamental element in the life of Churches. These witnesses through all these ages have been the salt of our religious life. Widening ever the sphere of their light and influence, they undertake age by age a larger portion of the burden which the weary State lays down, and bring the diviner influence to bear on the Christian life of the people. As truth grows self-sustaining in a country, the State in its wisdom withdraws its patronage and regulation. It does not cease to care, but it casts its care on purer and more powerful forces than any which it can bring by legal methods to bear on the unfolding of the national spiritual life.

It must be plain to all with an open eye that the time has come when something like an organic change in the constitution of the Church of England, and in its relation to the community, must be accomplished, if it is to retain any hold on the convictions and affections of the people. The many proposals for Church reform from various parties which are before the public, show plainly that the evils of the present system are too flagrant to be longer endured. Change of a very decided type is imperative. The question is, What change? The broadest fact against the Established Church is the great and increasing multitude of earnest and religious Englishmen who find that they can unfold their Christian life more freely, and do the work of Christ more effectually, outside her pale. The Dean of Westminster calls us the Nonconforming members of the National Church. I accept the name heartily. But it is of a much wider and purer National Church than the Establishment principle can ever work out that I hold myself a member. Quoad Establishment, however wide it may be made, I am no member, but simply Nonconformist. But, whatever our title, our position is conspicuous to all The ability and zeal of our ministry, the number of our sanctuaries, the strength of our resources, the magnitude and efficiency

men.

of the ministries which we sustain for the help of the ignorant, the poor, and the wretched, bear fair comparison with those of the Church as by law established. The question now is, Shall that Church renew its life and recover its lost national character by seeking to comprehend these great Nonconformist communities within its pale, by such relaxation and enlargement of its constitution as may promise to secure the result; or shall it serve the nation and the cause of Christ more effectually by recognising the irresistible set of the current of modern thought and life, and confessing that in its present form its work is done? Is not the time come for it to realize that what it has tried after a clumsy and worldly fashion to do for England can now be done much more nobly and effectually by setting religion free, and trusting to the voluntary play of the spiritual life of the community? The answer to these questions must depend largely on the view which the Nonconformists take of this prospect of comprehension. Are these new pastures likely to attract their steps?

The advocates of a wide comprehension, who hold that the Act of Uniformity was one of the most foolish and wicked Acts ever passed by Parliament, see clearly enough that the Church must abandon her claim to nationality unless the work of that Act can be undone. The Church of the Anglican party, could it organize itself, could never be anything larger than a powerful voluntary community, seeking, like ourselves, to bring its influence to bear on the country. National, in any sense, it could not be. As an Established Church in any modern society, it could not stand an hour. But the advocates of a wide comprehension have very much to say for their views. They see, and they know that the country sees, the state of things which we have just pictured. It is not a question of numbers. Numbers never yet settled anything in this world which was worth settling. But the power, the intelligence, and the Christian work of the Nonconformist bodies have long been steadily weakening the right of the Establishment to the name National; while they make its exclusive privileges and enormous endowments, were they worth anything for high purposes, a flagrant wrong. It would seem to be an obvious course in this difficulty to call in the life and the light which are at work outside, on terms which would as little as possible fetter their liberty, and thus gather into one pale the religious activity of the community. It is a fair scheme, and it has floated before the eyes of good and wise men in all ages; and yet it is a mere mirage. We hold that it has no basis in the needs and tendencies of the times; while it breaks up and vanishes as we approach it to make practical trial of its worth.

We will examine the grounds on which such a scheme commends itself to liberal and generous Churchmen. In criticizing it, the

reasons which lead the Nonconformists to regard it as hopeless will appear. In the first place we will consider the relation in which such a comprehensive institution would stand to the nation, and the influence which it would put forth.

The advocates of a large comprehension cling to the idea of the Christian commonwealth. They would have Church and State conterminous. And they believe that this vast and methodized system of religious observances and influences, one in name though manifold in form, under the moderating control of the political authorities, would offer some realization of their idea. They would include within the enlarged Establishment all religious teachers and communities who could be persuaded to come in, and to accept the offices of the Church, in which a large reform is contemplated; and they would present this society, in which by legal enactment and sanction the State and the Church would be one, as the visible image of the Christian commonwealth to the world. The method seems to us to dishonour the State and the Church about equally. We too believe in the Christian commonwealth. We too believe that the kingdom of the Lord Jesus is to be sought, not in the private domain of particular Churches, but in the social, political, and moral order of a Christian people. But this idea of creating and sustaining an army of Christian teachers as the means of establishing the Christian constitution of the State, seems tantamount to creating a governmental department, a bureau of religion, dishonouring the vitality of the religious life of the people, and manifestly degrading the idea of the kingdom of our Lord.

And is it not well worthy of the consideration of earnest Churchmen, who desire that some real form of theological truth should remain in their Church, whether, as this comprehension grows, as bond after bond of belief, habit, or tradition, which now binds Churchmen together, and lends some feeble vitality to their fellowship, is abandoned, it is not likely that teachers will grow more indifferent to the higher functions of the ministry, and will sink into the mere clerical estate of the realm, the Neo-Levitical tribe of which Coleridge dreamed; whereby much of the vital power of Christianity, whose springs lie deep down in the individual consciences of believers, will be lost to society? There is a deeper depth, which the Church has reached in Prussia, from which may God deliver us. The only adequate conception of a Christian State is that of a nation whose whole life is saturated with Christian ideas and influences; and which gives free play to its religious beliefs and impulses, that, like the higher intellectual life of the people, they may express themselves as they see fit. A comprehensive establishment, in which some exiguous minimum of Christian belief is

accepted as a qualification for a teacher, could have little nexus but such as the State would supply. It must inevitably sink into a mere State department, and miserably formalize that which, if its work is to be worth anything, must be a free, glowing, burning life.

It was not always thus. The time was when a certain powerful organization of the Church seemed to be essential to the creation of Christian society. The State, half barbarous, constituting itself with difficulty, and dimly apprehending Christian ideas, found a vast, learned, powerful, cosmopolitan hierarchy to instruct it and to leaven it with the leaven of the kingdom of Heaven. It was perhaps needful. But medieval students will know well how miserably corrupt was the leaven which the Church infused, and how much of the purer, the inspiring influence came from men out of tune with the system of the Church-that is, the Nonconformists of their times. Still the spiritual caste, whose office it was to be the priests of the community, had a separate function and calling in those days. Honestly, has it any now? If men, or the Government, want to know in any difficulty what is the Christian duty, do they turn with the faintest hope to the Episcopal Bench to instruct them? If the nation needs to know what is the Christian policy in any emergency, does it ask Convocation to consider it and deliver its judgment? Is it not notorious that these are just the very last sources to which the nation would look for light? Has not the State been recently shutting its ears to the witnessings of both Houses of Convocation on a grand question of Christian policy, with the profoundest conviction that the truth was on the State side, and on the Church side only ignorance, bigotry, and dread? The attitude of established teachers as a class throughout the recent agitation, offers little temptation to us to join them, for we wish to stand on the Christian side, and to be possessed not with the "spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." Better for them to take a bath in our freedom, than for us to load ourselves with their burdens and bonds.

The State then signally fails, it seems to us, to get from the Church an independent and vigorous enunciation of Christian ideas. All that it seems to gain in this direction is a perpetual obstruction; a class which, as a class, is always blocking the path of progress which the enlightened community is striving to pursue. The fiction of a State conscience in a clerical body, or of a Christian character being impressed on a community by the maintenance of such a body in the high places of the State, will hold together no longer. We want no clerical heralds with pomp of tabard and trumpet to proclaim our style as a Christian nation. We want Christian men, in every sphere of our public and private life, thinking, speaking, and