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which other Churches commonly practise, is almost unknown in the Church of England. Men and women attend its services and partake of its sacraments if they please, and stay away from them if they do not please, all the time speaking and writing publicly for or against them and their doctrinal basis; and never once are called upon by anybody to account for their acts or words. Usually, a clergyman in the country or in small towns visits his appointed flock as an acquaintance; but if any of them show distaste for such visits, or for discussion of religious matters, almost always the intrusion ends. In larger societies it is the sheep who must generally seek out the shepherd, if he desire from him any private counsel or ministration. Thus, while members of the Dissenting Churches in England (with the exception of the Unitarians) are all subject to a sort of social inquisition, very distasteful to the national character, the man who quietly allows himself to be counted as belonging to the State Church has no such trespass to fear. Even the much-disputed tax of the Churchrate affects him no more than his Baptist or Independent neighbors. He pays nothing, either in money or time, for whatever privileges Church membership may bring him. If he choose to take a seat in one or other special sacred edifice, he is free to do so; but, if he prefer to spare the cost, he is sure to be able to hear the same Liturgy gratuitously in the

next street.

Again, there is a reason for attachment to the Church to be found in the great breadth of doctrine taught under her shadow. If narrow, sharply cut creeds inflame the zeal of fanatics, there are (especially in our day) thousands more whose theological ideas are sufficiently hazy, and whose power of viewing the same dogmas from different sides have been sufficiently developed, to make them much more disposed to like a wide and tolerant Church, than any closely guarded sect, whatever might be its merits. The old saying of Lord Chatham, "that England has a Romish ritual, Calvinist articles, and Arminian clergy," instead of being corrected during the last century, might be re-enforced by several fresh anomalies. The High-church party, who stand condemned by the articles;

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and the Low-church party, who hide their diminished heads before the rubric,-exert their liberty of prophesying with less apparent license than the two Broad-church parties of Maurice and Jowett, teaching, the first, the finality of future punishment; and the second, the fallibility of Scripture. It was possible, a hundred years ago, to teach a great many things in an English pulpit, very obviously at variance one from another. It is rather difficult now to say what a clergyman may not preach (with some little trifling caution as to his expressions), secure from any danger of prosecution. Thus, if a layman do but like the invariable Liturgy, it will go hard but that, wherever he may be in the theological wilderness, he will find a shepherd close beside him, and may listen to a sermon which shall, more or less, express his own ideas. Literal belief in the old Calvinistic creed, or the reduction of every dogma of it to some spiritual idea, and "distillation of astral spirits from dead churches; " love of a splendid cultus, or a taste for ecclesiastical barns; warm enthusiasm or preferment of the coldest and driest of moral discourses; belief in the infallibility of every letter of the Bible, or a free criticism of all its pages, - these are but specimens of the differences which may exist in that "Happy Family," from whose and gilded cage its inmates seldom desire to depart.

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In a word, the attraction of the National Church to English minds is what the attraction of the earth's mass is to bodies on its surface. Every one, not endowed with strong will and vigor to rise, obeys its gravitation inevitably. The other churches, like moon and sun, may move the tides a few feet; but the waters of national life return ere long to the bed in which a nearer and stronger attraction preserves them. The Church of England may be modified, and even essentially changed, as the Constitution of England may be modified and changed; but the last contingency imaginable is, that any rival sect should dethrone it, and usurp its place.

If we have succeeded, in any way, in making clear to our American readers how the English Church appears to its lay members, it will not be hard for them further to understand

both how immensely important to English religion is any great movement in it, and also how great are the reasons which induce its most enlightened teachers rather to strive to reprove than to subvert it. Let it be remembered, a sect (in which position must be accounted every Church in a country which has no State Church) - a sect exists in right of its doctrines. The raison d'être of the Baptist, Methodist, and Quaker Churches is in each case certain dogmas (and practices proceeding from dogmas) concerning baptism, conversion, the inner light, etc. But it is more than doubtful whether the raison d'être of a National Church can be a system of doctrines, even if those doctrines be embedded in the very ground wherever it stands. The question is entirely an open one. What is a National Church? It may be viewed in half a dozen ways. It may be considered as a self-existing, corporate body, endowed by the State. It may be considered as a State endowment of an order of priesthood for the perpetual distribution of sacramental privileges. It may be held to be the payment of a class of teachers, sworn to instruct the people in a certain fixed system of dogmas. All these views of a National Church have been maintained in their time; but few will be disposed crudely to defend them now. The remaining theories open up very different vistas as to future progress. The Church may be held to be mainly a great national collegiate foundation of professorships of theology, for the instruction of the people in that highest of all sciences, as other professorships are designed to instruct them in history or mathematics. This view, though obviously incomplete as regards the practical work of the Church, yet commends itself to common sense, so far as theologic instruction goes, and at once legitimates the natural conclusion, that theology, like every other science, must be taught by its professors, not as it was when their chairs were founded, but as it is to-day, availing themselves of every new discovery which can be brought to bear on its advancement.

Lastly, there is the one noble view of the meaning of a great National Church. It is, that it is a venerable and splendid national monument, designed by its founders, and

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ever since upheld by the love of the people, for the purpose of supporting and propagating RELIGION ITSELF. Not certain sacraments nor certain dogmas; not even theology, but RELIGION, the love of God, and the love of man. True, when the Church was founded, men believed that sacraments and dogmas were essentials of religion; that it was impossible men could love God or their neighbors, without having been baptized in a certain form, and without believing in a certain theory. It is no shame to those Fathers of the Reformation to have made such a mistake. Abundance of people are to be found who make it still; very naturally therefore, so thinking, they embedded those sacraments and dogmas in the very mortar wherewith they built their temple. They also thought theology was a science incapable of progress. God had said his last word at the end of the twenty-first verse of the twenty-second chapter of the Book of Revelation: and as to science throwing new light on what he had said before, no one imagined such a thing; for science was rather justly suspected of suscitating difficulties with Galileo, instead of furnishing aid to commentators. Of course, all the institutions founded by men who took these things for granted were framed accord. ingly. Every thing was to be "for ever," and no provision. was made for any future modification. Equally, of course, such unbending, inelastic institutions have come to be very inconvenient to us who neither believe correct creeds to be the pre-requisites of all moral goodness, nor that God has spoken his last word in the Bible, nor yet that theology is less capable of progress than all other sciences. The founders of the English Church planted their young tree, not in the open ground, but in a flower-pot, a goodly-sized and gracefully formed vase, it is true, but still a flower-pot. The tree has long outgrown it; and the question is, "Shall we break open the pot, or suffer the tree to be dwarfed and stunted for want of free space wherein to spread its roots?"

The view of all the Broad-church clergy is, that it is possible, and in the highest degree desirable, to establish the principle, that the ministers of the National Church may be free to teach such theology as may best accord with the science of

the day, so far as the present constitution of the Church may, by any means, be proved to permit. When that limit is reached, the more advanced among them, such as Dr. Colenso, would desire that the nation which originally created the State Church should intervene to remove its ill-advised limitations, and lay it still further open. But such a legal intervention is not as yet even in question; inasmuch as, before it is called for, it has to be shown where the line of limitation as to doctrines permissible to the clergy is really to be drawn. Nothing has astonished the public more than the discovery, which all the recent ecclesiastical trials have contributed to establish, that, in spite of all her creeds, articles, and canons, the Church of England has not laid down clear marks of "Hitherto shalt thou go, but no further," on numerous points of highest importance. In other words, the provisions for punishing heresy fail to reach the most important modern heresies, precisely because those heresies were unforeseen when the provisions were made. Who, then, is to decide (say the Essayists and the Bishop of Natal) that our doctrines may not be taught in the Church of England? Till the constituted tribunals, whose office it is to do so, decide that we have exceeded our liberty, it is not for any one, on his own private opinion and because he dislikes our ideas, or never heard of them before, to decide that they are unlawful. We challenge our opponents to prove that they are so, in the only way possible, -by appeal to the Court of Arches and the Privy Council. When these decide against us, and not till then, is any one entitled to call us heretics; and it will then be time enough to ask whether we ought outwardly to renounce the Church, when it is shown that we have exceeded the liberty she gives us. Our avowed object is to use all such constitutional rights as we possess to bring into harmony the science of the day and the Church of our land; and it is as unfair to bid us, as clergymen, to quit the Church and become Dissenters, because we desire thus to reform it, as it would be to bid us as laymen to quit England and naturalize ourselves in France, because we desire to enlarge the political franchise.

Such is, in brief, the state of the case as regards the new

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