selves entertaining latitudinarian views, will fraternize with her enemies, discountenance the most faithful among her sons, the ablest and the most zealous advocates of her true principles.

The result will be-Church legislation of a secular and secularizing tendency,-the continued suppression of the synodal power of the Church,-and the systematic selection for the Episcopate of unsound men, who are content to view and to represent the Church, not as the Church in contradistinction to sects, but as the favoured one among many sects.

If there be left in the Church any elements which will not bend to this system, any men that will remonstrate and protest against it, any forms and institutions which offer an obstruction to it, the remedy will be, to keep down the one, and to make the other of none effect.

Such will, such, by a moral necessity from which no man can escape, must be the development of the relation between the temporal and the spiritual power, when the former, and with it its Supremacy over the latter, falls into the hands of nominees of the representative body of the people, of those whose authority is derived, not from the ordinance of God, but from the will of the people; whose faith is, not what God has revealed, but what the people choose to believe.

Such, as a matter of fact, has been the history of the relation between Church and State for the last twenty years, since the floodgates of the Constitution have been thrown open for the admission of Popish and Protestant schism, of professed and of virtual

infidelity, and of the clamour of the multitude, under the specious name of the voice of the people, to the national legislature; a change by which the constitution of the body politic, though still Christian and monarchical in name, has in its practical tendency become democratic and antichristian. The baneful effects of this change upon the Church are already but too apparent; she has grown more and more helpless, while her enemies have grown stronger and stronger; she has lost to a great extent her hold upon the minds and hearts of her own people, while the forms of schism around her have been multiplied, and its numerical strength increased. The Church, as a body, is miserably overlaid with a thick incrustation of secularity; whatever of life, of energy, of talent, of zeal, rises within her, is either repressed by the worldly pressure which paralyzes her corporate action, left to wear itself out in the bitter disappointment of isolated and fruitless efforts; or is driven forth into one or other of the various camps of schism to swell the ranks of her enemies. Pitiable, indeed, is the condition to which she has been reduced; unable to collect and to organize the strength which, by the wonderful grace and mercy of God, still remains within her; unable to take counsel with herself on the most momentous questions, which involve her efficiency, her welfare, her

very existence; unable to heal the angry divisions which are continually rising within her on points of vital importance, or to interpose her authority for the regulation of the most trifling point of outward observance, which the ill-complexion of the times has

160 ALTERED CHARACTER OF THE TEMPORAL POWER.

wrought up into a subject of acrimonious contention; beset with mischief from within and from without; and tied up from the application of any remedy, by a temporal power which, though it has renounced every one of the principles in which the connexion between Church and State originated, still claims and exercises over the Church and body of Christ that Supremacy, which the Church conceded to a temporal power likeminded with herself.

The essentially altered character of the temporal power, and its consequently necessary hostility to the Church, and to true Church principles, have not escaped the observation of thoughtful men for some time past; recent events have made manifest, even to the unthinking, the settled purpose of the State to unchurch the Church: the profane irreverence with which the most solemn offices of the Holy Ghost are treated as empty ceremonies, the lofty contempt with which Christ's commission to his Apostles is handled, as if it was a common State appointment, are nothing else than the undisguised and unmistakeable expression of the spirit which has long secretly presided over the administration of Church affairs.

These, then, are the facts with which the Church has to deal. She may have no sympathy with them; she may, as indeed she must, disapprove them; but such as they are, she must deal with them. How they are to be dealt with by her, is the concluding question to which this whole inquiry tends.

CHAPTER VI.

MODIFICATIONS IN THE EXERCISE OF THE ROYAL SUPRERENDERED NECESSARY BY THE ALTERED

MACY

CHARACTER OF THE TEMPORAL POWER.

A POSITION SO essentially unjust, and necessarily unblest, as that in which the Church is placed, under the absolute legislative and administrative control of a temporal power which, by a moral necessity, is hostile to those distinctive principles on which her existence as a Church is founded, and the maintenance and propagation of which is the trust committed to her by her Divine Founder, cannot endure much longer. Either the Church must be relieved from that position, or her character as an Apostolic Church, and her influence and usefulness as a national Church, are gone for ever.

The great question is, by what means the Church can be extricated from the perplexing, as well as unjust position in which she is placed? In handling this question, it is of the utmost importance that Statesmen should bear in mind, that in dealing with the Church they are dealing, not with a human, but with a Divine institution; that there are certain fundamental principles of Church Constitution which no human hand, no, not the united voice of the Crown and

M

both Houses of Parliament, has a right to touch; and that the Church is the depository of certain spiritual powers directly and constantly derived from God Himself; powers vouchsafed not merely for the work of ministering the Word and Sacraments to congregations and individual souls, but for the all-important purpose of maintaining the Church as a body,-even the body and Spouse of Christ,—in a healthy and an efficient

state.

The maintenance of the Church in a state of healthfulness and efficiency depends upon two points: the first and most important of these is, the maintenance of her internal life; the other, the adaptation of her external condition and circumstances to the requirements of that internal life. Over the former, human legislation has no control; it results from the operation of the Divine power, which is resting upon the Church according to the promise of her Divine Founder, and which will never fail her, so long as the hearts of her Members and Ministers submit to the guidance of that power in a spirit of reverence and faithfulness. The latter, the adaptation of the external condition and circumstances of the Church to the requirements of her internal life, is the subject of human legislation; but in the nature of things, legislation for such an object can be successfully taken in hand only by those who are acquainted with the original constitution, and the practical operation of her inner life. In other words, the Church can be successfully legislated for only by herself. At this point, therefore, the work of extricating the Church from her present anomalous