absence of which religion itself has no foundation on which to build -that virtue which is the adamantine basis of the moral world-the virtue of truth? A moral institute which does not inculcate truth is the most hideous of solecisms. Truth ought to flame from the battlements of the Church, to run like lightning along her towers and pinnacles, flashing into the lurking-places of falsehood in society, searching the haunts of moral pestilence, and burning up the malaria of the soul. Can we disguise from ourselves the fact that something very nearly the reverse of this has been the actual state of the case? Has not the ambiguous position of the Church breathed a subtle poison into the moral life of the nation? Has it not promoted a slippery prudence, a judicious meanness, a sanctity sly and sleek, a sordid contentment with half-truths and half-falsehoods, a tolerance, nay, an admiration, for "the glistening and softly spoken lie?" Can the conscience of England be as noontide clear if the Church of England is an organised equivocation?

"This will never do." The words are your Lordship's. They express what has become the stern determination of many English hearts. They sounded as the call of a leader, and multitudes lifted up their eyes, eagerly hoping that the call to action would prelude the announcement of a policy. My Lord, is your policy worthy of the crisis? It is a policy of palliatives. Other parties in the Church dare to face the future and to know the present. The free-thinkers desire simply that every man who can in any way procure an incumbency shall be a clergyman of the Established Church. No question of any kind shall be asked, except in so far as may be necessary to secure a certain amount of intellectual cultivation among the national preachers. The sacerdotalists, aiming with effective simplicity of purpose at the restoration in England of the ecclesiastical state of things which preceded the Reformation, laugh at the idea that they are required by any point of honour to leave the Church, and with cheerful courage and good hope anticipate the hour when the Anglican communion, themselves in the van, will formally do homage to Rome. These are consistent and vigorous schemes of policy. But the policy with which your Lordship is identified has no higher aim than to save an appearance here, to abate a symptom there, to arrange a vestment, to snuff out a candle, to alter a form, to change a name. Alone among the parties in the Church, the Evangelicals rush to Parliament for power to coerce or expel the other parties. The proceeding is necessarily invidious, necessarily ungracious. It suggests the sneer that the Evangelicals are afraid to confront the Ritualists in the Convocation of the Church and the free-thinkers in the forum of public opinion. This might be borne if the constant recourse of the Evangelicals to civil authority had been attended with any

successful result. But what has law done for the Evangelicals? They have grovelled in the dust before the Royal supremacy, and the legislative authority of Parliament has not done so much for them as to take off a button or to blow out a taper. If the Evangelicals have not had admonition enough to turn from man whose breath is in his nostrils and cease to put their trust in princes, what sort of admonition do they require? My Lord, it is time to depend more upon "the jurisprudence of the New Testament." It is not in the nature of civil authority to effect that which you desire. Institutions act according to the essential laws of their character. Civil governments exist for the protection and defence of society. To secure theological purity in the Church is a task for which they are naturally unfitted. Their tendency, accordingly, has at all times been to expand theological precision into comprehension, to exchange comprehension for Latitudinarianism, and to widen Latitudinarianism into Universalism. You are, my Lord, a statesman, you have had experience of Parliament, you have looked into history,-are not these things so?

One cannot without distress behold the scattered, disorganised, bewildered array of the Anglican Evangelicals at this moment. Their ranks are broken; their banners trail in the mire; none fears them; none honours them; their generals of division talk mere distractions, like the letters of Deans M'Neile and Close; their generalin-chief, your Lordship, telling Parliament that "this will never do," folds his hands as if in despair. Why should such be the position of the Evangelicals at a crisis like the present? It was not ever thus. A once mighty party has fallen thus low. The power and the greatness of the Evangelicals are written in the history of England. Even now elements of encouragement are not wanting for them. Liberality is a virtue which they have not to learn, for in the missionary and philanthropic enterprises of the last half-century they have distinguished themselves by a princely munificence. The example of the Free Church of Scotland has been much quoted; and the party which has prospered so signally after declaring itself the Free Church of Scotland was the precise counterpart, mutatis mutandis, of the Evangelical party in the Church of England. That version of the Christian religion which is accepted by the Evangelicals has never been boldly and earnestly presented to the people of England, or indeed to any people, without evoking their fervid enthusiasm and their cordial support. Is there no Anglican Chalmers to lead his party in this fateful hour, so cloudy in its darkness, so glorious in its hope? An Anglican Chalmers? He were hardly the man for the time. Englishmen have never fallen heartily into line at the back of an ecclesiastic, and even a king of men and a man of God like Thomas Chalmers

might, being a clergyman, fail to command their confidence. It is a layman who is required to head the Evangelical party of England. My Lord, what ought his policy, as the Evangelical chief, to be at this moment?

A party, like a man, finds its strength and prosperity in being true to itself; true to its history, to its principles, to its character. Looking above the distractions and degradations of the present, we behold in the Evangelicals a party of which no thoughtful, candid, and informed man would speak save in terms of high respect. It has not been specifically a learned party, an intellectual party, a refined party; it has not prided itself on its culture; it has not affected the elegance of æsthetic taste or the audacity of philosophical speculation. But it has been courageous for the truth it professed, alive to the beckoning of Providence in the signs of the times, intrepid in the sight of princes, and strong in its grasp upon the body of the population, upon that "common people" which heard Christ gladly. Both in the theology and in the practical activity of the party there has been a simplicity, a massiveness, commending it to busy men, to men of rugged energy, to men of strong sense. It has been distinguished by a regard for facts and a superiority to illusions. Consecrated places and ecclesiastical names it has regarded with comparative indifference, and has held, on what seems to be clear warrant from the lips of Christ, that man wants no holier cushion on which to kneel than the green turf of the brookside and the grave, no cathedral roof of diviner associations than the grey cloud or the cœrulean sky. It has allowed of no elaborate system of priestly mediation between God and man, but placed the creature and the Creator face to face. It has dared to recognise a Church wherever the spirit of God found a people, and did not, with the Jonahs of Anglicanism, think it right to be angry with the Almighty because He did not burn up the Nineveh of Dissent. When it spoke of regeneration it did not mean some mystic and untraceable influence exerted in the performance of a sacerdotal rite, in the utterance of a sacramental formula, but a change of the soul visible in the life. To the niceties. of biblical criticism it devoted comparatively slight attention; but it urged every man to read his Bible. It was not famed for the graces of its pulpit oratory; but it made the land ring with its impassioned and heart-searching appeals. Your Lordship has always acted with manly decision on this point, making light of theories and sophisms, and penetrating to the essential fact that the fire of God may fall at the street corner, or in the hall of a theatre, as well as in the temple aisle. In short, the Evangelical party has represented the alliance of Christianity with the broad and deep religious instincts of the human breast, instincts which impel nations

with a force that no philosophical or merely moral system has reached, instincts which have shaken England in the past and which may be slumbering but are not dead in England to-day.

If such is the Evangelical party, how shall we connect its history with the actings of the Anglican Evangelicals at this hour? How do they approve themselves heirs of Luther's dauntless fortitude and Calvin's burning faith, of Latimer's rugged plainness and Usher's magnanimous sympathy, of Toplady's glowing enthusiasm and Grimshaw's zeal for truth? We see them, amid the contemptuous laughter of the world, imploring the House of Lords to adjust the fringes on priests' dresses. We see them finding a balm for conscience, which they compel to bow down to an Ecclesiastical supremacy that has practically suspended the creed of the Church, in the miserable baseness of placing "detectives" on brother ministers. This is the true disgrace of a party-not to suffer defeat, but to deserve it by being false to their fame. The Evangelical party fails to satisfy the demands of reasonable men. It evades definite issues, shrinks from straightforward courses. It revels in inconsistencies. It trembles paralytically before logical inferences. The testimony of the party to truth has sunk down into a wretched guerilla warfare of personalities, offensive to good manners and alien to the spirit of Christ.

Why, my Lord, should not all this pass away like the imagery of a distempered dream? Why should not the true character of the party once more assert itself as the genius of Chatham, after having been eclipsed for a time by a baneful and mysterious disease, flashed out in its pristine splendour? Why should not the Evangelicals, recurring to the traditions of their nobler days, to the inspirations of a time when the proud intrepidity of the Reformers and the Puritans still glowed upon their faces, proclaim a policy adapted to the circumstances of the age? Their sympathy in the past with religion beyond the charmed circle of Anglicanism prepares them to form a league with those Reformed Churches which vigorously uphold the standard of Christian doctrine without dependence upon the State. An alliance with the Free Churches of England is pointed out by Providence as their duty and their wisdom. The words "A Free Church in a Free State," inscribed on the Evangelical banner, would be the proclamation of a policy equal to the emergency.

In your Lordship the Protestants of England are prepared to hail the chief of a new Protestant party, a party embracing every Protestant denomination in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Having announced an adequate and decisive policy, you would occupy a position of commanding influence and the highest distinction. The enthusiasm with which England rallied round Mr.

Gladstone when he proclaimed the policy of trust in the people might prove to be slight in comparison with that which would awaken in the whole religious community, Conformist and Nonconformist, when it became known that Lord Shaftesbury had declared for a Free Church in a Free State. Tens of thousands of Churchmen, convinced that the present Ecclesiastical machinery, even if it could be brought to bear upon the object, is incapable of securing fair play for Protestants,-feeling that, apart from all theories of the relation between Church and State, present arrangements have failed, and that the present union between Church and State means the extinction of the former, are prepared to give up the mess of pottage and to claim the birthright. As for the Nonconformists, they invite their Episcopalian brethren to share the benefit of a freedom which the experience of centuries has taught them to prize. They admit that an immense multitude in England are cordially Episcopalian, and that a Free Episcopalian Church might attain a denominational success more signal than their own. "The Episcopal Church," said Dr. Raleigh, President of the Congregational Union of England and Wales, at the late meeting of the Union at Leeds, "in the ardour of its new-born liberty and zeal may possibly far outstrip us in the race, even when the conditions of the friendly rivalry have ceased to be what they now are, unequal and unfair." What then? "In that case," he adds, "we shall rejoice in their pre-eminence, and feel that their success is our own." These words were received, in what was not inappropriately called the Parliament of modern Puritanism, with loud applause.

The policy of the new Protestant party would not be the dissolution of union between Church and State. It would be the reconstitution, on a broader and better foundation, of that union. What has the Episcopalian Church now to boast in the way of special union with the State? It is united to the State as the corpse of Hector was united to the chariot of Achilles. It is dragged along unresisting, deprived of every vestige of self-government, of every trace of doctrinal integrity. Were it not a better form of union between Church and State that each should recognise the vitality and the freedom of the other; that amity and confidence should reign between them; that they should co-operate in their respective spheres for the good of the people of England? It is an extension of the alliance between Church and State that is required, an extension wide enough to embrace every form in which man's reverence for God embodies itself in our country. Is the union of friend with friend less real than the union of master and slave? Is not the State, in a self-governing country, in real and effective union with every kind of industry, every kind of enterprise, every species of genial force whose sum combines to make up the nation's wealth,