a of fer a minister from one church to an- into play against such evils as the other or delegate authority to bishops. gambling habit, intemperate drinking, The grievance caused by pastorates and licentiousness. Sometimes the difwhich have exceeded their natural and ferent denominations unite in mainuseful duration can therefore be only taining Christian work at poor centres, remedied by the individual congrega- and in at least one case already tion turning its minister adrift. This, church is being built by united effort, in the absence of a general scheme by its ultimate ecclesiastical connection which he could at once find work else- being regarded as an indifferent matwhere, the congregation is loth to do ter. In carrying out plans of visitation until the prosperity of the church is in- each church makes itself responsible jured perhaps beyond repair. In these for an allotted district, which becomes two bodies there is no desire for author- its parish. By this delimitation itative persons; but there is a distinct "spheres of influence" a check is put desire for some means by which the de- upon the competition of the different nomination as a whole might exercise sects, and upon the overlapping of authority over churches which cannot charitable relief. The multiplication of stand on their own legs without denom- unnecessary chapels may be said to inational support. have ceased, the sectarian spirit which called them into existence having become too weak to be aggressive. Whether the new federation will be able to undo the mischief by persuading two or three feeble groups of worshippers to unite in one healthy congregation remains to be seen. The net result of these and other movements is a remarkable broadening and assimilation of opinion and practice among the principal Nonconformist sects. They have come SO close to gether that nothing seems to prevent their union, and union, accordingly, we see in process of accomplishment. There are two forms of union-federation and amalgamation. The second of these may, and probably will, grow out of the first, and a beginning will very likely be made by the Wesleyans and other Methodists within a distance measurable by years rather than by decades. But a federal union has not only been found practicable without disturbance to existing organizations, but has been by all the organizations warmly welcomed. The National Free Church Council, as the new federal parliament is called, has no more legislative power than the Church Congress; but the Council is more formally representative, being composed of properly elected delegates from local councils in which all the sections of Methodism, the Congregationalists and Baptists, the Presbyterians, the Quakers, and other evangelical dissenting bodies have united. The movement aims at creating in every part of the country a close alliance of hitherto isolated forces, superseding rivalry by co-operation. in a campaign against disorderly United missions are undertaken on a large scale; the united force is brought If the term "High Church" were not commonly identified with a sacramentarian and ritualistic party no better expression could be used to describe Nonconformity as found in its new federal councils. While objecting to the State establishment of a sect, Nonconformity objects far more strongly to a State which does not embody the Christian spirit in its laws and in its social life. The right of the State to control religion is denied, but the duty of religion to mould the State is affirmed. For this purpose Nonconformists desire to work hand in hand with the Church whenever the position of the Church will allow; and the Church will obviously find it easier to work with a federated Nonconformity, whose position can readily be ascertained, than with a number of Nonconforming items. In South London a joint committee of Churchmen and Free Churchmen has already been formed, with the Bishop of Rochester for chairman, to carry on rescue work and to stimulate the civil authorities houses. At the same time, the federation of Nonconformists involves a strengthening of their resistance to the through the same trunk, the Church of Church of England in its proselytizing the past, and through their many leaves and excommunicating moods. From from the same heaven, the Spirit in one point of view the dissenting de- which they both believe. But the connominations by uniting with each other forming branch-to change the metaemphasize the fact of their division phor-is in possession of the old homefrom the Church; though the dropping stead, and the nonconforming branch of the term "Nonconformist" shows a has had to build a new house for itself. desire to lay stress on the positive The long line of "orders," uniformly if rather than "oppositive" nature of Free superficially transmitted, attracts and Church life. In the more or less dis- awes the genealogical mind. Then tant future it is hoped that Noncon- there is the imposing ceremonial of formist federation will prove a step- Anglican worship. This appeals to ping-stone rather than a stumbling block to a larger federation in which the Church of England will take a noble share. But for the present Nonconformists are too busy with practical affairs to discuss the obviously impracticable; and the sense of their own increasing freedom from schisms will scarcely incline them to amalgamate with a Church torn by the tremendous schism which divides the High Churchman from the Evangelical. One of the most significant facts in connection with this very significant movement is that a catechism is being prepared for the common use of the Federated Churches, and that by this and other means "Free Church" history and principles will be systematically ingrained in the minds of the young. In the separated denominations such teaching has been neglected, largely because of the disinclination to dwell on points of difference. This is now felt to have been a cause of serious loss. Children whose mental nourishment in their most impressionable years includes the story of their stalwart and often heroic ancestors, and who are taught with clearness-not without charity-the reasons why the ancestral steps cannot be retraced, will not be so easily influenced as the Nonconformist youth of to-day by the temptations to Conformity. These temptations-the causes of that leakage from Dissent of which a great deal has been heard-are many. There is the glamour of antiquity. To be sure, the conforming and nonconforming branches of the Church are in a very real sense of equal age; they draw their nourishment the æsthetic faculties of many who are Nonconformists by strong conviction. It appeals with irresistible force to those who are only Nonconformists by hereditary habit and to those who have few strong religious convictions of any kind. These folks would drop out of the church-going habit altogether if they could not worship where the eye and ear are treated with great consideration. Politics have had a little to do with lapses from Nonconformity. The sharp division of opinion on the Irish question, though this subject migut never be referred to in the pulpit, could not but cause a sense of isolation in the minds of Unionist Dissenters. More potent as a repelling influence is the growing urgency with which ministers dwell on the connection of religion with the problems of poverty, wages, and sanitation. Dissent has shed many of its most prominent men in the last few years; and when the father shrinks from breaking the ecclesiastical connections of a lifetime his sons are infected with a spirit of discontent which has no such obstacle to encounter. The genuine if not well-founded sense of injustice caused by the minister's habit of taking the side of the poor against the rich is closely allied with a less worthy instinct-an unwillingness to suffer the social disabilities under which Nonconformists still labor. The vicar of a wealthy suburb called on a new parishioner the other day. His countenance fell when he found that the lady was a Congregationalist, and he exclaimed in evident pity, "I'm afraid you won't have any society!" The stigma of unfashionableness, of so the advantage. Nonconformity has its failures and unsolved problems, and plenty of them. So has the State Church-quite enough to make it hesitate before claiming superiority for its methods and monopoly for its divine ordination. cial inferiority, is keenly felt by the socially ambitious; and there is a common proverb that a carriage and pair never stay with a Dissenting family for three generations. It is contended by some experienced observers that the tide of loss has now been turned, and it is undeniable that against the losses from From this sketch of the present the these and other causes must be put reader may draw his own picture of very appreciable gains. A large num- the future of the Free Churches. To ber of Anglicans have taken refuge in one who sees much of the work both of Nonconformist churches from "priestly Nonconformity and of the English assumptions and Popish practices." Church there seems no reason to supThe exceptionable ability of particular pose that Free Church Christianity is seems to be good ministers also draws many English doomed. There for when Churchmen into Dissenting places of ground believing that, the Church of England is ready for worship. any sort of religious co-operation, the Nonconforming half of English Christianity will be found strong, wellequipped, and in every way worthy of so dignified an alliance. From Les Annáles. AN INFLUX OF ART. We live in an era of Art. The numbers of unhappy Frenchmen who are resolved, at all costs, to be great poets, great painters, great musicians, great sculptors, or great scientists-it matters not which-will end by rendering Paris The net result of all this give-and-take is probably a numerical loss, though not a large one, to Nonconformity, and a financial loss perhaps a little more serious. Nevertheless all the chief Nonconformist bodies are steadily increasing in numbers, and the Methodists and Presbyterians are probably increasing in wealth. The resources of Nonconformists in means and leisure are much smaller than those of the Church of England; but the Free Churchmen throw a larger proportion of their resources into their work. They have many notable successes to encourage them. They have their flourishing suburban congregations of well-to-do uninhabitable. Every person you meet folk, who almost invariably carry on a multifarious mission work in districts too poor to support churches of their own. In purely industrial centres they have gathered large and regular Sunday afternoon congregations of men who a few years ago would have been reckoned among the "lapsed masses." Even in London, with its vast nomadic laboring population and its hopeless depths of self-indulgence at both ends of the social scale, you may find a parish church manned by six clergymen and various lay agents yet attended by fewer people than go to a dissenting chapel with its one minister helped by a few lay members in their scanty leisure. A similar contrast might no doubt be found with the parts reversed, except that in the number of official workers the Church always has is a genius of some sort. The merely clever have quite disappeared. Even talent has become extremely rare, but the geniuses swarm. The time is a fearful time for vocations. O Art, Art! Things have come to such a pass, that if the child of a respectable family were to show a decided taste for commerce, agriculture, or any mild form of colonization, the father would be visited by terrible suspicions concerning the origin of the monster. From genuine Latin blood, only artists can spring. The child who differs from his kindred, in not being endowed by all the muses, must needs be a product of the new world. I have a notion of something novel in comedy, a scene, say, like the following: Father.-"Come to me, my son. You are now of age, and the voice of Na ture must have spoken clearly within you. Take this palette and these brushes and do me a Rubens. I will wait." Son.-"I don't know how." Father. "Then take this lump of potter's clay, and produce a Michael Angelo before my eyes." Son. "I really can't." Father. "Here is a rhyming dictionary. It is Rothschild's own. Have a shot at Victor Hugo and bring him down! Quick!" Son. "I should be delighted, but-" Father. "What is this which I hold in my trembling hand? Pincers! Take them and pull one of my teeth, but without pain, mind! Come! I am ready to sacrifice myself!" Son.-"But, papa Father.-"Time! You have called me father. Am I indeed your sire? That depends on your vocation. You are a Latin, born of a Latin mother. What then is your vocation?" passion is returned by the young lady who is herself an eminent painter on porcelain, and cannot see a white plate without dropping a few painted flowers upon it. In spite of the difference of position, for the turner is poor and turns in vain, the youth ventures to propose. "A tradesman in my family! Never!" cries the artist in canes; and he thrusts the young millionaire through the door on the right, while enters on the left, a sculptor who has not tasted food for a week, and has thus become by French precedent, the son-in-law of his choice. The despair of the young millionaire is deep. Why should he go back to America? He has realized his visions in tallow; and besides, he loves France. for though no artist, he was born there. He prefers to remain in Paris, were it only for the sake of consuming some of those artistic products of which there is such a vast accumulation, and which nobody ever buys. His resolu Son. "I should like to make three tion is taken. He will remain there; millions in tallow." and, moreover he will become an artist, like the rest of his countrymen and he will have his girl! he will be He excels. He gives all his fortune to the Taylorian Society to promote the holding annual exhibitions. He then climbs up into a garret, and devotes himself to making landscapes in hair, using his own. He will be bald, but famous. It is a new thing. and lo, and behold, he is a "dear master" like all the rest of us! His father then forgives him. The turner is conciliated. The painter on porcelain weeps. They are married, and France bestows a benediction on the only species of artist which she had not produced before. On the other hand the sculptor, who had been false to his art and taken up a trade, is arrested and Father. "And you claim to be my son! Avaunt! You are not even a Frenchman. Your eleven brothers, all belong, more or less, to the Institute, the Academy, or at least the chat noir. There is not one of them who has not dabbled in water-colors, played the Lancers on the piano, or had a few fierce lyrics printed by Lemerre. Your eight sisters chirrup like birds and annihilate Malibran every day of their lives. Your cousins go into everything. There is not one of your friends or acquaintances who has not won, by his performance on the flute or the drum, a right to the title of dear master' you are no child of mine. You come from America, you do! Bourgeois, return thither!" And he turns him out of doors. In condemned to the guillotine. Such is the succeeding acts, the young mau, who has disgraced his lineage by not being an artist, gradually amasses an immense fortune, at Cincinnati or Chicago, in the tallow of his dreams. He then comes back and falls in love with the daughter of a man who makes artistic canes on a turning-lathe. His the piece which I propose to bring out. every citizen convicted of personal music, be tied to a piano and ordered to march! For the idea of forty millions of people-all artists, eating, drinking, absorbing and emitting nothing but art, and all capable of propagating their species, is grotesque, inhuman, appalling!' "Among these forty millions of vocabe some mistakes tions there must either of nature or of education. It is to be hoped that there will be a few certain blunders, a little confusion, a number of bad lots. It cannot be that God has thus far protected France only that the Krupp guns of the next war a hundred may strew the soil with thousand Raphaels, Mozarts, Jean Goujons and Racines with as many more Molières, Beethovens, Michael Angelos and Shakespeares, all belonging to the National Guard. "For the fact is," adds M. Degenais, "that besides having a gift for any given art one must have practice in it, there's the rub! For practice and means hard work, and hard something horrible." Translated for The Living Age from the French work is venture not to be a great artist and and make fountains of them! And let where the absence of genius is noticeable. To ask whether there will be a Degenais in the piece, is to inquire whether I know my business. Of course there will be one; and this personage, whom I shall make as crabbed as is consistent with my own gentle nature, will make himself especially disagreeable by perpetually requesting to be told what is meant, in France, by a thwarted vocation. "What's a vocation thwarted," he exclaims, "in a country where everybody paints, or rhymes, or Whence comes sculps or sings flat? that absurd legend about the provincial parent, who disinherits his boy for having run away to Paris to be a great man? I'll give a white rabbit with ruby eyes, to anybody who will produce a young Frenchman with an ambition canvass, to smear the well-stretched and whose father has not ruined himself by promoting the boy's vocation. In every family budget there is now a sum reserved for the publication of that first volume of verse wherewith every chicken chips his shell. A man cannot marry until he has exhibited at least one picture. "Then," says my old ape of a Degenais "I rise to inform my native land that she is suffering from a plethora of genius and needs to be bled. 'France,' I would say, 'thy walls are all painted. Thy stock of paper is hausted. Thou hast no more of that vile clay which they call potter's-earth. One melody trickles from every one of thy windows and there is no such thing as a minute's silence to be had in all the length and breadth of thy territory. It is time to pause. I propose a MinisDistry of Artistic Discouragement. courage! discourage! if need be, by force. Offer prizes for the renunciation of genius! Let the highest be for those who will swear to enjoy art without attempting to produce it. Let the Legionof-Honor-for-exceptional-services awarded to those who will make a public holocaust of their works! Let prefectures be assigned to the brave fellows who will jump on their own canvasses, or ride over them on horseback; or who will fit their statues with pipes ex be of Emile Bergerot. From St. James's Gazette. CHEATING AT GOLF. Golf is the only first-class game at which cheating is at all easy-supposing, of course, that the player is unand even accompanied by a caddy; when accompanied by a caddy it is still a player, quite possible to cheat. If having played five strokes, says to his caddy, "That is four, is it not?" the latter will probably reply, "I think it's five, sir;” but if the player responds, "Oh, no, I'm sure it's only four," the caddy will probably say no more. Possibly at the end of the match he may mention to the other caddy his opinion of the circumstance, but this will not affect the player's reputation unless he happens to be at his own club. Even |