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exhibited some of these characteristics, but no one who reads the Guardian, which I suppose appeals to a larger clerical public than any other paper, can fail to realise the contrast. It is not merely that it is habitually written in the style and temper of a gentleman, but that it reflects most clearly in its criticism, its impartiality, its tone of thought, the best intellectual influences of the time. Men may agree or differ about its politics or its theology, but no one who reads it can fail to admit that it is thoroughly in touch with cultivated lay opinion, and it is in fact a favourite paper of many who care only for its secular aspects.

The intellectual ability, however, included among the ministers of a Church, though one test, is by no means a decisive and infallible one of its religious life. During the period of the Renaissance when genuine belief in the Catholic Church had sunk to nearly its lowest point, most men of literary tastes and talents were either members of the priesthood or of the monastic orders. This was not due to any fervour of belief, but simply to the fact that the Church at that time furnished almost the only sphere in which a literary life could be pursued with comfort, without molestation, and with some adequate reward. Much of the literary ability found in the English Church is unquestionably due to the attraction it offers, and the facilities it gives to those who simply wish for a studious life. The abolition of many clerical sinecures, and the greatly increased activity of clerical duty imposed by contemporary opinion, have no doubt rendered the profession less desirable from this point of view; but even now there is no other profession outside the Universities which lends itself so readily to a literary life, and a great proportion of the most eminent thinkers and writers in

the Church of England are eminent in fields that have little or no connection with theology.

Other tests of a flourishing Church are needed, but they can easily be found. Political power is one test, though it is a very coarse and very deceptive one. Perhaps it is not too much to say that the most superstitious creeds are often those which exercise the greatest political influence, for they are those in which the priesthood acquire the most absolute authority. Nor does the decline of superstition among the educated classes always bring with it a corresponding decline in ecclesiastical influence. There have been instances, both in Pagan and Christian times, of a sceptical and highly educated ruling class supporting and allying themselves with a superstitious Church as the best means of governing or moralising the masses. Such Churches by their skilful organisation, by their ascendency over individual rulers, or by their political alliances, have long exercised an enormous influence, and in a democratic age the preponderance of political power is steadily passing from the most educated classes. At the same time in a highly civilised and perfectly free country, in which all laws of religious disqualification and coercion have disappeared, and all questions of religion are submitted to perpetual discussion, the political power which the Church of England retains at least proves that she has a vast weight of genuine and earnest opinion behind her. No politician will deny the strength with which the united or greatly preponderating influence of the Church can support or oppose a party. It has been said by a cynical observer that the three things outside their own families that average Englishmen value the most are rank, money, and the Church of England, and certainly no good observer will

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form a low estimate of the strength or earnestness of the Church feeling in every section of the English people.

Still less can it be denied that the Church retains in a high degree its educational influence. For a long period national education was almost wholly in its hands, and, since all disqualifications and most privileges have been abolished, it still exercises a part in English education which excites the alarm of some and the admiration of others. It has thrown itself heartily into the new political conditions, and the vast number of voluntary schools established under clerical influence, and the immense sums that are annually raised for clerical purposes, show beyond all doubt the amount of support and enthusiasm behind it. In every branch of higher education its clergy are conspicuous, and their influence in training the nation is not confined to the pulpit, the University, or the school. No candid observer of English life will doubt the immense effect of the parochial system in sustaining the moral level both of principle and practice, and the multitude, activity, and value of the philanthropic and moralising agencies which are wholly or largely due to the Anglican Church.

Nor can it be reasonably doubted that the Church has been very efficacious in promoting that spiritual life, which, whatever opinion men may form of its origin and meaning, is at least one of the great realities of human nature. The power of a religion is not to be solely or mainly judged by its corporate action; by the institutions it creates; by the part which it plays in the government of the world. It is to be found much more in its action on the individual soul, and especially in those times and circumstances when man is most isolated from society. It is in furnishing the ideals and motives of individual

life; in guiding and purifying the emotions; in promoting habits of thought and feeling that rise above the things of earth; in the comfort it can give in age, sorrow, disappointment and bereavement; in the seasons of sickness, weakness, declining faculties, and approaching death that its power is most felt. No one creed or Church has the monopoly of this power, though each has often tried to identify it with something peculiar to itself. It may be found in the Catholic and in the Quaker, in the High Anglican who attributes it to his sacramental system, and in the Evangelical in whose eyes that system holds only a very subordinate place. All that need here be said is that no one who studies the devotional literature of the English Church or who has watched the lives of its more devout members will doubt that this life can largely exist and flourish within its pale.

The attitude which men who have been born within that Church, but who have come to dissent from large portions of its theology, should bear to this great instrument of good is certainly not less perplexing than the questions we have been considering in the preceding chapters. The most difficult position is, of course, that of those who are its actual ministers, and who have subscribed its formularies. Each man so situated must judge in the light of his own conscience. There is a great difference between the case of men who accept such a position in the Church, though they differ fundamentally from its tenets, and the case of men who, having engaged in its service, find their old convictions modified or shaken, perhaps very gradually, by the advance of science, or by more matured thought and study. The stringency of the old form of subscription has been much mitigated by an Act of 1865 which substituted a general

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declaration that the subscriber believed in the doctrine of the Church as a whole for a declaration that he believed 'all and everything' in the Articles and the Prayer-book. The Church of England does not profess to be an infallible Church; it does profess to be a National Church representing and including great bodies of more or less divergent opinion, and the whole tendency of legal decisions since the Gorham case has been to enlarge the circle of permissible opinion. The possibility of the National Church remaining in touch with the more instructed and intellectual portions of the community depends mainly on the latitude of opinion that is accorded to its clergy, and on their power of welcoming and adopting new knowledge, and it may reasonably be maintained that few greater calamities can befall a nation than the severance of its higher intelligence from religious influences.

It should be remembered, too, that on the latitudinarian side the changes that take place in the teaching of the Church consist much less in the open repudiation of old doctrines than in their silent evanescence. They drop out of the exhortations of the pulpit. The relative importance of different portions of the religious teaching is changed. Dogma sinks into the background. Narratives which are no longer seriously believed become texts for moral disquisitions. The introspective habits and the stress laid on purely ecclesiastical duties which once preponderated disappear. The teaching of the pulpit tends rather to the formation of active, useful and unselfish lives; to a clearer insight into the great masses of remediable suffering and need that still exist in the world; to the duty of carrying into all the walks of secular life a nobler and more unselfish spirit; to a habit of judging men and Churches mainly by their fruits and very little