to individual churches, and simply for the maintenance of the worship of God in those churches. There is not one scrap of evidence to show that those endowments were given to a national institution '-indeed, there has never been a national institution,' either in England or in Wales, having a corporate entity capable of receiving such endowments. There is not one scrap of evidence to show that those endowments were given by a "Legislative Act,' or to be applied to any 'purely secular purposes' of which Mr. Lloyd George speaks in his Preface. There is not one scrap of evidence to show that those endowments are other than private benefactions to particular churches,' of which Mr. McKenna spoke in the House of Commons.

I have already quoted, for its reference to tithe, the charter by which William Revel-a private individual-at some date between 1115 and 1135 endowed the church of Hay in Brecknockshire—an individual church—with the glebe which its parson held subsequently when Giraldus visited it.

In the margins of the famous Book of St. Chad-an illuminated Latin MS. of the Gospels that was long in the possession of the church of Llandaff, and was transferred thence to Lichfield, possibly by sale, about the year 964-there was inscribed, according to the custom of the age, a number of grants and other documents of formal records. Thus, it is stated-and Mr. Seebohm points out that there can be no reason to doubt for one moment the authenticity of these records'-that Ris and Luith Grethi gave to God and St. Eliud (the patron saint of an individual church) the land called Trefguidauc. The census or food-rent of this Tref is carefully stated-and, as usual, the curse of God is solemnly invoked on all who would interfere with this endowment.23

A similar grant in the Book of St. Chad is from Ris and Hirv of land at Bracma-and these are all gifts from individuals to individual churches.

So, too, Mr. Seebohm quotes from the Book of Llan Dav a long grant to the church of Garth Benni of Constantine in Erging, by one Peipian-the son-in-law of Constantine-of the land called Mainaur Garth Benni, which is given to God and St. Dubricius, to be held free from all secular tribute for ever. And he refers to a number of other grants in similar terms. He says: Many of the early donations to churches in South Wales are recorded in the Book of Llan Dav, St. Dubricius and St. Teilo being the reputed founders of that see.' St. Dubricius and St. Teilo were both related to the royal line of Cunedda, and to St. David-of whom St. Cadoc was also a friend and rival.

23 The Tribal System in Wales, p. 185.

3 s

VOL. LXXII-No. 429

The legendary life of St. Cadoc, that has come down to us in a twelfth-century MS. in the British Museum, contains a number of remarkable donations to the church of St. Cadoc, dating from a very early period, about 547 A.D. These donations are, in their form and stipulations, precisely similar to the grants which I have already quoted. They are the solemn records of the benefactions of individuals, given to individual churches, for the preaching of the Gospel to the poor, and for no other purpose whatever. And they are all accompanied by the invocation of a curse on those who would defraud Godthe gift being invariably stated to be to God and to' the patron saint of the particular church endowed. Some Radicals, more sensitive than their leaders, have protested against the spoliation of the parish churches in Wales being stigmatised as a robbery of God'-but they would no longer do so if they would take the trouble to read the original deeds. For instance, in the St. Cadoc donations, one Conbellin gives the land of Lisdin-barrion 'to God and St. Cadoc, for the purchase of the kingdom of heaven.' Again, one Temit gives his land of Ager Crucin 'to the altar of St. Cadoc in perpetual possession,' and adds: Who shall keep this, God keep him!-and who withdraws it, God will break him in pieces.' And every other grant of glebe to a Welsh parish church that I have seen has a similar curse for the impious man who shall dare to divert it to secular uses. Without incurring the reproach of superstition, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. McKenna may well shrink from deliberately defying the undoubted beliefs, and outraging the deep religious sentiments, of all their Welsh ancestors.

It would be possible to quote numerous instances of the same kind of thing in the endowments of the ancient British Church in Cornwall, where the Celtic Bishop Conan held the see of St. Germans in the time of Howel, the last Celtic king of Cornwall, who reigned at Liskeard circa 936. It was Bishop Livingus, King Cnut's justiciar and the Devonian Bishop of Crediton, who succeeded his uncle Bishop Brihtwold as Bishop of St. Germans, and transferred the Cornish see to Crediton, whence Leofric carried it to Exeter. It was in Leofric's time. that the Domesday Survey of Cornwall was made-and this shows the individual Cornish churches, as in Wales, holding their glebe-lands in the names of their patron saints, having received them by grants similar to those to St. Teilo and St. Cadoc. For instance, under the heading of Lanchehoc, a manor near Bodmin, the Domesday Survey tells us that: Earl Moreton holds Lanchehoc from St. Petrocus, and one Cargan a thane held it in the time of King Edward the Confessor.' Then follow a number of other manors, all stated to be held from St. Petrocus,

the patron saint of the great parish church of Bodmin where St. Petrock was buried-and then this striking declaration : 'Omnes superius descriptas terras tenebat tempore Regis Edwardi Sanctus Petrocus-hujusce terrae nunquam reddiderunt geldam nisi ipsi ecclesiae.' The endowments of the old Celtic saint of Bodmin had been held sacrosanct through the Saxon Conquest by Athelstan, and the Norman Conquest by William -as subsequently they were held, both through the time of the Reformation, and through the Puritan rule of the Commonwealth. It has been left for the predatory instincts and the immoral methods of the new finance' to devise hypocritical excuses for the robbery of God, and the plunder of the poor, by this mean measure of disendowment.

Mr. Lloyd George, in the Preface to which I have already referred, declares that Parliament has several times exercised this right '—the right of seizing the endowments of the parish churches-notably at the time of the Reformation, and the fortunes of many of our great families and the prosperity of many of our educational institutions are dependent upon a full acknowledgment of this right.' This ad captandum reference to the Reformation of religion in England is simply a grotesque misrepresentation of the facts of history. Henry the Eighth's dissolution of the monasteries had no more connexion with the Reformation of religion in England-except in the accident that it was facilitated by the political breach between the King and the Pope on the divorce question-than Mr. McKenna's Disendowment is connected with the Revival of religion in the Welsh Church which he hates. The persecution of religious reformers as heretics went on as merrily after the dissolution as before. Mr. Lloyd George may, indeed, fairly compare Mr. McKenna's disendowment of the Welsh parish churches to King Henry's dissolution of the monasteries to this extent, that the latter was founded on greed and envy, and that the proceeds of that robbery were distributed to the friends of the King, just as Mr. McKenna's plunder is to be given to his friends in the Welsh County Councils and the Welsh University Colleges. But all that had nothing to do with the Reformation.

Moreover, the comparison to the Reformation is particularly unfair in the case of the Celtic churches of Wales and Cornwall. The learned Cornish antiquary, Mr. Lach-Szyrma, of Brasenose College, Oxford, has proved beyond dispute that the course of the religious Reformation in Cornwall was an absolutely imperceptible and peaceful development, with no disturbance whatever of local church work.24 And Sir John Rhys and Sir D.

24 Lach-Szyrma's Church History of Cornwall, pp. 64, 65.

Brynmor Jones 25 bear witness to precisely the same phenomenon in the history of the Welsh Church. They say: 'By the bulk of the population it seems that the events of the sixteenth century were practically unnoticed.' But if Mr. McKenna's Bill were ever to become law, no one knows better than Mr. Lloyd George how terrible would be the upheaval, how heavy would be the blow struck at the religious life of the Principality for years to come.

Mr. McKenna's Under-Secretary in the Home Office, Mr. Ellis Griffith, M.P., speaking at a meeting in Cardiff on the 18th of February 1907, dealt with Welsh Disendowment in terse and concise terms of almost brutal frankness. In the Daily News of the following day he is reported to have said: 'Disestablishment meant a social reform programme, and MONEY BEHIND IT!' That certainly puts the whole question into a nutshell. Whether that frank and straightforward declaration is entirely in harmony with the words of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. McKenna quoted by me above, is not for me to say. Mr. Ellis Griffith says plainly: Rem. . quocunque modo rem'! Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. McKenna seem coyly to whisper the qualification, Si possis, recte'! Of these two conflicting policies, which will the Government elect to follow?

ROPER LETHBRIDGE.

25 The Welsh People, p. 461.

A GHOST OF THE LIVING

GHOSTS of the dead are not uncommon, if we are to believe the Society of Psychical Research. Alleged appearances at the hour of death are also common material for the Society's investigation, and, in many cases, have been satisfactorily established. As a boy I often saw the brass plate at St. Edmund's College, Ware, which was set up in memory of Philip Weld; and the story of his being drowned at Rye House in 1846, and appearing to his father and sister at the moment of his death, was familiar to me. I once told it to Mr. F. W. Myers, and, at his request, I communicated with Philip Weld's sister, who was still alive, that he might have something more authentic before him than my own recollection of the story. I received from Miss Weld a written account of the episode, which I still have somewhere, and of which I sent a copy to Mr. Myers. The correspondence I had with Miss Weld was not wholly satisfactory, as it seemed that she and her father at the time of the occurrence had only thought that they saw a boy very like Philip Weld. They had not, at the time, any feeling that the likeness was so great that it must be Philip himself. And it was only after they learnt that he was dead that they attached significance to the incident. Still, the occurrence was worth chronicling.

Either my own ghost or my double was seen by my relations more than once at Eastbourne when I lived there, and on one of these occasions I received an anxious telegram in London to ask if I were living or dead-for my relatives were apparently more ready than Mr. Weld's to suspect a sad significance in the apparition.

I think there are several instances well authenticated of people having seen living friends who were at a distance. But I had never until recently heard of A. appearing to B. and B. appearing to A. in the same place and circumstances, and recognising each other, yet both having actually been at the place only at different times. The annihilation of time which such an idea implies seems to raise Kant's metaphysical question as to the