to suppress the fact that the delinquent had been intimately known to him for some thirty or forty years; that he had even been on rather friendly terms with him at a period when his action was by many degrees more detrimental than when he thought it expedient to take him into custody; and, above all, concealing the extenuating plea that for several years he had been gradually, but by no means slowly, mending his ways.

The injustice with which in this respect Mr. Gladstone is chargeable is to be found in an aggravated form in some of Mr. Froude's writings, and specially in his American lectures. Mr. Gladstone's friends may and do plead in his excuse that from the moment he reached the conscientious conviction that he was bound to the reform of Irish Church and Irish Land, he felt that, to carry two such heavily weighted measures to a successful issue, it was absolutely necessary to get up all the extra steam in his power. That the political need may have been so urgent as to render such a course moral, I have no wish to deny; but it is quite clear that a similar excuse cannot possibly be stretched to cover Mr. Froude writing history in his closet, or lecturing at times and in places of his own selection.

PETER FITZGERALD, Knight of Kerry.

READJUSTMENT OF CHURCH AND
STATE.

AMONG the many suggestive and monitory signs of the present time none deserves more attentive consideration than the widely-spread and openly-expressed desire for a readjustment of the relations now existing between the Church and the State. This desire, so far as it has at present become formulated, and has passed out of the region of mere complaint and dissatisfaction into something like the recognition of a real need, it is my intention to subject in the following paper to a careful investigation. There is much in it that all parties who wish well to the permanence of our institutions will be wise to consider, now that it remains only a desire. In a very short time the desire may pass into some form of definite action, and the present relations between the Church and the State become permanently endangered. Now, however, there is a little breathing-time; and that breathingtime could hardly be more profitably employed than in a quiet consideration of the peculiarly difficult subject that is formulated in the title to this article.

I propose, then, to enter as fully and systematically as my limits will permit into the general question of readjusting the relations of Church and State; and I hope to place before the reader not only the shapes into which the desire for readjustment has begun to precipitate itself, but, what is far more important, the broad and clear constitutional principles which, rightly or wrongly, it is seeking to modify. But it must be admitted that this is no easy task. The general subject of the present relations of Church and State is very far from simple; and its difficulties are increased by the amount of audacious assertion that is always made whenever the subject comes under consideration. Writers and speakers seem to forget that there are Acts of Parliament, in full force to this very hour, which regulate these relations, and in reference to which it may be said with confidence that there are none on the pages of the statute book which are less likely to be repealed or even modified. Knowing that they have ultimately this protection against the caste spirit that is unhappily now showing itself in some sections of our clergy, our Protestant laity remain comparatively passive and indifferent. Matters,

they well know, cannot pass beyond certain bounds: so they remain placid and apparently almost indifferent. Let, however, any proposal be made formally to transcend these bounds, or legislatively to remove the ancient landmarks, and it will at once be seen what a force that inexpugnable Protestantism' of our country is, which our Anglo-Romanist friends now suppose, from the sort of good-humoured toleration with which they are at present treated, that they can disregard and flout at their leisure.

But, to address ourselves at once to our difficult and responsible subject, let us agree, for the sake of greater simplicity and clearness, to consider it under the form of three leading questions, to which I will do my best to give clear and intelligible answers. Three ques

tions seem fairly to cover the ground. First, what, in simple terms, are the general outlines of the present relations of Church and State? Next, on what grounds is it contended that these relations need readjustment? In the third place, what are the more plausible readjustments that have, at present, been suggested; and what is the likelihood that any of them would receive statutory and legislative sanction? After having answered these questions we shall be in a position to pass our judgment on the whole question, and to decide how far it will be wise to give encouragement to the agitation that is now showing itself in many and unexpected quarters within the Church of England.

Before, however, we enter into these details let us just pause to make two general observations which it may be well to have clearly placed before us, and which certainly seem to add to the gravity of present developments.

The first observation is this: that the desire for readjustment of the relations of Church and State has spread greatly during the last few months, and cannot equitably be considered as confined entirely to one of the two great parties of the Church. A general discovery has apparently been made that the Church of England is languishing under a depressing bondage; and, as arch-priestliness is not confined to one party of the Church, champions have appeared even among those who have been commonly credited with something more than acquiescence in the settlements of the Reformation. It may be that there is a large constitutional party in the Church of England belonging to both schools of thought that has no sympathy whatever with the present perilous cry for readjustment; it may be that the leading members of the Evangelical party who have committed themselves to decided opinions on the subject represent a very small section of their party; still it remains a fact, of which we are bound to take cognisance, that the movement for readjustment of Church and State has, just of late especially, spread with some degree of rapidity, and has extended to quarters where we should never have expected to find it.

To illustrate this by facts, we may observe that a year and a half ago we heard very little of the subject. Ritualist pamphlets and partisan writers have, as we know to our cost, long been engaged on the subject of the tyranny of the State. Many a public man's waste-paper basket could bear witness to the activity with which these sentiments have been propagated for some few years. But little or no effect was ever produced by them. We had all become accustomed to the sort of language that was regularly used. The authorities on the subject, beginning with the quotation from Magna Charta and ending with the first words (not the remainder) of the fourth paragraph of the Address to the Thirty-Nine Articles, had all become quite old friends; but the effect they had produced was confined to the party from which they had emanated. It was not till a certain number of persons of high character and honourable position in the Church felt it their duty to lay before the Archbishops and Bishops their great anxiety and distress' at the existing relations between the Church and the State, and their desire that the living voice of the Church' should lay down the law for the future, that the feeling arose and spread that we had all been unconsciously languishing in the chains of an Erastian bondage. The legislative action of the Church, we were assured, had become paralysed by the apprehension of what Parliament might do with any Church measures. that might be submitted to it; Archbishops and Bishops were urgently called upon to devise measures to allay this newly-discovered 'anxiety and distress.' Something was to be done, and speedily; and so widespread in clerical minds has become the conviction, that Conferences and Congresses, including a Congress under a Primate of all England, has been deliberating what that something is to be. Whether there are any real grounds for the conviction is another matter; but that there is a widely diffused feeling in clerical circles that readjustment of some kind or other must at once be attempted, is one of those unwelcome phenomena which must, we fear, now be distinctly recognised. When one responsible speaker tells a Church Congress that the State has found it convenient to use the organisation of the Church for furthering its ends' (though how, or what the ends may be, was not specified); and when another speaker of a perfectly opposed school of thought reminded the same audience that 'the position of the Church is that of a huge dumb animal' (fortunately he did not specify more exactly), and that he and his clerical brethren were 'practically gagged and muzzled, and debarred from any opportunity of expressing their minds about ecclesiastical measures in Parliament,' we may smile, and we may wonder that even clerical rhetoric should permit itself to take such flights; but the fact remains, such language as this is used in large Church assemblages, and is, we are afraid, accepted and believed in by many.

A second preliminary observation which may also be made is this:

that not only is there this widely diffused ecclesiastical persuasion, that the relations of Church and State must be readjusted at the earliest opportunity, but that there is what is still more serious, a reckless indifference to the certain consequences of the proposals that are made. This perhaps is the most startling fact connected with the whole question. For an utter divergence in the remedial suggestion we are not unprepared. When, for instance, of the two speakers just alluded to, one found all he wanted in a convention of laity associated with Convocation, and the other was apparently as fully persuaded that the laity have an overpowering voice' in Convocation in the persons of those they practically nominate, we feel no particular surprise. What, however, does seem especially striking is the total indifference either to the necessity of consulting Parliament or to the judgment that Parliament would inevitably form if it were to be consulted, and if any of the proposals were ever introduced in either of the Houses of the Legislature. A few of the more extreme writers have always had the good sense and perspicacity to recognise this as an axiomatic truth, that if the Church wants real spiritual liberty it must purchase it at the cost of disestablishment. With this preamble to their proposals, though we may not for a moment agree with the principles of the writers, we can at any rate tolerantly discuss their remedies for the supposed ills of Church and State. We find no fault with their way of putting the matter; we do venture, however, to find very grave fault with the loose and free manner with which proposals are made by responsible speakers of quite a different way of thinking, when almost a moment's thought would remind them that their proposals involve either direct infractions of the Act of the Submission of the Clergy, or violations of existing compacts that would bring about a rupture with the State as certain as it would be promptly and perilously final.

Let us, for instance, just briefly illustrate this by a notice of the proposals that were brought forward only three months ago in our Northern and Southern Convocations with some appearance of concerted action. The subject was that which we are now consideringthe better adjustment of the relations of Church and State. Well, what were the proposals? Why, simply and in general terms, as follows that Convocation should make constitutions, which the Crown should allow Parliament to look at, and which, if Parliament did not disapprove of them, were to become law. The proposal of the Southern Convocation was more constitutional than that of the Northern, as the constitutions suggested by the Lower House of the Convocation of Canterbury were only to assume a rudimentary form of existence, and to be 'draft' constitutions until the Crown finally transferred them, we presume, to parchment. Still the general arrangement was the same. Convocation was to propose, and Parliament was to approve; and this without one word, even on the surface, clearly indicative of the relation which such an arrangement