cal conflicts; and no one has a right to wonder at their triumph over the apparently approaching destruction of what they have so long and intensely wished to destroy, even if it is not to be destroyed for the reasons which have made them wish to destroy it. Within the Church, the various influences which at previous times told against separation from the State and against internal changes, have been greatly affected by the course of thought and by the events of the last thirty years. Changes in the balance of political and religious parties, in the ideas of government, in legislation, in doctrinal bias and development; in the character, the activity, the power, the aims of religious leaders; in the fashions and understandings of religious society, all have contributed in their degree, and often on different and opposite grounds, to reconcile many among the warmest and most sincere of churchmen to innovations from which even a few years back they would have shrunk with dismay. The signs of the time portend change in the Church, and facilitate it. They point, also, to the direction which change is likely to take. Engineers tell us that when the periodic times of a ship's roll coincide with the periodic times of the waves in the trough of which she is swaying from side to side, this is the most dangerous time for her: for then the two forces act together, instead of checking one another, in disturbing her stability and balance. There never was a time, probably, in the history of the English Church, since the Reformation, when the impulse towards change from without conspired with such strong impulses towards change from within, which, though of a totally different nature, yet are acting in the same direction. To all minds which feel the interest of religion the momentous question is presenting itself,-What is to be the future of religion in England, as far as religion is affected by the outward framework and visible form under which it lives and acts? These outward conditions in England have been very peculiar. Nothing exactly like it has been known in Christendom. Religion has been organised simultaneously on two different and antagonistic principles, and on both of them organised naturally, strongly, and popularly. The Church principle and system, and the Nonconformist principle and system, have long been, like two nations and two manner of people, struggling in the womb of English Christianity. In varying degrees of strength and prominence; with alternate periods of conflict, aggression, and truce; with many vicissitudes of fortune; with great fluctuations of predominance and repulse, each often checked and thrown back,

apparently at the moment when it was most hopeful of triumph-they laid hold of English society before the Reformation, and have disputed the possession of it ever since, as they do now. And the remarkable thing is, that English Society will have both of them. Both of them growing out of tendencies of unknown depth and force, and of indestructible vitality, neither of them has been able to overpower and expel the other; to make England, like France or Spain, the realm of a dominant Church, or, like the United States, a commonwealth of sects. Both of these modes of organising religion have much in common, as they both belong to English religion, which stands in sharp contrast with the different types of Continental religion. Both of them, besides their secondary differences, have points of affinity and sympathy which vary and alter in the progress of time, but which may, at any particular moment, create confusing and misleading appearances of resemblance. But they are essentially separated by a great gulf. The basis on which one rests is a public one, that on which the other rests is a private one. In contrast with the Church-quite apart from the position of the Church on the Statute-Book-every Nonconformist body, from the smallest and youngest company of Free Christians to the imposing organisations of the Methodists and Congregationalists, is a private association, the growth of private ideas and private wants, and exclusively and without challenge in its own hands and in its own power. This is just what cannot be said of the Church. It did not make itself. It could not, if it would, unmake itself. It declines, in the most peremptory way, any dependence on individuals; it rejects impatiently individual pressure; it will have nothing to do with private ideas, private doctrines, private claims. It is anything but co-extensive with the nation; yet the thought which inspires and guides it is nothing less than a national one. The one order is historical, inherited, continuous with the past, keeping in company, in troubled times and smooth, with the life and range of the nation. The other, in all its manifold shapes, starts in each instance from a fresh basis of change, reform, protest. To improve, it makes a breach; to build aright, it pulls down and clears the ground; and that which it has done on its own responsibility in order to begin its career, of course may be, and in the lapse of time is likely to be, done to it. It is the enterprise of private men. It may be right, it may be based on truth, it may be commended by imperious necessity, it may be a revival of primitive ideas and practices, it may be a return to real Christianity, and

destined to retrieve and save it in a world which has lost it: but, be it what else it may, it must be a thing private and not public, the work and thought of private men, which nothing at present conceivable could ever make a public thing.

This, independently of belief, usage, and temper, is the broad distinction between the two forms of religious organization which have recommended themselves to the genius of the English nation. The capital difference is between what is public and what is private. The one is sometimes spoken of invidiously as the State Church, the creation of Acts of Parliament and the policy of governments, an establishment in bondage to the civil power and at its mercy; and the other is often described as being distinctively the voluntary system, the organisation which belongs to churches which are free, independent of political control, untrammelled by human law, and which leaves choice and conscience at liberty in matters of religion. These popular ways of viewing the subject are inadequate and misleading. The Church is subject to legal regulation, not because it is the creation of law, but because its basis is a public one; and what is public must attract the notice of the law much more than, and in a different sense from, what is private. And it is not only a mere begging of the question, but it is going in the face of palpable facts, to claim for the Nonconformist system the distinctive attributes of voluntary and free; as if the Church were neither. It would be strange, in a race like the English, if that which had been for ages the chosen religious organisation of the nation were less voluntary and less free than the organisation of particular fractions. As no one is obliged to be a Churchman against his will, and as neither numbers nor heartiness of attachment are wanting in the Church, it is idle to allege that the absence of spontaneous adhesion and voluntary choice distinguishes its organisation from that of the Nonconformists, or that its members feel themselves less free because they are under the limitations and government of English law. In their vigour, their tenacity of conviction, their ennobling sense of liberty, in their genuine and spontaneous warmth of zeal, no one who cares for his character as an honest reporter of facts can venture to say that there is anything to choose between them. Both are free, as far as freedom is compatible with an organisation at all; both are voluntary, if voluntary means the unrestrained adhesion of the will; both are popular, if popular means what answers to and attracts the sympathies and interest of mankind. It is not in this direction that the distinction between them is to

be sought. But one is public, with the advantages and the disadvantages of what is public; and the other is private, with the advantages and the disadvantages of what is private.

Whether these two great roads are still to remain open for the religion of Englishmen, or whether one of them is to be closed, and closed for ever, is becoming one of the serious questions of the time. From the earliest days of English history, with one short interruption, there has been a public Church, a public religion. We do not call it national, for it has not always been such; but it has always been public, open to the public, and for the public; public in its aims, public in its management. Whatever its origin, it was not private; whatever its changes, they have been brought about by great public influences, and they have been fixed by the acts of public authority. Whether there shall be such a thing any longer, is what the present generation will have to decide for themselves and those who come after them. Churchmen, indeed, believe-and believe with at least as much ground of reason as their antagonists have against them-that no changes of political relations can change the inherent attributes and prerogatives of their great institution. Its antiquity, its remoteness of origin, its long and chequered and powerful life, alone distinguish it from sects which were founded at a known and recent date, on known and limited doctrinal bases, and by the will and energy of particular men. The Church never can sink in such points to the level of religious societies which are but of yesterday. But the Church may cease, by certain alterations in her relations with the country, to be what she is now,-a public institution. And when she ceases to be a public institution, let her retain what she may of her present character and her present doctrines and habits of thought and feeling, the whole religious condition of the country is changed, and she takes her place as one among a number of religious societies, under the control of private men, under private government, and with private interests.

The general direction of Liberal thought in politics and religion is in favour of reducing all religious organization to a private matter: that is to say, to giving to the Nonconformist principle and system a complete and final triumph over the older principle and system. And this is natural; for the Nonconformists claim to have been in all periods of English history the staunch supporters of Liberal principles; and, as regards the embodiment of these principles in definite political changes and acts of

the preacher of culture. These are tricks of writing, and belong to a man's manner and favourite ways of expressing himself; and all of us have a right to our likes and dislikes in such matters of taste. But there never was a greater mistake than that of supposing from this that Mr. Arnold had not thought deeply and really on what he writes about, or that he is anything short of being in the most anxious and often sorrowful earnest. In truth there ought to be no difficulty in seeing, through all his banter and sarcasm, that he knows well what he is talking of, and that his purpose is as near his heart as his meaning is clear and definite. But after all our experience, though humour has so often veiled the deepest feeling and conviction, we still are slow to discern what lies hid under a disguise of light and playful handling,-to distinguish between the smile of indifference or mockery, and the smile of masked emotion and concern:

'Questo che par sorriso ed è dolore.' And yet with our literature, and all that it has shown us of the manifold and subtle devices of expression, we ought to be familiar with the reasons which have induced some of the keenest lovers of truth to seek a refuge from the consciousness of human fallibility and inadequacy in that selfrepression which the Greeks call ɛipwveía, and have made them reveal their most anxious convictions and say their invidious truths' in words which seemed to mock their meaning. Mr. Arnold has certainly said many things at which both Nonconformists and Churchmen may stumble; but those who least agree with him may convince themselves, if they will, that few men have taken more pains to clear up to themselves, their theaghts, and the facts with which they deal; and that few take deeper interest in the conclusions which they urge. There is something irritating to many people in the easy flexibility of mind and style which passes rapidly through alternations of lofty calm, and light but stinging touches of satire, and goodnatured carelessness and self-abandonment, putting on the appearance of being too little in earnest, for fear of pretending to be too much. Let us, if we will, say that different men have different ways of writing, and that this is not ours, nor to our liking. But this ought not to lead any one to mistake the seriousness, the solid thought, and the sincerity and warmth of intention, which are marked on every line of his recent writings. A man who responds, as Mr. Arnold does, to the piety of Bishop Wilson, is not a man to think lightly of what Bishop Wilson lived and worked for.

The other point is more important. Nonconformists, whose theology Mr. Arnold criticises so severely, have certainly some reason to except to the theology of their critic. Mr. Arnold's interpretation of St. Paul, if it is the true and the adequate one, makes a clean sweep of a good deal more than Puritan divinity and tradition; and it certainly seems to us that in his anxiety to bring out in its due importance the moral basis and moral significance of religion, which he does with great beauty and truth, he overlooks two things, the inextricable connection with even the moral side of Christianity of real outward facts of history, which if they fall, must bring down Christianity with them, and which it is intelligible to deny, but idle to‘ignore; and next, the value of those efforts after a philosophy of religion-efforts, often, doubtless, misdirected and barren, yet also, as certainly, involving deep and true work of the human mind, close scrutiny of its ideas, and patient and skilful use of the materials of knowing, which have gone on without interruption during the most progressive ages of man, and which we call theology. Mr. Arnold, for instance, is so deeply impressed and so amply satisfied with St. Paul's moral use of the idea of resurrection, that he does not seem to want for himself or further to care to see in St. Paul, any great stress laid on the historical fact of our Lord's resurrection. But to leave out the capital and supreme significance of that actual rising from actual death in the belief and teaching of St. Paul, is surely as arbitrary and hopeless a suppression as any that can be laid to the charge of those Puritan interpreters who have been blind to St. Paul's morality, and have dropped it out of his doctrine. It is vain to say that St. Paul did not want it as a real fact and step in the history and development of human destiny, as well as a great figure and suggestion of moral progress. It is in vain to attempt to expound St. Paul on the supposition that though he believed the resurrection as a fact, he put it, as an historical event, in the background as secondary; it is in vain to explain the meaning of Christianity on the supposition that it may be left aside, to succumb to or to wait for the decision of science. The great alternative which the question about it offers ought never to be absent from the mind of any one who speaks of Christianity. If it cannot be, then Christianity cannot be; and then it is waste of time to write about churches and sects, and to compare their merits.

We must think that St. Paul, though most, undoubtedly, as Mr. Arnold urges, he