"to care for none of these things"? Surely to moot the question is to answer it.

"Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."

Lord Palmerston in 1856 stated: "I, for one, am decidedly of opinion that Church Establishment is a proper part of the organisation of a civilised country, entertaining a deep, a settled, a rooted conviction, that a Church Establishment is essential in every country in which it is thought desirable that religion should be diffused and inculcated on the minds of the population.'

It is because the State for centuries has recognised that public no less than private life should be influenced by religion, that commissioners of assize and the Houses of Parliament commence their proceedings with public prayer; that the sovereign is crowned in the Abbey Church at Westminster; and that citizens in these and many other ways are reminded that all true service must be dedicated to God. Nay, more, the national flag itself, the emblem of national life, is thrice marked with the sign of the cross.

If, then, it is the duty of a Christian State to invest its citizens with the right and the opportunity of obtaining those means of grace by which alone national character can be wisely moulded, the State must select as a National Church that denomination which, in the opinion of the State, will in the most efficient manner expound the true doctrine of Christian

ity, and the State will raise the selected denomination to the status of a National Church; the Church on its part undertaking

(1) To provide spiritual ministration to all parishioners in its several parishes; and

(2) Not to change its doctrine without the consent of the nation expressed in statutory form.

Sir Edward Clarke has stated that "the difference between a country in which there is no Established Church, and the place in which happily this Church is established with its authority and its correlative duties is, that in the former you have a number of somewhat narrow sects, competing with each other for the influence and revenue they may gain from the community, while in the latter the church doors are open to all, and the poor man, though he can bring no gift, is entitled to enter and to hear the preaching of the Gospel and receive the ministration of the Sacraments. It is his right, and none can bar him from it." By 1 and 2 Ed. 6, c. 1, and other statutes, a legal right to the ministration of the clergy is vested in parishioners, and a refusal of ministration without lawful cause would support an action on the case at common law, or proceedings in an Ecclesiastical Court against the offending clergyman. Such is the meaning of a National Establishment of religion. Such is the effect of an Establishment upon the rights and privileges of the clergy and the laity. If laymen once become aware that disestablish

ment means the abolition of the legal right of the laity to receive the ministrations of the Sacraments,-a right which is theirs not because they pay for it, but because they are members of an Established Church, -the resentment of popular audiences will glow into a devouring flame, for the people will then realise that disendowment means not only that the clergy may lose their stipends, but that the means whereby alone young and old, rich and poor, the outcast, the ignorant, and the afflicted can receive Christian ministration will become drastically restricted. The laity will never knowingly consent to give up this splendid heritage, which they hold not only for themselves, but as trustees of those who shall succeed them.

It must always be remembered that it is the laity, and not the clergy, who will be the heaviest losers if disestablishment takes place. Is it not, therefore, a grave error in tactics that defenders of the Church should expose before popular audiences the evils of disendowment, and leave untouched the far greater and more deep-seated evils which would follow in the train of disestablishment? The Establishment of the Church of England, then, consists in the legal status which the Church acquired at the Reformation in exchange for the obligations which she then undertook to perform. The effect of the Establishment was not to confer privileges on the clergy, but to vest legal rights in the laity. No one can pre

There was no privilege granted to the Church at the Reformation except the privilege of being intrusted with the spiritual welfare of the nation; for although a State which recognises the mount importance of propagating Christian principles is under a moral duty to provide the Established Church with the necessary means of effecting its purpose, the State in this country has undertaken no such obligation. With the exception of Parliamentary grants between 1818 - 1824, amounting in all to £1,500,000, for the erection of new churches in populous districts, and annual grants to Queen Anne's Bounty between 18091820, reaching in the aggregate £1,100,000, the State as such has not endowed the National Church with any part of the property of which ecclesiastical corporations stand possessed. Further, the principal privileges which the Church enjoys became vested in her long before the Establishment ; her spiritual and her coercive jurisdiction has been conceded to her from at least Norman times; the Coronation service of the Church and realm of England, according to the late Dean Hook, has been substantially the same since the eighth century, and

of the House of Lords ever since it has existed.

Sir Lewis Dibdin has pointed out "that not one of the privileges referred to above was conferred at the Reformation. They have all been handed down from the earliest antiquity."

What objection can be raised to such an Establishment as this, which confirms but does not create the rights and privileges of the clergy, which embodies the national recognition of religion, and which brings to the doors of all who seek the means of grace the opportunity of finding them? However, the system is sometimes attacked by opponents within the Church, and, before attempting to combat the objections put forward by Nonconformists, it may be well to refer to two ecclesiastical reforms which would disarm much criticism among faithful members of the Established Church. The unrestricted right of Church patronage, whereby an incumbent may be appointed and retained in 8 benefice without the approbation-and, it may be, against the wishes -of the parishioners, is a cause of much uneasiness in the Church, and seventy years ago lost to the Scottish Church Dr Thomas Chalmers-the most brilliant of all champions of Church Establishments; and a reform whereby the nomination of the patron should require for its validity the confirmation of the parishioners would prove both expedient and popular.

Further, in any scheme for

of Lords, the exclusion of Bishops would be be received with approval by an overwhelming proportion of the laity. It is in theory, as in practice, as unsatisfactory that Bishops should sit in the House of Lords as that Nonconformist ministers should sit in the House of Commons.

The clergy of all denominations are concerned with the principles upon which conduct should be based; they should be content to leave in other hands the consideration of the best means whereby those principles can be put in practice.

The position of the clergy in France was profoundly prejudiced by the unfortunate intervention of the Church in "l'Affaire Dreyfus," while in this country it would not be easy to find an instance in which the active participation of ministers of religion in politics has not been fraught with danger both to religion and to the body politic.

The support which the Archbishops and Bishops gave to the Parliament Act in 1911, the first-fruits of which were avowedly to be a scheme of Church Disestablishment, and the vehement manner in which many of the bishops and clergy advocated the passing of the confiscatory clauses of the Licensing Bill, 1908, have alienated the sympathy of many Conservative Churchmen, who hold that plunder is plunder, whether what is taken be licensed property or land or ecclesiastical endowments.

The course which the Episcopal Bench have thought it right to pursue in the House of Lords with respect to recent legislation goes some way to show that theological erudition is not always the concomitant of political statesmanship. Although these matters undoubtedly are prejudicial to religion, they cannot be said to affect the principle of Church Establishment; the main objections urged against the Established Church being(1) "That the application by law of the revenues of the State to the maintenance of any form of religious worship and instruction is contrary to reason, hostile to liberty, and directly opposed to the Word of God" (Basis of Association of Liberation Society, 1844).

It is to be observed, however, that the revenues of the State have never been applied, with the exceptions already stated, to the maintenance of the Established Church. "Tithe," wrote Bishop Stubbs, "never belonged to the nation, and was not the gift of the nation," because, in the words of Professor E. A. Freeman, "the Church preached the payment of tithe as a duty: the State gradually came to enforce that duty by legal enactment."

On the contrary, it is its highest duty and privilege "to maintain religious worship and instruction." The Voluntaries either draw a distinction in principle between endowments derived from public sources and those derived from private benefactions,-a distinction which has been shown to be essentially unsound, and which is irrelevant so far as the Church of England is concerned,-or else they maintain that endowments, from whatever sources they may have been derived, are indefensible, in which case the large and growing endowments of Nonconformist denominations are seen to be tainted with the very vice which is said to render the endowments of the Church "contrary to reason, and directly opposed to the Word of God." Supporters of the Established Church do not complain, however, that Nonconformists have accepted from time to time large sums by way of Endowment, derived partly from Parliamentary grants and partly from private benefactions, but they do invite Nonconformists either to surrender their endowments in support of their principles, or else to admit that a system of free-trade in Christianity must always break down in practice. Dr Chalmers in his works again and again proves this to be the case.

beings for religion is far short of the actual interest which they have in it. That is not so with their demand for food or raiment, or any article which ministers to the necessities of our physical nature. The more destitute we are of these articles the greater is our desire after them. . . . The The sensation of hunger is a sufficient guarantee for there being as many bakers in a country as it is good and necessary for the country to have, without any national establishment of bakers.

"Now the very reverse of all this holds of Christianity, or rather of Christian instruction. It is not with man's intellectual or his moral, as it is with his animal nature. Although it be true that the longer he has been without food the more hungry he is, and the more urgent is his desire of foodyet the more ignorant a man is, not the greater, but, generally speaking, the less is his desire of knowledge. And this converse proposition is still more manifestly true of his moral than of his intellectual wants. The less a man has, whether of religion or righteousness, the less does he care for them, and the less will he seek after them. It is thus that nature does not go forth in quest of Christianity, but Christianity must go in quest of nature." And again, "A free trade in commerce only seeks to those places where it can make out a gainful trade; but it is sure to avoid or to abandon those places where, whether from the languor of the demand or the poverty of the inhabitants, it would be

exposed to a losing trade. By a free trade in Christianity let the lessons of the Gospel follow the same law of movement, and these lessons will cease to be taught in every place where there is either not enough liking for the thing or not enough money for the purchase of it; so that religion, the great and primary characteristic of which is that it should be preached unto the poor, must be withheld from those people who are unable by poverty to provide a maintenance for its teachers."

Was not Lord Macaulay abundantly justified when he said, "The person about whom I am uneasy is the working man.

What is to become of him under the Voluntary system?"

(2) The second objectionnamely, that under an Establishment the State "intervenes between a man's conscience and his God"-has no more substance than the first. If Nonconformists mean that in the United Kingdom any man is compelled by law to accept any form of religion, an examination of the Toleration Acts from 1689 onwards will dissipate the illusion.

If Nonconformists mean that ministers of the Established Church are maintained in their benefices so long and in so far as they conform to the laws of the Established Church, the objection comes to nothing, for Nonconformists in like manner are only at liberty to retain possession of their endowments so long as they conform to the terms and conditions set forth in the trust deeds of their