Church the faithful adherence to the apostolic model has insured large liberty together with right government. Archbishops and bishops make no pretence to being superior to the Church, or overriding her decisions. They, as well as the other two orders of the ministry, are servants of the Church, and bound by her commands just as the priesthood or the diaconate, though, of course, holding a higher and more responsible position, and having the inherent power of government. The other orders of ministry are bound to them not with an obedience to any ipse dixit, but with canonical obedience, i.c., obedience so far as the bishops' commands do not infringe the canons of the Church.

Various disadvantages in some of these respects in the Anglican Church

That there are some disadvantages, some matters which admit of improvement in the Anglican Church, every loyal Churchman would readily admit. The Church, as we have seen, believes that infallible power of stating the meaning and bearings of revealed truth rests with the whole Catholic body, not with any one part of it. The Anglican Church is, therefore, open to improvement in her own arrangements from time to time. Some disadvantages are observable in her, arising in great measure from the struggles of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The great evil for many parts of the Church, and not least for the Anglican, have been

"Acts of Uniformity." By pressing these too violently, there is no doubt that unnecessary separations have been caused. A more generous and statesmanlike attitude at the time might have prevented the Wesleyan schism, and, even in recent days, it was only the loyalty and determination of the faithful clergy and laity alike, which hindered some further breach at the time of "the Ritualistic controversy." Men now begin to see that unity, not uniformity, is what is needed in, what has now become, a world-wide communion. In so vast a Church as the Anglican, there is needed unity in the great matters of the Faith, with large latitude, according to the needs of many men, in matters of devotion and ritual. The relation of the Church to the State is an immense blessing in England, to the country, and to the daughter and sister Churches elsewhere; but, in consequence of it, in modern times the State has at times tried to encroach upon the spiritual sphere, and though always resisted, and in the main defeated, when assuming functions not by right belonging to her, yet at times she has crippled the Church's usefulness, intruded upon her unworthy or unsuitable persons for the highest offices, and hindered her from needful reforms. These things, however, settle themselves in time with patience, and in consequence of that loyalty to the Church which on the whole has marked the clergy and the faithful laity. That wide common sense, which seems to be one of the best gifts of the English race, together with their love for fair play, have (notwithstanding occasional spasms of unreasoning prejudice) in the long-run prevailed.

The silencing of the Convocations for long, and even now when they are restored to their rightful position-the necessary slowness in large reforms needed to make them effective, the efforts of the civil power, supported too often by Erastian ecclesiastics and laymen, to assume to itself functions belonging to the Church, and many unsatisfactory features in patronage-these, and other things of the same kind, have hindered the Church's usefulness.

Again, invaluable as the Book of Common Prayer has proved itself, not only to the Church of England, but to the whole English race, in inducing a sober and solid piety and a wise and deep religious temper, it still may be doubted whether the use of the priest's office-i.e., of matins and evensong as the only regular congregational services, apart from the Mass-has proved to be the best thing for the poor. The poor require something simpler, more fervent, more expressive of their subjective and inarticulate yearnings. What has been invaluable for the well-instructed and more cultured children of the Church, has often proved too stiff and cold for them, and needed large supplementing; hence, among other reasons, the Church lost the poor to a great extent, though now she is recovering them with her reviving life. The Puritan, and then the Erastian and the fanatical and political Protestant temper, left their marks upon her. The beauty of art was for long banished from her Churches. Thus an injurious stiffness and hardness prevailed, quite unlike what belonged to her in the past, and this accounts for the feeling, even now not wholly obliterated, which

devout people have been conscious of on revisiting an English, after being accustomed to a foreign, cathedral, that they were returning to unfurnished rooms; as well as for the unhappy necessity, for long felt, and even now not in all cases swept away, of warning young men to look upon the arrangements of college chapels, and even cathedrals, as things not to imitate but to avoid. We have had to lament a certain want of poetry, and of a real sense of beauty. Things, however, have wonderfully improved. If the religious ferocities of two and three centuries ago have still left “the trail of the serpent" across the Church, still there has been a reawakening in the last fifty years unexampled in Christendom, touching every department of philanthropic and charitable effort, and of religious work and worship. We cannot, unthankfully, forget the unexampled blessings, even when we honestly acknowledge and bewail our disadvantages. There was an egotistic habit among us of calling all this "simplicity," when, in fact, it was ineffective stiffness, a too utilitarian and even secular temper, which made men lose sight of the essentially supernatural powers of the kingdom of God; and also an effort-far too general among English ecclesiastics-to make up for want of real reverence by an excess of pomposity. These have been sorrows and disadvantages in the Anglican Church; for nothing but living and energetic truth and effort, as distinct from respectable appearance, can advance the work of the kingdom of God.

The Forward and yet Conservative Attitude of the Anglican Church

Notwithstanding such faults which all Catholicminded Churchmen must sorrowfully acknowledge, yet much has been mended and much is being improved. One important feature in the Church is her careful conservative temper as to all that is of faith, and all that is valuable in her inherited traditions and ways, together with her living and increasing sympathy with all that is good in the temper, and all that is evident in the needs of our own days. In this she shows herself as the society which holds mission and jurisdiction from her Lord, the great Head of the Church, to the English-speaking races. She throws herself into popular movements;-witness the action of the Bishop of Durham and others in the strikes in the North; witness her wise efforts in the temperance cause; witness her noble endeavours in penitentiary work, and in the advance of the cause of purity by the "White Cross Guild;" witness her innumerable struggles in behalf of goodness, in guilds, brotherhoods, sisterhoods, societies for the sick, the poor, the working men, and so on. She is conservative in the best sense, and in the best sense progressive, more and more earnestly showing in the highest of all causes at once the balance and enterprise of the English

race.