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other hand, on keeping up a formal system of which the reality has passed away, and which shackles without protecting her. The State, which has granted the Reform Bill and Free Trade, has no ground to deny the Church a more free and consistent position.

There never has been a reason why the Church alone should not be listened to in the universal cry for rights. But the event which has happened during the past month, has changed the state of the question, and made it imperative on her to claim at once, and labour without remission for, that which it would have been prudent and wise in her to have claimed long ago. If it was right always that she should have a distinct voice in her own concerns, it is indispensable now, at whatever cost, and whatever inconvenience ;-and the cost may be great, the inconveniences certainly will be many.

It cannot be dissembled that Churchmen must now take a new and a very important position; a very important one, both to themselves personally, to their own consciences and their peace, to the Church, and to the English State and nation. Reform has long been going on within the Church, in such ways as individuals and private efforts could carry it on; changes for the better, spontaneous and self-originated, in matters of private competence, though of the highest public interest. But Churchmen must become reformers in another and far less agreeable and safe way. They must take up the position of reformers towards the State. There is no help for it that we can see, except by allowing the insensible but most important political alterations of the last half-century to alter the hitherto recognised basis of the Church, and to control and extinguish the ideas which the majority of her members have hitherto held of her constitution and organic laws. The English Church of George III., Charles II., Charles I., James, Elizabeth, and even of Henry VIII., however closely connected with the State,—or rather with the Crown,-however far it admitted its control, never for a moment lost sight of the principle, that if it held one set of powers from the Crown, it held another set of powers which no Crown or State on earth could, or pretended to, confer; powers which it held as a Church, powers which it inherited through a line distinct from that of a royal or a national succession. It never, we say, for a moment forgot that, however connected with the State, it was still a self-subsistent, even if not independent body, which would exist to-morrow, if the State broke up into anarchy, or cast off the Church. Unless this basis is changed, and the Church, once co-extensive with the nation, but now no longer so, is nevertheless, in consequence of her union with the Crown, to share, so to speak, the neutrality

of the Crown, and to lose all her distinctive characters of tradition, of doctrine, of maxims, and practice, in order to fit her once more, if that were possible, for comprehending the nation, -unless she has passed from being a Church with an origin and powers of her own, into a great organ of the national government, to be disposed of at the discretion of the national government, -she may rightfully claim, not as an institution issuing out of the State, but as a contracting party with the State, to be secured from whatever endangers her organic basis, and threatens to fuse her with the State. And such a case has distinctly arisen. Much as she has trusted the Crown, and indisposed as she has been to be jealous of Governments, they never asked of her, and she never gave them, the sole and final interpretation of her articles of faith. And to allow them to have it, to consent that officers of State and judgment, simply as such, may by a side wind settle a fundamental question of theology, which the Church herself has not yet interfered in, and that without her having an opportunity of authoritatively expressing her dissent or concurrence, would certainly be to abdicate the distinct existence which she has hitherto claimed and been supposed to possess.

She has a good and reasonable case; she has power more than she knows of-more, probably, than her opponents, who know more of her power than she does herself, suspect; and she must be determined, steady, and unflinching. It is thus that victories are gained in England. Nor is there any reason why her position should be one of hostility, because it is one of determination. The Dissenters did not affront the State, but they pressed their grievances resolutely, and made themselves heard. The Roman Catholics did not quarrel with it, though they had to meet strong opposition from it, and to push their claims in spite of it. The reformers of representation, and of commercial and colonial policy, have taken the offensive in the most unremitting and uncompromising manner, yet without showing themselves hostile to the State. No cause, however clear and reasonable, will succeed in England without steadiness and without temper; and few causes, even if wanting in reason, will fail with them.

We

On the eve of a great struggle, to which we stand committed, and from which we see no escape, it behoves us to recollect ourselves. The issues are not in our hands; yet we shall be deeply responsible for them, for in part they depend upon us. shall be responsible for indecision, for carelessness, for ignorance, for mismanagement, for all that sows the seeds of future difficulty and endangers future perseverance and steadiness, as well as for indifference and want of zeal. We are called to

battle, to battle in a name not our own; but to battle, not merely as brave men, but as wise. We have to do with an age of cool heads, of large knowledge, of practised dexterity, of resolution and firmness-with an age of strong and deeply-rooted law, an age incredulous of what is extreme, shocked by what is violent, jealous of what is one-sided, impatient of what is unfair,—an age hard to persuade, yet hard from its wish to be reasonable,an age in which boldness and courage are more than ever indispensable, and perhaps more than ever respected; yet in which they are too ordinarily found in different parties, and too equally opposed, to be of avail by themselves. We must not look to

succeed, humanly speaking, by other means than success is ordinarily gained by, in our own time. The daring, and main strength of will and arm which won Crecy and Agincourt, were but elements, in that concourse of power and wisdom, which triumphed in the Peninsula.

We must know our ground, and our difficulties; and if we are wise, we shall take account, not merely of the peculiar difficulties of our own case, but of those which surround and seem inherent in the general question of the relations between the Church and the Civil Government. For if we may speak our minds freely, we cannot look back with much satisfaction, either to the conduct, or the issue of most Church contests. It is hard to find one in which the Church was ultimately and really successful; harder still, in which the ground taken by her advocates was altogether unexceptionable and clear. They show off individual virtues, rather than command our full sympathy for a cause, or our admiration of the wisdom with which it was maintained. We have to make the same reserves that we make in political history; reserves where we least wish to make them, yet reserves which nothing but a deliberate ignoring of facts will dispense us from. And so with the results. What is represented as a triumph, is often but a varnishing over of concession; the maintenance of a principle ends in the guarantee of a salvo; what can no longer be retained in reality, is surrendered under the form of a grant of privilege; compromise is content to save what it can; what is called policy is at best but management; a struggle for important rights expires in a Concordat. We are not speaking now of the intrinsic power and action of the Church on her members and mankind; for these set contests are no measure or trustworthy criterion of her true efficiency and strength. But in these set contests, unless we read history entirely wrong, she has not been fortunate, except in the occasional example she has thereby gained of saintly or heroic fortitude; and, with the great lesson have ordinarily come warnings equally great.

But our fathers' failures, as they are no excuse for our inaction and despair, furnish no argument against our better success. We shall, doubtless, leave behind us abundant materials for the criticism of our posterity, who in their turn must not look in this respect to be more fortunate than ourselves. But we may hope at any rate we must try to turn to full account what is for the better in our training, what is more complete in our knowledge and experience. We should be miserable as men and faithless as Christians, unworthy of the place and time and country in which God's providence has called us to work, if we could not look forward, in cases of difficulty, to acting a part fully proportionable to our age of the world-of availing ourselves to the full of everything, in which we see that society has really made improvement; of whatever good thing is rendered more easy, more natural, more influential among our cotemporaries. That we possess, as we trust, the faith of the fourth or the fourteenth centuries, is no reason why we should make no use of our education of the nineteenth,-why we should import into it without discrimination their ideas and methods, and limit ourselves to their precedents.

We trust that these remarks will not be thought unmeaning, because necessarily general. Something like them must, we think, have come more or less strongly across the mind of any one, who in our day, and with our ordinary habits of judging, rises from the study of any of the controversies or conflicts which have tried the Church, and looks forward to the approach of a similar struggle. We doubt whether the highest admiration and heartiest sympathy have not been somewhat abated or tempered by regrets; and whether with the full recognition of earnestness to be copied, there went not along also a sense, perhaps unacknowledged or repressed, of mistakes to be avoided. And in the hasty remarks which we are about to make on one special point bearing on our present and our impending difficulties, we hope that we shall not be taken to doubt of the rights of the English Church, or to despair of her cause or that of the Church universal, if we attempt to look fairly in the face what appears to be the state of the facts which relate to the subject. That point is, the position of the Crown and the civil power towards the ecclesiastical power, viewed as a matter of history and practice.

We are not thinking at this moment of any complete or systematic account of the question, historically or theoretically. We write in haste, under the pressure of an emergency which we feel to be serious, and with a present and temporary object in view. A great question has been opened, and has to be settled; we shall all of us contribute more or less to settle it. It is of the highest importance that in taking their ground, Churchmen

should, as accurately and comprehensively as they can, take in and review, not merely their own principles, but along with them, the real state of things with which these principles have been connected and have worked, whether in conflict or harmony. It is also of high importance that they should not act under any untrue or unfair impression as to the actual realizing of Church independence, in our own, as compared with other Christian nations. To master fully the nature of the ground open to them, to choose their position carefully, and make it as unexceptionable as possible, is the first business now of Churchmen; and, if even they have to narrow it, they need not be afraid of weakening it. And then, since danger undoubtedly exists, let them see to it that their sense of the danger be such as becomes men; without blindness to it, and without exaggeration. With these points in view, we shall proceed to suggest a few considerations

The English Church in the middle of the nineteenth century, suddenly, and certainly to her own surprise, finds herself caught as it were, and brought to a stand still, by an effect-the unintended, apparently, and unexpected effect of what is called the royal supremacy. It can hardly be called a stretch of that supremacy, for the act in question is a perfectly legal, and, as far as the officials and ministers concerned in it, involuntary result and exercise of it; but in Parliament and the Council itself, it was felt to be an unnatural and undesirable, indeed, a hazardous, exercise. And it raises the question, What is the nature of that power, which has led, in such a perfectly legal way, to results so anomalous and perplexing; and how ought Churchmen to view it?

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How is this question to be met and answered fairly and truly? Easy ways of answering it there are many. It may be answered by theory, or by law-texts, or by historical argument or induction. The supremacy is absolute and right; it is abso' lute and wrong:-it has practically no limits; it is practically as well as theoretically limited by Church law and Church power: -historically, the Church has been subservient to the Crown; historically, the Church has kept her own line and had her own way very much :-good, sufficient at least to reconcile us to such 'an arrangement has resulted from it; evil has followed from 'it, and worse is at hand.' And none of these contradictory answers are made without strong grounds of one sort or another; if we will but choose on what grounds to put the question, we shall have no difficulty in getting an answer.

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We cannot, however, but hope, for our own part, that Churchmen will prefer feeling and facing the difficulty of giving an answer, to giving it, on arbitrary and limited grounds. It may be very troublesome to collect and take in the aggregate of con

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