leaders touched; then they sat still and looked at each other. Both were determined that it was a point of honor to stay where they were. After a few words of rather substantial English had passed between them, both subsided into a dogged equanimity. A crowd gathered instantly, but with as little tumult as ants make; it regarded the occurrence as a milder form of pugilism, and watched the result with interest. A policeman passed blandly from one wagon to the other, represented the necessities of the public traffic, hoped they would settle it shortly, urged the matter as an intimate friend of the parties, till at length the man who was conscious that he turned into the lane the last gathered up his reins and backed out of it. It was a little index of the popular disposition; and I expected that as soon as the country became convinced that it had driven rashly into our civil strait, it would deliberately back out of it. And this it is now slowly engaged in doing.

The two great parties of the Church and Liberalism are blocking each other in the same manner; but in this case Liberalism has turned into the great thoroughfare of the world's movement, and finds the Church, like a disabled omnibus, disputing the passage by simply lying across it. Dr. Temple and one hundred liberal Fellows of Oxford sent up to Parliament a petition which prayed for the abolition of the subscription test. At Oxford two subscriptions are required as a qualification for academic degrees: one to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and one to the third article of the thirty-sixth Canon. Liberal clergymen and members of the Church of England find this test odious, because it constrains the conscience to accept ancient formulas of belief without the benefit of private interpretation. The conservatives desire to maintain the test, thinking that it will be a barrier to the tide of private interpretation which is just now mounting so high. The petitioners perceive that no test can prevent a man from having his own thoughts; that it is therefore obsolete; that it drives out of the Church the best men,—those, namely, who think with independent vigor, and whose activity would put a new soul into the old Establishment. When this petition came up for debate in the House of Commons, the conservative speakers accused the petitioners of wishing to set up a new school of theological belief and criticism. Mr. Gladstone made a speech, full of grace and an even vigor, to the effect that he could not conceive of religion disconnected from definite statements such as those which the Church possessed; the idea was to his mind as absurd as to conceive of manifestations of life without a body. Mr. Goschen, the new member from London, made his maiden speech on this occasion. It was very earnest and liberal, and reminded one of American styles of speaking, being less even and conversational than the style which Englishmen admire. His opinion was, that all tests should be abolished, and that inclusion was safer than exclusion: meaning that the Church ought to keep herself so organized as to absorb the best vitality of every generation, instead of turning it out to become cold and hostile. The phrase which he used is the very essence of a republican policy. It represents the tendency of the people of England, as distinguished from its ministers and the traditions of its government. That phrase will one day be safely driven clear through the highway where the omnibus is now lying; but for the present, the abolition of tests and church-rates, the recognition of every shade of dissent, and the graver political reformation which waits behind all these are held in check by the vis inertiæ of an Establishment that lies across the road.

During the exciting anti-church-rate contests of 1840, the Church party in Rochdale, which had been defeated in an attempt to levy a church-rate where for several years none had been collected, held a meeting to try the matter over again. It was adjourned from the church to the graveyard. The vicar, as chairman, occupied one tombstone, and John Bright stood upon another to make one of his strong defences of the rights of Voluntaryism. In the course of the discussion, the vicar's warden rendered an account of the dilapidations of the building which the proposed rate was to repair, and stated, with great simplicity, that "the foundations were giving way,"—a significant remark, which the meeting, though held in a grave place, received with shouts of laughter. Such a statement may well be taken as symbolical of the condition of the Establishment, when liberal criticism, represented by Colenso, Stanley, Jowett, Baden Powell, and a respectable minority, is silently crumbling the underpinning, while the full service is intoned above and the pampered ceremonial swells the aisles.

If the opponents of liberal thinking ever bring an action against a prominent dissenter from their views, the Privy Council gets rid of the case by deciding it upon the purely technical position of the Church,—as in the case of Dr. Williams, whose offence was the publication of his Essay on Bunsen, and Mr. Wilson, whose essay was entitled "Séances Historiques de Genève—The National Church." The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council decide that they have no power to define what is true and what is false doctrine, but only what has been established to be the law of the Church upon the true and legal construction of her Articles and Formularies.

I. The Church does not require her clergy to believe in the inspiration of all portions of the Scriptures.

II. Nor that the Atonement operates by substitution of Christ's suffering for our sins.

III. Nor that the phrase "everlasting fire," in the Athanasian Creed, is to be received as a final and hopeless statement.

As a specimen of the popular element which is at work among the uneducated classes to make the people itself of England its real church, it is worth while to observe what Mr. Spurgeon is doing. His chapel stands on the southern side of the Thames, between the Victoria and Surrey Theatres, where the British subject is served with the domestic and nautical drama. On those stages the language struts and aspirates, and the effects are borrowed from Vauxhall and Cremorne for plays which are constructed to hold the greatest possible amount of cockneyism and grotesqueness, with the principal object of showing how villany and murder are uniformly overcome by virtue, whose kettle sings upon the hob above a pile of buttered muffins at last; and the pit, which came in for a shilling, pays the extra tribute of a tear. These shop-keepers of the Surrey side sit on Sunday beneath Mr. Spurgeon's platform, whose early preaching betrayed the proximity of the theatres, but was for that very reason admirably seasoned to attract his listeners. If he ever did slide down the rail of his pulpit-stairs, as reported, in order to dramatize the swift descent of the soul into iniquity, and then painfully climb up again to show its difficult return, the action was received, doubtless, in its full ethical import, and shook the suburban heart. His blunt and ordinary language, sinning frequently against taste, and stooping sometimes to be coarse, was the very vehicle to take his hearers up at the pit-door, theatrical or theological, and send them in wholesomer directions. It was a fortunate—his co-religionists would say providential—adaptation of an earnest and religious man to the field of his labor. For, as time passed, the phrases and demeanor of his preaching improved,—their absurdities have, no doubt, been caricatured by the London press,—and the temper of the man was more plainly observed to be sincere, fervent, and devoted to a certain set of religious preconceptions. The want of culture and of general intelligence was not so lamentable in such a neighborhood. He led, by many lengths, the Victoria and Surrey stage. If he had more deeply reflected upon the subjects which