’Are we to set to work to revive St. Paul’s ideal of the life of a Church?  If so, what we need is not more Christians, but better Christians.  We want to make the moral meaning of Church membership understood and its conditions appreciated.  We want to make men understand that it costs something to be a Christian; that to be a Christian, that is, a Churchman, is to be an intelligent participator in a corporate life consecrated to God, and to concern oneself, therefore, as a matter of course, in all that touches the corporate life, its external as well as its spiritual conditions....  We Christians are fellow-citizens together in the commonwealth that is consecrated to God, a commonwealth of mortal men with bodies as well as souls.’[46]

With regard to ritual, he will not allow that the disputes are unimportant.  The vital question of self-government is at stake.  From this point of view, a ‘mere ceremony’ may mean a great deal.  St. Paul, who said ‘Circumcision is nothing,’ also said, ’If ye be circumcised Christ shall profit you nothing,’[47] This is quite consistent with his hearty disapproval of the introduction of purely Roman ceremonial.

Does this ideal of a free Church in a free State involve disestablishment?  Not necessarily, Dr. Gore thinks.  Why should not legal authority be entrusted to diocesan courts, with a right of appeal to a court of bishops, abolishing the jurisdiction of the Judicial Committee in spiritual cases?  It is the paralysis of spiritual authority, in his opinion, which pushes into prominence all extravagances, and conceals the vast amount of agreement which exists in essentials.  ’We are weary of debating societies; we want the healthy discipline of co-operative government.’[48] The policy of this self-governing Church is to be ‘Liberal-Catholic,’ a type which ’responds to the moral needs of our great race.’

Such is the scheme of Church reform towards which the Bishop is working; and he has told us, in the sentence last quoted, what kind of Church he looks forward to see.  But what kind of Church would it actually be, if his designs were carried out?  It would not be a national Church; for his belief that Catholicism ‘responds to the moral needs of our race’ is contradicted by the whole history of modern England.  The laity of England may not be quite ’as Protestant as ever they were, though we often hear that they are so; but they show no disposition to become Catholics.  Catholicism as we know it is Latin Christianity, and even in the Latin countries it is now a hothouse plant, dependent on a special education in Catholic schools and seminaries, with an index librorum prohibitorum.  Such a system is impossible in England.  Seminaries for the early training of future clergymen may indeed be established; but beds of exotics cannot be raised by keeping the gardeners in greenhouses while the young plants are in the open air.  The ‘Liberal Catholic’ Church, accordingly, would shed, by