degrees, the very large number of Churchmen who still call themselves Protestant.  Nor would the adjective ‘Liberal’ secure the adhesion of the ‘intellectuals.’  Bishop Gore’s Liberalism would exclude most of them as effectually as the most rigid Conservatism.  It would also be a disestablished and disendowed Church; for surely it is building castles in the air to think of episcopal courts recognised by law.  The prospect of disestablishment does not alarm the Bishop.  Some of his utterances suggest that he would almost welcome it.  Indeed, disestablishment is viewed with complacency by an increasing number of High Church clergy.  They feel that they can never carry out their plans for de-Protestantising the Church while the Crown has the appointment of the bishops.  For even if, as has lately been the case, their party gets more than its due share of preferment, there will always, under the existing system, be a sufficient number of Liberal and Evangelical bishops on the bench to make a consistent policy of Catholicising impossible.  And the Catholic party are so admirably organised that they are confident in their power to carry their schemes under any form of self-government, even though the mass of the laity are untouched by their views.  Moreover, the town clergy, among whom are to be found advocates of disestablishment, find in many places that the parochial idea has completely broken down.  The unit is the congregation, no longer the parish, and the clergy are supported by pew-rents and voluntary offerings, not by endowments.  In such parishes, disestablishment might, they think, give them greater liberty, and would make little difference to them in other ways.  But in the country districts the case is very different.  Thirty years after disestablishment, the quiet country rectory, nestling in its bower of trees and shrubs, with all that it has meant for centuries in English rural life, would in most villages be a thing of the past.

For these reasons, the Bishop’s policy of reconstructing the Church of England as a self-governing body, professing definitely Catholic principles and enjoining Catholic practices, seems to us an impossible one.  The chief gainer by it would be the Church of Rome, which would gather in the most consistent and energetic of the Anglo-Catholics, who would be dissatisfied at the contrast between the pretensions of their own Church and its isolated position.  The non-episcopal bodies would also gain numerous recruits from among the ruins of the Evangelical and Liberal parties in the Church.

But, it may be said, this dismal forecast may be falsified if the Anglican Church can win the masses.  The English populace are at present neither Protestant nor Catholic; they are, if we count heads, mainly heathen.  May not the working man, who has no leaning to dissent, unless it be the ‘corybantic Christianity’ of the Salvation Army, be brought into the Church?