little the historical or legal view as it is the theological view.  We have not yet lost our right in the nineteenth century to think of the Church of England as a continuous, historic, religious society, bound by ties which, however strained, are still unbroken with that vast Christendom from which as a matter of fact it sprung, and still, in spite of all differences, external and internal, and by force of its traditions and institutions, as truly one body as anything can be on earth.  To this Church, this body, by right which at present is absolutely unquestionable, property belongs; property has been given from time immemorial down to yesterday.  This property, in its bulk, with whatever abatements and allowances, it is intended to take from the Church.  This is disendowment, and this is what is before us.

It is well to realise as well as we can what is inevitably involved in this vast and, in modern England, unexampled change, which we are sometimes invited to view with philosophic calmness or resignation, as the unavoidable drift of the current of modern thought, or still more cheerfully to welcome, as the beginning of a new era in the prosperity and strength of the Church as a religious institution.  We are entreated to be of good cheer.  The Church will be more free; it will no longer be mixed up with sordid money matters and unpopular payments; it will no longer have the discredit of State control; the rights of the laity will come up and a blow will be struck at clericalism.  With all our machinery shattered and ruined we shall be thrown more on individual energy and spontaneous originality of effort.  Our new poverty will spur us into zeal.  Above all, the Church will be delivered from the temptation, incident to wealth, of sticking to abuses for the sake of gold; of shrinking from principle and justice and enthusiasm, out of fear of worldly loss.  It will no longer be a place for drones and hirelings.  It is very kind of the revolutionists to wish all this good to the Church, though if the Church is so bad as to need all these good wishes for its improvement, it would be more consistent, and perhaps less cynical, to wish it ruined altogether.  Yet even if the Church were likely to thrive better on no bread, there are reasons of public morality why it should not be robbed.  But these prophecies and forecasts really belong to a sphere far removed from the mental activity of those who so easily indulge in them.  These excellent persons are hardly fitted by habit and feeling to be judges of the probable course of Divine Providence, or the development of new religious energies and spiritual tendencies in a suddenly impoverished body.  What they can foresee, and what we can foresee also is, that these tabulae novae will be a great blow to the Church.  They mean that, and that we understand.