the people—­I ask the one vital question, whether, whatever they were in form, they were in substance sufficient?

The securities which the Church had were these:  First, that the assembling of the Convocation was obviously necessary for the purposes of taxation; secondly and mainly, that the very solemn and fundamental laws by which the jurisdiction of the See of Rome was cut off, assigned to the spiritualty of the realm the care of matters spiritual, as distinctly and formally as to the temporalty the care of matters temporal; and that it was an understood principle, and (as long as it continued) a regular usage of the Constitution, that ecclesiastical laws should be administered by ecclesiastical judges.  These were the securities on which the Church relied; on, which she had a right to rely; and on which, for a long series of years, her alliance was justified by the results.

And further:—­

The Church had this great and special security on which to rely, that the Sovereigns of this country were, for a century after the Reformation, amongst her best instructed, and even in some instances her most devoted children:  that all who made up the governing body (with an insignificant exception) owned personal allegiance to her, and that she might well rest on that personal allegiance as warranting beforehand the expectation, which after experience made good, that the office of the State towards her would be discharged in a friendly and kindly spirit, and that the principles of constitutional law and civil order would not be strained against her, but fairly and fully applied in her behalf.

These securities she now finds herself deprived of.  This is the great change made in her position—­made insensibly, and In a great measure, undesignedly—­which has altered altogether the understanding on which she stood towards the Crown at the Reformation.  It now turns out that that understanding, though it might have been deemed sufficient for the time, was not precise enough; and further, was not sufficiently looked after in the times which followed.  And on us comes the duty of taking care that it be not finally extinguished; thrown off by the despair of one side, and assumed by the other as at length abandoned to their aggression.

Mr. Gladstone comes to the question with the feelings of a statesman, conscious of the greatness and excellence of the State, and anxious that the Church should not provoke its jealousy, and in urging her claims should “take her stand, as to all matters of substance and principle, on the firm ground of history and law.”  It makes his judgment on the present state of things more solemn, and his conviction of the necessity of amending it more striking, when they are those of one so earnest for conciliation and peace.  But on constitutional not less than on other grounds, he pronounces the strongest condemnation on the present formation of the Court of Appeal, which, working in