progressively justified in experience.  It breaks down the denominational barriers which divide men and women who worship the Father in spirit and in truth—­barriers which become more senseless in each generation, since they no longer correspond even approximately with real differences of belief or of religious temperament.  It makes the whole world kin by offering a pure religion which is substantially the same in all climates and in all ages—­a religion too divine to be fettered by any man-made formulas, too nobly human to be readily acceptable to men in whom the ape and tiger are still alive, but which finds a congenial home in the purified spirit which is the ‘throne of the Godhead.’  Such is the type of faith which is astir among us.  It makes no imposing show in Church conferences; it does not fill our churches and chapels; it has no organisation, no propaganda; it is for the most part passively loyal, without much enthusiasm, to the institutions among which it finds itself.  But in reality it has overleapt all barriers; it knows its true spiritual kin; and amid the strifes and perplexities of a sad and troublous time it can always recover its hope and confidence by ascending in heart and mind to the heaven which is closer to it than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.

But on the other side we see a tendency, even more manifest if we look for external signs, to emphasise the institutional side of religion, that which prompts men and women to combine in sacred societies, to cherish enthusiastic loyalties for the Church of their early education or of their later choice, to find their chief satisfaction in acts of corporate worship, and to subordinate their individual tastes and beliefs to the common tradition and discipline of a historical body.  It is now about eighty years since this tendency began to manifest itself as a new phenomenon in the Anglican Church.  Since then, it has spread to other organisations.  It has prompted a new degree of denominational loyalty in several Protestant bodies on the Continent, in America, and in our own country; and it has arrested the decline of the Roman Catholic Church in countries where the outlook seemed least hopeful from the ecclesiastical point of view.  Such a movement, so widespread and so powerful in its results, is clearly a thing to be reckoned with by all who desire to estimate rightly the signs of the times.  It is a current running in the opposite direction to the mystical tendency, which regards unity as a spiritual, not a political ideal.  Fortunately, the theory of institutionalism has lately been defended and expounded by several able writers belonging to different denominations; so that we may hope, by comparing their utterances, to understand the attractions of the theory and its meaning for those who so highly value it.