And yet once more.  There are (though this may to some seem strange) people who consider the Church at least as important as the State, and even more so, inasmuch as its concernments relate to an eternal instead of a transitory order.  What are the prospects of the Church?  Here the mists are thicker than ever.  Is the ideal of the Free Church in the Free State any nearer realization than it was three years ago?  All sorts of discordant voices reach me through the layers of cloud.  Some cry, “Our one hope for national religion is to rivet tighter than ever the chains which bind the Church to the chariot-wheels of the State.”  Others reply, “Break those chains, and let us go free—­even without a roof over our heads or a pound in our pockets.”  And there is a third section—­the party which, as Newman said, attempts to steer between the Scylla of Aye and the Charybdis of No through the channel of no meaning, and this section cries for some reform which shall abolish the cynical mockery of the Conge d’Elire, and secure to the Church, while still established and endowed, the self-governing rights of a Free Church.  In ecclesiastical quarters the mist is always particularly thick.

Certainly at this moment, if ever in our national life, we must be content to “walk by faith and not by sight.”  This chapter began with imagery, and with imagery it shall end.  “I have often stood on some mountain peak, some Cumbrian or Alpine hill, over which the dim mists rolled; and suddenly, through one mighty rent in that cloudy curtain, I have seen the blue heaven in all its beauty, and, far below my feet, the rivers and cities and cornfields of the plain sparkled in the heavenly sunlight.”

That is, in a figure, the vision for which we must hope and pray.

III

“DISSOLVING THROES”

I borrow my title from a poet.

  “He grew old in an age he condemned;
   He looked on the rushing decay
   Of the times which had sheltered his youth;
   Felt the dissolving throes
   Of a social order he loved.”

It seems odd that Matthew Arnold should have spoken thus about Wordsworth; for one would have expected that the man who wrote so gloriously of the French Revolution, “as it appeared to enthusiasts at its commencement,” would have rejoiced in the new order which it established for all Europe.  But the younger poet knew the elder with an intimacy which defies contradiction; and one must, I suppose, number Wordsworth among those who, in each succeeding age, have shed tears of useless regret over the unreturning past.  Talleyrand said that, to know what an enjoyable thing life was capable of being, one must have been a member of the ancienne noblesse before the Revolution.  It was the cynical and characteristic utterance of a nature singularly base; but even the divine Burke (though he had no personal or selfish interests in the matter) was convinced that the Revolution