The title is glorious; and, so far as I know, the credit of inventing it belongs to my friend the Rev. H. R. L. Sheppard, the enterprising Vicar of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields.  Mr. Sheppard has what in newspapers we call a “magnetic personality,” and no one has more thoroughly laid to heart the sagacious saying that “Sweet are the uses of advertisement.”  Whatever cause he adopts, the world must know that he has adopted it; and it shall obtain a hearing, or he will know the reason why.  The cause to which (outside his pastoral work) he is just now devoted is that which is summarized in the phrase, “Life and Liberty for the Church of England.”  It is a fine ideal, and Mr. Sheppard and his friends have been expounding it at the Queen’s Hall.

It was no common achievement to fill that hall on a hot summer evening in the middle of the war, and with very little’ assistance from the Press.  Yet Mr. Sheppard did it, and he filled an “over-flow meeting” as well.  The chair was taken by the Rev. William Temple, who tempered what might have been the too fervid spirit of the gathering with the austerity which belongs to a writer on philosophy, an ex-Head Master, and a prospective Bishop.  The hall was densely crowded with clergy, old and young—­old ones who had more or less missed their mark, and young ones keen to take warning by these examples.  There were plenty of laymen, too, quite proud to realize that, though they are not in Holy Orders, they too are “in the Church”; and a brilliant star, if only he had appeared, would have been a Second-Lieutenant in khaki, who unfortunately was detained at the front by military duties.  A naval and a military chaplain did the “breezy” business, as befitted their cloth; and, beaming on the scene with a paternal smile, was the most popular of Canons, who by a vehement effort kept silence even from good words, though it must have been pain and grief to him.[*]

[Footnote *:  Alas! we have lost him since.]

The oratorical honours of the evening were by common consent adjudged to a lady, who has since been appointed “Pulpit Assistant” to the City Temple.  May an old-fashioned Churchman suggest that, if this is a sample of Mr. Sheppard’s new movement, the “Life” of the Church of England is likely to be a little too lively, and its “Liberty” to verge on licence?  A ministry of undenominational feminism is “a thing imagination boggles at.”  Here it is to be remarked that the leaders of the movement are male and female after their kind.  Dr. and Mrs. Dingo sit in council side by side, and much regret is expressed that Archdeacon Buckemup is still a celibate.  But let us be of good cheer.  Earnest-minded spinsters, undeterred by the example of Korah (who, as they truly say, was only a man), are clamouring for the priesthood as well as the vote; and in the near future the “Venerable Archdeaconess” will be a common object of the ecclesiastical sea-shore.  Miss Jenkyns, in Cranford, would have made a capital Dean.