t is the connexion of the Church of
England with the State.

This connexion is not, I think, such a hindrance to religious sympathy
as it was, but it would be untrue to say that it is none. And there is
of course the danger that if disestablishment became a political
question, and especially if it involved the deflection of endowments
which have long been used, and on the whole well-used, for the
maintenance and furtherance of religion to secular objects, feeling
between the majority of Churchmen and those who in consequence of their
views in the matter became opposed to them might be seriously
embittered. Yet there is good ground for hoping that the question of the
relations of Church and State and all matters connected therewith will
in the years that are coming be faced in a calmer spirit, and with truer
insight into important principles, than too often they have been in the
past. It should certainly be easier for those who approach them from
different sides to understand one another. Particular grievances
connected with inequality of treatment by the State have been removed;
while a broad principle for which Nonconformists stand in common has
come to be more clearly asserted, through their attaching increasingly
less significance to the grounds on which different bodies amongst them
were formed, as indicated in the names by which they have been severally
known, and banding themselves together as the "Free Churches." But in
the Church of England also in recent years there has been a growing
sense of the need of freedom. It is better realised than at one time
that in no circumstances could the Church rightly be regarded as a mere
department of the State, or even as the most important aspect of the
life of the State. However complete the harmony between Church and State
might be, the Church ought to have a corporate life of her own. She
requires such independence as may enable her to be herself, to do her
own work, to act according to the laws of her own being. This is
necessary even that she may discharge adequately her own function in the
nation.

It is not part of my duty now to inquire in what respects the Church of
England lacks this freedom, or whether such readjustments in her
connexion with the State can be expected as would secure it to her,
implying as the making of them would that, although she does not now
include among her members more than half the nation, she is still for an
indefinitely long time to c