ers a church which he has never before seen should be able to feel
that he is certain of finding public worship intelligibly and decently
performed, as in past generations it has been celebrated in all sections
of the Established Church. It has, in my opinion, been a gross scandal,
following a gross neglect of duty, that this primary obligation has been
defied, and that services are held in English churches which would have
been almost unrecognisable by the churchmen of a former generation, and
which are manifest attempts to turn the English public worship into an
imitation of the Romish Mass. Men have a perfect right, within the
widest limits, to perform what religious services and to preach what
religious doctrines they please, but they have not a right to do so in
an Established Church.

The censorship of opinions is another thing, and in the conditions of
English life it has never been very effectively maintained. The latitude
of opinion granted in an Established Church is, and ought to be, very
great, but it is, I think, obvious that on some topics a greater degree
of reticence of expression should be observed by a clergyman addressing
a miscellaneous audience from the pulpit of an Established Church than
need be required of him in private life or even in his published books.

The attitude of laymen whose opinions have come to diverge widely from
the Church formularies is less perplexing, and except in as far as the
recent revival of sacerdotal pretensions has produced a reaction, there
has, if I mistake not, of late years been a decided tendency in the best
and most cultivated lay opinion of this kind to look with increasing
favour on the Established Church. The complete abolition of the
religious and political disqualifications which once placed its
maintenance in antagonism with the interests of large sections of the
people; the abolition of the indelibility of orders which excluded
clergymen who changed their views from all other means of livelihood;
the greater elasticity of opinion permitted within its pale; and the
elimination from the statute-book of nearly all penalties and
restrictions resting solely upon ecclesiastical grounds,--have all
tended to diminish with such men the objections to the Church. It is a
Church which does not injure those who are external to it, or interfere
with those who are mere nominal adherents. It is more and more looked
upon as a machine of well-organised beneficence, dischargi