e poor, and wear the only real cross--the cross
of self-discipline and self-denial." These are echoes, faint, indeed,
but not, I think, unfaithful, of St. Peter's pulpit in its days of
glory.

When I look back upon the Church in London as it was when I first knew
it, and when I compare my recollections with what I see now, I note, of
course, a good many changes, and not all of them improvements. The
Evangelicals, with their plain teaching about sin and forgiveness, are
gone, and their place is taken by the professors of a flabby
latitudinarianism, which ignores sin--the central fact of human
life--and therefore can find no place for the Atonement. Heresy is
preached more unblushingly than it was thirty years ago; and when it
tries to disguise itself in the frippery of aesthetic Anglicanism, it
leads captive not a few. In the churches commonly called Ritualistic, I
note one great and significant improvement. English Churchmen have
gradually discovered that they have an indigenous ritual of their
own--dignified, expressive, artistic, free from fuss and fidgets--and
that they have no need to import strange rites from France or Belgium.
The evolution of the English Rite is one of the wholesome signs of the
times. About preaching, I am not so clear. The almost complete disuse of
the written sermon is in many ways a loss. The discipline of the paper
protects the flock alike against shambling inanities, and against a too
boisterous rhetoric. No doubt a really fine extempore sermon is a great
work of art; but for nine preachers out of ten the manuscript is the
safer way.

As regards the quality of the clergy, the change is all to the good.
When I was a boy at Harrow, Dr. Vaughan, preaching to us on our
Founder's Day, spoke with just contempt of "men who choose the Ministry
because there is a Family Living waiting for them; or because they think
they can make that profession--that, and none other--compatible with
indolence and self-indulgence; or because they imagine that a scantier
talent and a more idle use of it can in that one calling be made to
suffice." "These notions," he added, "are out of date, one Act of
Disestablishment would annihilate them." That Act of Disestablishment
has not come yet, but the change has come without waiting for it. Even
the "Family Living" no longer attracts. Young men seek Holy Orders
because they want work. Clerical dreams of laziness or avarice,
self-seeking or self-indulgence, have gone out