y. They feel that they can never
carry out their plans for de-Protestantising the Church while the Crown
has the appointment of the bishops. For even if, as has lately been the
case, their party gets more than its due share of preferment, there will
always, under the existing system, be a sufficient number of Liberal and
Evangelical bishops on the bench to make a consistent policy of
Catholicising impossible. And the Catholic party are so admirably
organised that they are confident in their power to carry their schemes
under any form of self-government, even though the mass of the laity are
untouched by their views. Moreover, the town clergy, among whom are to
be found advocates of disestablishment, find in many places that the
parochial idea has completely broken down. The unit is the congregation,
no longer the parish, and the clergy are supported by pew-rents and
voluntary offerings, not by endowments. In such parishes,
disestablishment might, they think, give them greater liberty, and would
make little difference to them in other ways. But in the country
districts the case is very different. Thirty years after
disestablishment, the quiet country rectory, nestling in its bower of
trees and shrubs, with all that it has meant for centuries in English
rural life, would in most villages be a thing of the past.

For these reasons, the Bishop's policy of reconstructing the Church of
England as a self-governing body, professing definitely Catholic
principles and enjoining Catholic practices, seems to us an impossible
one. The chief gainer by it would be the Church of Rome, which would
gather in the most consistent and energetic of the Anglo-Catholics, who
would be dissatisfied at the contrast between the pretensions of their
own Church and its isolated position. The non-episcopal bodies would
also gain numerous recruits from among the ruins of the Evangelical and
Liberal parties in the Church.

But, it may be said, this dismal forecast may be falsified if the
Anglican Church can win the masses. The English populace are at present
neither Protestant nor Catholic; they are, if we count heads, mainly
heathen. May not the working man, who has no leaning to dissent, unless
it be the 'corybantic Christianity' of the Salvation Army, be brought
into the Church?

Bishop Gore has always shown an earnest sympathy with the aspirations of
the working class to improve their material condition. He is also
profoundly impressed by the ap