she
will last, as an Establishment, for any very long time, will hardly be
expected by those who mark the direction in which thought tends to
move all over the civilised world. But Tait's policy and personality
have counted for something in prolonging the time-honoured connection
of the Anglican Church with the English State.

Perhaps a doubtful service either to the Church or to the State. Yet
even those who regret the connection, and who, surveying the long
course of Christian history from the days of the Emperor Constantine
down to our own, believe that the Christian Church would have been
spiritually purer and morally more effective had she never become
either the mistress or the servant or the ally of the State, but
relied on her divine commission only, may wish that, when the day
arrives for the ancient bond to be unloosed, it should be unloosed not
through an embittered political struggle, but because the general
sentiment of the nation, and primarily of religious men throughout the
nation, has come to approve the change.

-----

[19] An admirable life of Archbishop Tait by his son-in-law, Dr. R. T.
Davidson (now Archbishop of Canterbury), and Canon Benham
appeared in 1891.

[20] They thought his public action scarcely consistent with the
language he had used to Temple in private.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE[21]

When Mr. Anthony Trollope died (December 11, 1882) at the age of
sixty-seven, he was the best known of our English writers of fiction,
and stood foremost among them if the double test of real merit and
wide popularity be applied. Some writers, such as Wilkie Collins, may
have commanded a larger sale. One writer at least, Mr. George
Meredith, had produced work of far deeper insight and higher
imaginative power. But the gifts of Mr. Meredith had then scarcely
begun to win recognition, and not one reader knew his name for five
who knew Trollope's. So Mr. Thomas Hardy had published what many
continue to think his two best stories, but they had not yet caught
the eye of the general public. Mrs. Oliphant, high as was the general
level of her work, and inexhaustible as her fertility appeared, had
not cut her name so deep upon the time as Trollope did. Everything she
did was good, nothing superlatively good. No one placed Trollope in
the first rank of creative novelists beside Dickens or Thackeray, or
beside George Eliot, who had died two years before. But in the second
rank he st