nty-three priests of the Zagreb diocese who were in favour of a
married clergy and of several other reforms could not stand up against
their ecclesiastical superiors. The movement has made no open progress
and their leader has been constrained to abandon Holy Orders and
become a timber merchant. Nevertheless the idea of a national Church
has not vanished; a good deal depends for other countries on the
degree of success which attends the newly established national Church
in Czecho-Slovakia. It already possesses over half a million adherents
out of a population of 13 millions. We may be going to witness the
rise of a series of national Churches, a consummation which--a Roman
Catholic might observe--will very likely be no more successful in
bringing nearer the brotherhood of man than the wide-flung Catholic
Church. The enthusiastic nationalism of such new Churches may, in
fact, help to postpone that happy state of things. In any case, and
whatever be the results, we shall do well not to ignore the beginnings
of what may be a mighty Reformation.

Ever since 1848 the Czech clergy have been anxious to obtain reforms,
not so much in dogma as in discipline. They assert that it is more in
accordance with the democratic spirit of the age if a priest is
selected not by some magnate but by his prospective parishioners; they
desire to have their mother-tongue employed for the liturgy--in this
respect they are in advance of most Catholic countries--and they wish
to allow their priests to marry or not to marry, as each man prefers.
This, one need hardly say, is the point which, almost to the exclusion
of all others, is taken up by the hostile compatriots of the new
believers. "It is nothing more nor less than this," said a portly
Benedictine abbot to me one day in Prague, "there are priests who live
in concubinage and they actually want to have it legalized!" But in
Czecho-Slovakia, with her vivid memories of the Hussites in the
fifteenth century--magnificent new monuments to John Huss decorate the
principal towns--in Czecho-Slovakia the old regime has not the same
power as in Croatia. At first the new Church was sneered at, being
called a Churchlet, then they called it a sect, and now they say it
may persist for fifty years. While its critics occupy themselves so
largely with the topic of clerical celibacy, the founders of the
Church themselves are much more interested in other questions. They do
not greatly concern themselves with t