no more. Like the later pantheon of imperial Rome, it
offers its impartial hospitality to representatives of every form of
orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The shadowy warfare is now waged,
apparently, in the London press and magazines, in the bulls of popes
and the responsions of archbishops. Of course, the renewed inquiry set
on foot by the industry and temerity of Lords Halifax and
Nelson--_tanti nominis umbra_ surely, in this latter case, to engage
itself in such a battle--could have but one ending, namely, the
reiterated and emphasised condemnation of our national ecclesiastics as
nothing better than mere laymen, and the renewed degradation of the
officiating curate to the level of his neighbouring Nonconformist
minister who celebrates "the Supper" and preaches in his coat.

The papal representatives in this country have published a rejoinder to
the official reply of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, which, if
I may shelter myself behind the authority of the _Times_[2] reviewer,
does not err on the side of dignity, moderation and scholarship. It is
said to be jaunty, perky, off-hand, suggestive of "the smart evening
journalist"--this last is very serious--and, worse than all, it is an
appeal, not to theologians or scholars, nor even to thoughtful and
instructed men, but "to the gallery".

Who the gallery in this particularly Divine comedy may be I really do
not know. I strongly suspect that if the piece were put upon the
boards--and everything is now dramatised, from the trials of Satan to
the Dreyfus case--the gallery would be the emptiest department of the
theatre. And this opinion I am pleased to see confirmed by the closing
remarks of the review above noticed, which warns the Christian bishops
and pastors of the present day that the comparative merits of one set
of "orders" as opposed to those of another set have "little interest
and not much meaning for nine Englishmen out of ten".

But what, I think, the average man would be interested to know is
whether there be such things as "holy orders" at all. Very many of
them are, in this matter, I believe, in the position of those
interesting Asiatics who "knew not whether there be such a thing as a
Holy Ghost," and I think it will be abundantly easy to show that the
ignorance of the ordinary man as to the precise nature of "orders" was
shared in also by our Asiatic friends whose existence is noticed in an
early chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. We shall