rity was unpopular on the whole for the sake of those accidents of foreign sway by which it was thus inseparably attended. Under the Tudor and early Stuart princes, the regale was somewhat more tightly pressed than before;' but then, as a compensation, the force of the Tudor prerogative carried the Church essentially safe, although in externals sorely suffering, through the crisis of the Reformation. He thinks that, all things considered, especially the moral guarantee dictated to those princes by the 'necessity' under which they lay to preserve the discipline of 'that Church in which they had embarked their fortunes,' 'the 'Reformed Church started on her course substantially free, or at 'least as much so as she was in the Roman times; .... the precautions taken at the Reformation were in intention, however they might be afterwards twisted, rather anti-papal than pro-regal;" so that her relations with the State were only changed in form, and those forms were in the main a recurrence to an earlier 'state of things.'

6

And here we must say that we do not quite see our way with the writer. We will briefly state our view. When, in the twelfth century, the struggle between the spiritual independence of the Church and the rights of the Crown drew to a head, the forces on the former side could only support themselves by rallying round the Papacy. It was pope and king who divided the ceremony of investiture between them, not king and national primate, between whom the struggle or the rivalry had lain in the days of the Witan. When, therefore, the papal power was by king and by clergy alike declared null in the sixteenth century, the forces in favour of spiritual independence lost their rallying-point. The pope's interference had tended to check the encroachments of the Crown, and to establish a balance of power. At the Reformation that balance of power was lost. We are not saying now that it was or was not a wise, a happy, or an inevitable step, but, in point of fact, it left the forces of the spiritual estate without any rallying-point as against the king. The power and influence of the bishops in the Witan, and of the primate in the Saxon realm, were gone, and could not be brought back, and what else was there now on which the rights of the spirituality could rely? The powers which the Papacy had assumed to wield, however grossly abused in practice, were theoretically defensible, as maintaining a recognition that the Church possessed liberties which might be maintained against the possible and often actual tyranny of the Crown, by the protest or the judicial sentence of Christendom at large. Those powers were either absorbed by the Crown itself, or returned to be vested in the national spirituality. If the former, all check upon the Crown, even in theory, was lost; if the latter, it was

plain that none could ever be exercised. The spirituality had no weapons for effectual struggle; it could only, as in the case of the seven bishops against James II., suffer the persecution of the tyrant with passive fortitude. The bishops, indeed, only suffered arrest and prosecution. But that was because there remained in the administration of justice temporal powers beyond the king's control. Popular sympathies, expressed in the verdict of a jury, rescued the prelates from the king, because it was felt that he was the common enemy of both.

The same principle seems to us to apply also to the case of appeals on points of doctrine. Here, quoting the words of Hooker, Professor Burrows says:

"If the cause be spiritual, secular courts do not meddle with it." The Crown was to see justice done by ecclesiastics in the ecclesiastical courts. The Crown, in the last resort, was to hear appeals from the Archbishop's court, those appeals which, though temporarily stopped by the Constitutions of Clarendon, used up to this time (the Reformation) to go to Rome; and it heard them through delegates chosen by the Lord Chancellor. Now, as the appeal could no longer go to Rome, it must rest somewhere; and so long as the delegates were faithfully selected, with a view to mere cases of ordinary discipline, a good deal might be said for this Court of Appeal. It was probably only intended as a temporary arrangement, and was no doubt liable to abuse, yet for a long period it was not abused. But the great point is that it went side by side with the active existence of Convocation regularly sitting, and acknowledged as the proper court for questions of doctrine.'

Now regarding the question of final appeals on doctrinal points as it appeared in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it must be admitted that such an appeal when carried to Rome was a call upon the central power of Christendom to prevent corruptions of doctrine in one of its constituent churches. Assuming, for argument's sake, a Papacy uncorrupt in its own dogmatic views and pure in the administration of justice, such a power of appeal was a factor of valuable strength against possible corruptions of the faith in England. It was the support of the Catholic body given to Catholic truth as against a rebellious member. This support, impossible even in theory at a later period, when opposite standards of doctrine prevailed in England and at Rome, was swept away in Henry VIII.'s time, while those standards were ostensibly the same. The Court of Appeal was evidently the king's court, and the delegates could be packed by royal authority whenever the temptation arose. If it was in fact for a long period not abused,' that was probably because no such temptation did in fact arise. Further, as regards any possible check maintained, as Professor Burrows thinks, by Convocation against corruptions of dogmatic truth, the same fact meets us. Convocation was ultimately dependent on the

Crown; the Papacy had been independent of it. There was, therefore, no independent check left. The power of Convocation to legislate depended on the king's summons. Would he be likely to summon it in order to check himself? We think, then, that in two important particulars it cannot be correctly said that the Reformed Church started on her course 'substantially free, or at least as much so as she was in Roman 'times,' since in the appointment of her chief pastors and in her dogmatic decisions the encroachments of the Crown were left, even theoretically, without redress.

The Professor is more successful in showing that the arrangements of the Reformation, tolerable while the Crown was strong and the prince had the interests of the Church at heart, have become intolerable since, when the Crown has become emptied of political power, and a chain of precedents has been formed under a series of princes, hostile, or indifferent, or but lukewarm in their constitutional duty of protection. The latter part, indeed, of the second lecture seems to us so excellent that we are sorry we cannot quote it consecutively throughout. We will, however, select a few striking passages. Speaking of the period of the Restoration, the lecturer says:

'Silently and unobserved, one important outwork of the Church vanished into the past. Taxation was to undergo an entire change, a process of centralization the clergy were to relinquish their most ancient privilege of taxing themselves. They had scarcely any choice in the matter; they made no remonstrance; they seem not to have foreseen the natural consequence, but that consequence was most momentous. Convocation lost its chief guarantee for a place in the constitution. There was no longer now the same cogent reason for summoning it as before; and the kings who would have summoned it for Church purposes, had passed away.'

The fact above stated is at once a reproach to our sovereigns and an ample plea in excuse of any shortcomings of Convocation either in adequately representing the clergy or in performing the proper functions of a deliberative body. The reproach, indeed-in proportion as modern theories of ministers responsible to Parliament and a sovereign who reigns but does not govern, have prevailed-has ceased to rest in any moral sense on the royal head. But the reproach cleaves to the governing power in the State wherever that power may reside. The fixed resolution of every Government from Charles II.'s downwards appears to have been to baffle and elude, save on rare and exceptional occasions, the rights of the Church, from the moment when they found they could do so without loss to the exchequer. They have sold her paramount spiritual interests for a mess of pottage. Whilst there were taxes to be got by the clergy from the clergy, the Convocations might meet; when

that method was superseded, the Convocations were suppressed. Commenting further on this iniquitous denial of constitutional rights, Professor Burrows says:

'Her (the Church's) rights were indeed recorded in plain language enough, for in the first money bill by which the clergy were taxed along with the laity, a clause was inserted to the effect that "nothing herein contained shall be drawn into example to the prejudice of the ancient rights belonging to the Lords spiritual and temporal and clergy of this realm." But the rights, however protected in words, were not used in fact. Grievances were now unredressed because the sense of justice was no longer quickened by the want of money The rulers of the land cared little enough for the State, but for the Church still less, and her relations to the State, thus mutilated by the unconstitutional suppression of her synods, were not readjusted. Can it be said with truth that they have been properly readjusted since those days?

It has been often remarked, but will bear frequent repetition, that these successive Governments dealt with the Convocations of the Church exactly in the same spirit as Charles I. dealt with his parliaments. To procure supply' and stave off redress of grievances, is the brief formula which suffices for either policy. It miscarried in the latter case because Parliament in the last resort appealed to the sword. Having no fear of such an issue before their eyes in the former case, the Crown and its advisers have tyrannized at discretion, and continue the practice to this day.

As regards the effects of this policy on Convocation itself, they form, as has above been said, a plea in bar of any charge against it. Of all results to a deliberative body those are the most fatal which prevent it from keeping pace with the time, and open a chasm, slowly widening in each successive age, between the body representative and the body represented. Habits of supineness and neglect creep in systematically. Mischiefs excused as exceptional establish themselves as rules of evil. Temporary expedients grow into precedents, and gradually eclipse the principles for which they profess to apologize. Then, too, as regards the neglect of work that needs to be done, and which no Church can long neglect with impunity, the enforced silence of Convocation caused a dead-lock of the vital forces of action. The people rapidly outgrew the means of the Church to superintend their education, and to provide for the diffusion of the most elementary truths of Christianity at home,-how much more to propagate it abroad! It was left to irresponsible societies with voluntary organization to prosecute the work of extending the area of Christianity, of providing for the spiritual wants of English colonists in their new country, and even of securing pastoral care and church-room for the increase of population at home. Gross abuses of non-residence, plurali

ties, and clerical delinquencies took root and multiplied without check or inquiry, until wide tracts of population became a spiritual desert, or only yielded a chance harvest to the sectary and schismatic. The zeal which might have been husbanded for the Church's work ran to waste, or was alienated. Thus Methodism drained off energies which, if retained under Church influence, would have gone far to prevent the dismal estrangement which so largely pervades the lower middle class in town and country. The Church made no answer to the imploring hands held up to her. The parson of the parish, the magistrate, and the mob did severally what was right in their own eyes. And that right was almost always a blunder or a crime. Beyond this, as regards the Houses of Convocation inter se, their uncertain and fitful intervals of session broke off the habit of action which guides the judgment by instincts formed through acting. Traditions of order, privilege, and mutual relation between the Upper and Lower House were lost, or became obsolete for want of adjustment. It is still only by delicate tact that collisions or complications can be avoided. There is no broadening chain of precedents, fortifying and interpreting one another. Such as exist are to be gleaned few and far between, and require frequent qualification to make them suit a modern instance. Not uncommonly one of the Houses stands at fault, and has to grope its way by uncertain analogies, or is arrested suddenly by the recollection of some rule or order not familiar to the majority. Such a state of things is fertile in 'misunderstandings, delays, and vacillations, and taxes human endurance very hard. Then there is the dual arrangement of the Northern and Southern Provinces, the unconformableness of which to the fused and united England which we have known for the last century is manifest in every attempt to popularize Church principles. Had Crown ministers done what their influence enabled them to do in keeping the clergy up to their legislative work, instead of compelling them to abandon it, this anomaly in modern England might have been long ago remedied by a fusion of the two Convocations into one representative body. What there is, even as matters stand, to prevent them from meeting as one body for deliberation and advice, and from voting jointly on one motion made and question put, it is not easy to see, unless it be some mediæval impossibility of either archbishop sitting under the other as president of the whole. This suggestion brings to our mind a valuable distinction. mentioned by Professor Burrows in a note on page 29, between the Provincial Synod and the Convocation as one of the estates of the realm. We could wish, perhaps, he had put this a little more prominently. The same assembly of either province has