-the only permanent and essential form of Christianity.

(b) The more intellectual, educated, and vigorous churchmen were tending to hold a rational, sympathetic, and practical attitude towards the Christian Churches as a common phase in human civilisation and moral civilisation.

Unhappily a very different current has been setting in of late under the stress of party politics. The Church has been losing its national character of comprehension, and has been stiffening into an aggressive corporation, rapidly becoming a party machine. This change may be dated from the Disestablishment of the Irish Church and still more from the Gladstonian policy twenty-five years ago. In this generation we have seen the Church fling itself into the hands of one party in the State, sacrificing national and popular interests to its own constitution and privileges, even to the extent of allying itself with the interests of Alcohol, the Peerage, and Obscurantism. It has grown to be a branch of the Conservative caucus-a sort of Clerical Primrose League of the Cross.

In doing this it ceases to be national, and is becoming what it has so often denounced in other communions, by stamping itself as a sect-that is, a religious society which makes its primary interest the maintenance of its own doctrines and rights and ascendency, and in defence of these will sacrifice national interests and the general public. To this there can be in our day but

one end-the deposition of the Church from the place of national prerogative, which it has abused and no longer attempts to fulfil. The House of Lords has fallen from its ancient prerogative because it persistently made itself the ally and tool of one political party in the State. For one generation (even for two generations) the Established Church has done the same and must pay the same penalty. The prerogatives and wealth it enjoys solely by Act of Parliament can be taken back to the nation by Act of Parliament so soon as the nation has grown conscious of its power to deal with all forms of reaction, however venerable by age and sentiment and however adorned with high qualities and pathetic traditions.

CHAPTER X

ORTHODOX DISSENT

IN passing from the Catholic Church and the Church of England to Dissent, we pass from Christian communities of a stable, definite, and highly elaborate creed, with systematic and artistic rituals, historic organisation and traditions, to a heterogeneous body of differing sects, exceedingly variable in their forms, government and dominant ideas.

I mean by Dissent, all communions calling themselves Christian and Protestant, accepting the Gospel, but not the Catholic nor the Anglican interpretation of it. And by Orthodox I mean the Protestant Christian Communities which accept the creeds; at any rate, the Apostles' creed, the Trinity and Atonement, the inspiration of the Scripture and the miraculous scheme of Salvation. That does not include Unitarians; at any rate, the new Unitarians, who regard Christ as a purely human teacher, and deny any miraculous character to His birth, resurrection, and atonement.

The Orthodox Dissenters differ from Churchmen not so much in cardinal doctrine, as in Church government, forms of worship, sacramental notions, functions of the ministry, and conditions of Church membership. Dissent does not only differ from the Churches, Anglican or Catholic, but it differs within itself. The shades and

varieties of Orthodox Dissent are almost infinite. Voltaire said that England was a country which had one hundred religions and only one sauce. But Voltaire was hardly up to date. The Registrar-General some years ago certified more than two hundred religious denominations who have opened places of public worship under distinctive separatist names, all being Orthodox Dissenters or Trinitarian Protestants, and belonging neither to the Catholic nor Anglican Churches. And the sects go on increasing year by year and no one could remember their names. There are Methodists and Benevolent Methodists, Free Methodists, Independent Methodists, Methodists of the Reform Union, Army Methodists, Modern Methodists, New Methodists, Primitive Methodists, Reform Methodists, Free Church Methodists, Wesleyan Methodists, Refuge Methodists, Temperance Methodists, United Free Methodists, Welsh Calvinist Methodists, Welsh Wesleyan Methodists. Then there are Baptists, Baptised Believers, Bunyan Baptists, Calvinistic Baptists, Congregational Baptists, General Baptists, Particular Baptists, New Connexion Baptists, New Connexion General Baptists, Old Baptists, Open Baptists, Presbyterian Baptists, Scotch Baptists, Seventh-Day Baptists, Strict Baptists, Union Baptists, Unitarian Baptists-15 Methodist, 18 Baptist connexions, 33 in all. Here are 33 registered shades of Methodist and Baptist! It is such things as this which bring to mind the thunderous outburst of Bossuet with which he opens his "History of Variations of

the Protestant Churches," a book in the Positivist Library. He says:

"If Protestants only knew how their religion has been formed, with how many variations, with what continual changes their creeds have been constructed; how they first split off from us, and then from one another; by what subtleties and sophisms and equivocations they have tried to repair their divisions and to gather up the scattered members of their disunited Reformation-this Reformation of which they boast would not appear so satisfying as they imagine. No! to speak plainly, it would rouse them to contempt."

And he goes on to show how from the beginning the Catholic Church has held one plain uniform doctrine, whilst heresies have been a constant succession of different and incompatible doctrines, with infinite novelties that never endure, but are driven out by fresh novelties as shallow. However, the Catholic verities, resting not in logic and human ingenuity, but on divine inspiration, are always unchanging-always clear, uniform, authoritative. Once abandon the Truth committed to the Church, and endless disputations and novel explanations result, he says.

I should be sorry indeed to guarantee the Church history of the eloquent Bishop of Meaux, "The Eagle," as a learned English historian calls him; and I consider a creed that remains unchanged for 1800 years to be ipso facto convicted of falsehood—and not only of falsehood, but of mischievous falsehood. And I should