apply; they were passed before colonies were dreamed of. Now as the State does not support our clergy in the colonies, as they have no privileged position, but are on the same footing with other religious communities, it is clear that the State has no more right to limit the action of Churchmen in any particular than the action of Wesleyans and Independents. If the Wesleyan Conference, an unendowed body, were not allowed to transact its business in England, everybody would say civil and religious liberty was invaded; yet this is precisely the case of the Church in our colonies. And yet

when last year Mr. Gladstone brought in a Bill merely to put Churchmen on an equality of free action with other religious bodies, he was met with furious opposition by the voluntaries, with little real support from many Churchmen. Now I say the clergy are to blame for this. If they do not explain to their representatives in Parliament what it is which clergy and laity alike desire in the colonies, and remove the misapprehensions under which those representatives may labour on the subject, if when solicited for their votes they speak of corn laws and tariffs and such like party topics, but say not a word of those high interests connected with their own calling, they are not, as the right rev. prelate told us on Sunday, doing their part in preaching the Gospel either to our black or white colonial population.

In the last century we would not give bishops to America for fear she should be so rendered more

independent. And well were we punished for this niggardly unchristian selfishness. In this century we persist in keeping our brethren in the colonies under disabilities other sects are not exposed to for fear they should separate from us. Why, if they were not profoundly imbued with the doctrine of the Unity of the Church and the sin of schism, we should long ago have driven them to set up a free Church, to separate from us, and go to the United States and to Scotland for an equally valid consecration and for that spiritual freedom which is their due. But this separation is a bugbear. In the Cape and Australia and New Zealand they begin by laying down as a fundamental rule that their diocesan assemblies shall not touch the Prayer Book or Articles.

As our colonies acquire civil strength they seek to change the old English monarchy into some more popular and democratic form of government. Our brethren in the colonies as they increase desire to adopt the model of the English Church, asking for no State privileges, for no oppressive acts against other religious bodies, but simply liberty to act as freely as their neighbours, to enable the Church to put forth her whole strength, to perfect her organisation and discipline.

Gentlemen, allow me to recommend for your perusal a little book which you will find at the railway stations, the adventures of Messrs Huc and Goebet, two Roman Catholic missionaries of the congregation of Saint Lazarus, who traversed China and the inhospitable region of Tartary to Thibet, to the

head-quarters of the Buddhist religion. You will there see what hardships they underwent, the dexterity and adroitness with which they overcame all obstacles, and passed through the Chinese provinces, where death or imprisonment would have awaited them as Christians. You will see the marvellous account of the Buddhist ceremonial, much resembling their own, but such a resemblance only as the galvanic action. communicated to a corpse bears to the motions of a living and animated body. But it may serve to

show how dead and savourless those ordinances which are the appointed means and channels of grace may become if spiritual faith and knowledge has departed from them.

And now what a prospect of labour, and, if of successful labour, how glorious a future lies opens to the Church in Australia! If the zeal were not wanting as far as material wealth is concerned, the metropolitan cathedral of Sydney might soon rival in splendour the very temple of Solomon.

That fertile land bears pine-trees which eclipse in splendour and in magnitude the fir-trees, the almugtrees, the cedars of Lebanon, which the fleets of Hiram brought to Jerusalem. That more fertile land bears endless treasures of gold, of that gold which only came to King Solomon by the painful tedium of a three years' voyage from Tarshish, so that now we actually realise the Sacred Word, which before perhaps we accepted only as an Eastern figure, an Oriental parable, how that from the plenty of gold silver was nought accounted of in the days and in the courts of the son of David (1 Kings x. 11, 21, 22).

THE ROYAL HUMANE SOCIETY

ANNIVERSARY DINNER.*

March 10th, 1853.

You may easily conceive, gentlemen, how difficult it must be for those who in each succeeding year occupy the chair of this great festival, and preside at these recurring anniversaries, to exhibit in any new point of view a subject which has so often exercised the talents of the great, the benevolent, the eloquent, or even to lay before you in new guise and shape ideas with which your own minds are already familiar.

But fortunately the sources of this Society's prosperity are independent of the accidents of oratory. They spring not from the fickle surface of the tongue, but from the deep recesses of the heart; from those spontaneous, irrepressible, never-failing impulses which make the Christian feel that the preservation of human life is a duty, an office, a privilege, second only to the supreme felicity of conducting to eternal life an immortal soul.

And if it be an object of honourable ambition, of undeniable duty to foster those institutions which seek to wrestle with, to remedy and alleviate those pains and infirmities with which the human frame is

* Lord Powis occupied the chair on this occasion.

pregnant, the seeds of which it bears within itself, of which even the most insidious approaches may be discerned, and which each of us to a large extent by temperance and self-denial may himself avoid and guard against, does not the heart kindle and expand at the prospect of animating that zeal, of promoting those discoveries, of communicating to all nations those mechanical appliances which enable feeble man to defy the raging storm, to wage successful war against the elements, and to snatch from the dominion of the grave the inanimate form on which pale death already appears to have set his irrevocable impress.

Surely it is this great triumph of mind over matter, I had almost said of intelligence over destiny, which is shadowed out to us and typified in that tale of heathen mythology, itself perhaps some strangely distorted ray from the expiring light of primitive revelation, that tale which teaches us how Prometheus brought down from heaven the "vital spark of heavenly flame," which alone could endue with life and animation the human figure which he, with art almost superhuman, had constructed.

Gentlemen, I do not doubt that some of our older members, at all events our venerable treasurer,* can call to mind the time when to anticipate or assert that the progress of medical skill and the perfection of our various apparatus would make this marvellous result of recalling into action suspended animation a matter of ordinary medical practice, and so to speak

*Mr. Benjamin Hawes.