confronted. They have the great merit that they are not palliatives, but cures. If the Parliamentary strength requisite for carrying them can only once be mustered, the controversy is closed for ever. It will no longer break up the peace of parishes, or undermine the stability of Parliamentary seats. It will cease to be the pest of the clergyman in the vestry, or of the candidate upon the hustings. It will be as dead as the crusade against the Irish Church. It will, no doubt, be cherished all the more lovingly, as a tradition of bygone power, in the hearts of a handful of fanatic or revolutionary politicians; but it will have passed away from the recollections of the people.

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It has often been said, by those who are only anxious to be eased of a troublesome dispute, that Conservatives invest with an exaggerated value the object of the struggle. The sum total of the rate is but 250,0007.-less than an average of 251. for every parish. Surely,' they say, it would be safe to act on the assumption that the wealthiest religious community in the world will not, for lack of such a sum as that, suffer the temples of their worship to decay.' It would be taking our readers a tedious journey over a well-trodden path to show, by instances, how failure and disappointment have always in the long run rewarded the attempt to dispense with endowments and to rely wholly on voluntary effort. We have already cited the case of Birmingham as a proof of its inapplicability to the Church of England; and what is true of an opulent and crowded town will be doubly true of poor, secluded, rural parishes. It is impossible to over-estimate the difficulty of crossing over from one system into the other. Men's minds are not easily induced to accept principles totally novel, or to acquire the habit of practising unwelcome duties never known before. In the vast majority of parishes our people have grown up to the idea of having public worship provided for them without any effort of their own. Their fathers and their ancestors, so far as they can look back, lived and died in the same habits of thought. The intelligence that, to secure their weekly Church-service for themselves or for their poor, it would be necessary to carry the hat round and raise subscriptions in the neighbourhood, would be as much introducing them to a new order of ideas as if they were to be told that the Queen's coronation was put off until the necessary expenses had been subscribed. Supposing a law were to pass that the administration of justice should henceforth depend upon voluntary effort, and it were announced that the judges of assize would not come round till private munificence had provided them with a court-house for themselves and a gaol for their prisoners--does any sane man suppose that the courts of law

would

would go on as efficiently as before? And yet the mass of men place at least as much value on the administration of justice as on the ministrations of religion. Of course, in process of time, men would become habituated both to the one novelty and to the other. The increase of crime would frighten them at last into opening a subscription-list and paying for the court-house; and it is possible that the increase of heathenism would, though more slowly, convince the rural parishes of the necessity of making a similar effort to secure a church. But a generation, at least, must elapse before the habits of thought bred by the old system would pass away. It is not easy to reconcile one's self, for the sake of a political expediency, to the gratuitous injury which, during that interval, would be inflicted on the Church, and through her on all for whose highest interests she exists. Her forced inaction would be ill-replaced to the community by the short and scornful respite she would buy from the envious sects around her.

But in truth it is not the mere rate for which Churchmen are now fighting. The threatened loss of the 257. per parish, though it is a consideration not to be despised, would not have called forth that wide-spread and passionate expression of indignation which has already produced so marked an effect on the House of Commons. Rightly or wrongly, the general feeling is that more than Church-rates are in issue. The struggle has been accepted on the Church's side as a struggle for the existence of the Establishment. Churchmen have been much blamed for this interpretation, and have been charged with magnifying by their needless terrors a mere money quarrel to ridiculous proportions. It is said that there is nothing in the argument against Churchrates to force those who use it to go one step further in the direction of spoliation; and that it is bad policy to represent tithes and Church lands-which have a sounder foundation of their own-as standing or falling with an institution that a short time ago seemed doomed, and is still undoubtedly insecure. It is perfectly true that the Church's title to tithes and to Church lands is absolutely distinct in its nature from her title to the Church-rate. It would not only be a very unwise, but a very unfair, mode of reasoning, to represent the confiscation of tithes as following by logical sequence from the abolition of Church-rates. It must be fully admitted that, as far as the arguments which will be used in their justification go, these two branches of spoliation have very little in common. But the same may be said of the successive steps of every wrongful aggression that was ever perpetrated under the sun. The ground on which Catherine II. invaded the Crimea was not the same ground as that on which

the

the Emperor Nicholas crossed the Pruth; but they have always been looked upon in England as steps of the same process. Rome was occupied on one pretext; Savoy was annexed on another; Sardinia will probably be seized on a third. But no one in his senses ever doubted that the three steps were part of the same plan, and that the strength gained by each has been and will be used for the attainment of the next. What people look to in these cases is the motive from which the aggression springs, not the pretext which is held out to screen it. Churchmen have applied the same common-sense principles to the question of Church-rates. That the ingenuity of our antagonists will be able to discover new pretences for each spoliation, without being driven to the base economy of furbishing up the old ones, it never occurred to us to doubt. But though the logic will change, the motives will be the same. The fact that the Liberation Society is the informing spirit of both, is quite enough by itself to establish an absolute identity between the movement against Church-rates and the movement against the Established Church. Mr. Bright and Mr. Miall tell us that, if they were members of the Established Church, they would repeal Church-rates to add to her security. In fact, they would persuade us that they, who look to the dis-establishment of the Church as the consummation of all their political hopes, are straining every nerve to pass a measure which will make that consummation more remote. Those who desire to keep their charity in practice may test its mettle by trying to believe these protestations. Whatever success they may have in other quarters, such pretences at least do not deceive the party that puts them forth. If the Dissenters and Radicals really believed that the abolition of Church-rates would strengthen the Established Church, we should assuredly not see them devote to its accomplishment expenditure so lavish or energy so untiring. They know, as we know, that no institution ever yet throve the more because its resources had been cut down, or because successful pillage had marked it for an easy prey. Nothing is so fatal to a menaced community as a proved inability to defend its rights and to resist its foes. Its first great disaster is certain to be the parent of many more. When once the impression becomes general that all the prizes of a great political success are likely to reward its assailants, and that nothing but discredit awaits its friends, defeat follows defeat, and confiscation follows confiscation, with terrible rapidity. When we treat the question of Church-rates as involving the question of the Establishment, we do so not because any close logical sequence connects them, but because the words and acts of our opponents unmistakably betray that in their hopes the two Vol. 110.-No. 220. achievements

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achievements are but successive stages of one great enterprise. If we are to struggle for the Establishment—a fact concerning which Dr. Foster and Mr. Bright leave us in no uncertainty-we must struggle from the first. To wait till the operations of our enemies are more advanced, and they are able, in bidding for the support of secular allies, to point to one great success as a gage and earnest of coming triumph, is to fight at fearful disadvantage. If we mean to resist at all, we must resist now. The Church is politically lost, if we wait to fight her battle till confiscation has crippled her means of influence, and the belief in her impending fall has transferred the unstable devotion of politicians to her foes.

By this generation that battle, for weal or woe, will be decided. If Churchmen of the present day should be guilty of the weakness of purchasing an ignominious and transient ease by concessions which will only make their enemies more powerful and more rapacious, they cannot expect their sons to fight more sturdily than themselves. They will have handed down to the Church of the next generation the inheritance of a base example and a hopeless cause, and they cannot presume that these will breathe into her a courage to which they themselves have been too languid to aspire. The powerful reaction we have witnessed, while it justifies the most sanguine hopes, fearfully increases our responsibilities. It places in our hands, it stakes upon the continued earnestness of our efforts, an issue upon which the whole future of the Established Church, and therefore in a great degree the future of Christianity in England, may depend. The duty of unflagging exertion at such a crisis presses in a peculiar manner upon the clergy. Their union and activity have produced this reaction, and they alone can maintain its force; and they are specially bound to guard with no laggard zeal the fabrics which are the heirlooms of a long line of ancestors to them. There is no power in the State strong enough to withstand them, if they act together with perseverance and with vigour. There is no power in the State strong enough to save them, if they sit by with folded hands and indolent complaints. With them it now chiefly lies to decide whether this generation is to witness the first stone removed from the foundations of the Established Church; or whether this harassing controversy shall be brought to a triumphant close, and banished for ever from the battlefield of politics.

INDEX.

INDEX

TO THE

HUNDRED AND TENTH VOLUME OF THE QUARTERLY REVIEW.