ther the chief officer of a body which is said to form part of a Church under the supremacy of the Crown can be wholly removed from the jurisdiction of the Sovereign or of Parliament; and (2), whether any instrument not sanctioned by Imperial legislation can be legally imposed on any who have the right of appeal in the last resort to the Judicial Committee of Privy Council. It has, seemingly, .never been disputed that Mr. Long had this right of appeal, and exercised it, not as the member of a voluntary society, but as a clergyman of the English Church who had entered into a certain compact with a Bishop who, like himself, was subject to the laws of the Establishment. So, again, until Lord Romilly's judgment has been formally set aside, all persons, in any colony, calling themselves members of the Church of England are at once subject to its laws and entitled to the benefit of those laws; and it is perfectly clear that one of these benefits in this country is an absolute exemption from all doctrinal tests which have not the sanction of Parliament.

But in the minds of those who cannot bear to think that the story of Moses may be as mythical as that of the Roman Decemvirs, or that the Jesus of the fourth Gospel as little resembles the Jesus who really lived and suffered as the Socrates of Plato resembles the Socrates of Xenophon or of actual history, the question of the patents of Bishops has raised hopes which may turn out to be illusory. It has been ruled that these patents cannot confer coercive jurisdiction beyond the limits of the United Kingdom, and it has been hinted that for the future no more such patents shall be issued. About the precise mode of appointment to be adopted in this event, no decision seemingly has yet been announced. But if the Crown resigns all rights of sanction or of veto, it is hard, if not impossible, to see how the rights and liberties belonging to members of the Church of England can be secured to the clergy and laity of Colonial Churches. If the right of appeal to the Sovereign in Council is to be reserved to them, then, even if the election of Bishops is left to the voluntary association calling themselves members of the Church of England, it seems impossible that the Crown can sanction the imposition of any doctrinal test beyond those to which Bishops in England are subjected before their consecration. If the Bishop-elect choose

to make such a compact with his clergy, or with another Bishop who is pleased to style himself a Metropolitan, the compact will in law be null and void, and no suit will lie against the Bishop who may violate it either from caprice or from a change of mind resulting from conscientious conviction. Thus the house which these voluntary associates may build will be raised on a quicksand. It may rise to fair proportions, and at any moment it may crumble to its foundations. For there is this difference between the members of the Church of England and all other religious bodies in this country, that the latter have absolute power in the determination of their own religious tests, while the former have none. When his co-religionists chose to put their ban on Dr. Davidson, he had no remedy in law. It is not so with members of the Church of England, nor can it be so until its constitution has been wholly changed. Clergy and laity may meet, if they please, in Church Congresses, and declare that they accept all the decrees of the first four or any number of general councils; they may, like the eleven thousand, subscribe a document avowing the comfortable belief that all sinners dying with any sin not repented of will be condemned to endless torments, or declare their firm conviction that the Bible is throughout correct in all matters of science, history or geography, while it exhibits no flaw in its morality or religion. They may trust to Catholic consent and the power of the Holy Spirit to keep their ranks firm; but if any of these clergymen should hereafter come to a different mind, the law of the land will uphold them in their benefices or in any ecclesiastical office whatsoever. There existed no power adequate to the imposition of such tests, and they who are aggrieved by the apostacy of their fellows must content themselves with the reflection that many are called but few chosen, or in any other way which may please them, except that of resorting to a court of law.

In this country, then, it is not easy to see how, under the present regimen, the Voluntaryists can make any solid gains. It remains to be seen whether in the Colonies their position is essentially different. If the judgment in the Long case is to be applied to future cases, it would seem that, under the existing constitution of the Church of England, their cause is lost. It was there distinctly laid down

that Bishop Gray had no right to impose any commands on his clergy which could not be imposed by an English Bishop in his own diocese, and that in cases of alleged disobedience the defendant could not be deprived, except for such cause as would authorize the deprivation of a clergyman by his Bishop in England. But it is absolutely certain that the Privy Council would not suspend or deprive a clergyman who should have been presented to a benefice after subscribing to the Lambeth Encyclical, or the creed of the eleven thousand, or to any other like instrument, merely because after induction he saw fit to change his mind, and maintain the contradictory of the positions in which he had previously avowed his belief. If the change was indecently sudden, or if it could be attributed to unworthy secondary motives, public opinion might pass on his conduct the verdict which it might deserve; but there would be no legal remedy against the offender. If then, regard being had to any differences which may arise from the circumstances of the colony, the clergy and laity retain all rights as Churchmen which they would enjoy in England, it follows that no civil court would or could enforce any doctrinal compact in Calcutta or Bombay which would be ipso facto null and void at Canterbury or Lincoln. This must be the case unless the Crown resigns all power of control over the Colonial Churches, or, in other words, unless it ceases to maintain the rights and liberties of English Churchmen in the Colonies. Such a change can be accomplished only by an Act of the Legislature, and any Act which should give to the majority in any colony the power of imposing any religious or doctrinal test before the admission of a clergyman to any ecclesiastical office, would at once rescind the judgment in the Long case, and leave to the Churchmanship of the Colonies no legal meaning or value. That Parliament is competent to do this, will be disputed by none; but until it so determines, we may quite well imagine a case in which a Bishop, chosen by voluntary election, should sign the most stringent theological conditions and should be consecrated in faith of this compact, and then after some years might modify and change his belief on any given point or points, and candidly avow the change. Let us suppose that Mr. Butler had gone out to Natal, not, as was proposed, to be a rival to the legal Bishop of the diocese, but after the resigna

tion of Bishop Colenso, and with the assent of the Crown to his election. Let us suppose that he entered on his work with thorough devotion to the Catholic faith and cause, but that in the course of years he is led to question the historical accuracy of some statements in the Bible, and that he is brought to accept the dictum of Sir Cornewall Lewis, that all books professing to relate any history must be tested by the canons of credibility which are applied to the determination of facts in our courts of justice. If under this conviction he examines the history of the Old Testament and the New, and comes to the conclusion that there is no evidence for the personality of Moses, Nicodemus or Lazarus, or for the genuineness of the fourth Gospel,-if, in short, Bishop Butler were to put himself in every respect into the present position of the Bishop of Natal, and yet refused to resign his Bishopric on the ground that he was still perfectly orthodox according to the judicial standards of the English Church, what remedy would there be for those Churchmen in Natal who might hold that he had denied the faith and fallen into sheer infidelity? Doubtless, the courts would enforce any compact which, regard being had to the rights of Churchmen in England, the Colonial Churchmen had the power of imposing. But exemption from any tests not imposed by Parliament is the first privilege of the clergy in England. Churchmen, therefore, by ever so large a majority, cannot have the power of imposing any such tests in Natal.

If they who hold that the Church of England is a body distinct from the State and independent of all earthly legislature are willing to carry out their voluntary system under these conditions, they are of course perfectly free to do so. But in proportion to the extent of its range will be the chance that some who have honestly and conscientiously accepted the shibboleth will be led, after long thought, perhaps after severe struggles, as honestly and conscientiously to reject it, while yet they may see no reason for abandoning a profession in which this shibboleth is a mere work of supererogation. Doubtless, if ninety-nine out of every hundred Churchmen agreed in denouncing such changes as acts of utter apostacy from the Christian faith, a great, perhaps an irresistible, moral pressure might be brought to bear on the one man who was bold enough, or ill-advised enough, to express his dissent, instead of quietly

concealing his unbelief, as Mr. Matthew Arnold would probably recommend him to do. But even in our Colonies the minority would not be so insignificant, and in England the idea of thus crushing all opposition is purely visionary. The Sacerdotalists may be both earnest and vehement. Their combination may make them appear more formidable than they are, while even the Evangelical or Puritan party may speak out with a distinctness in some degree compensating the decay of their influence; but on the other side is arrayed almost the whole literature of England. Dr. Pusey and Dr. McNeile alike admit that the general literature of the country is deeply tainted with that which they term infidelity that politics, religion and science are all treated without reference to an indefectible Church or an infallible Book-that philologists do not shrink from saying that man was not created with his powers of speech and thought developed that poets and moralists seem to know nothing or to care nothing for any ideas of mediation between man and his Maker. These admissions are supplemented commonly by indignant denunciation of the civil tribunals which justify such opinions, by deciding that there is nothing in the doctrinal standards of the Church of England to disqualify those who hold them from taking any ecclesiastical office. When this issue has been raised again and again and the same sentence comes from the highest court of appeal, that conscience must be morbidly sensitive which would regard the retention of office in such cases as dishonest and criminal. At the least, the number of clergymen who do so retain office in this country is not contemptibly small, and the strength which they derive from the legal sanction thus given to their position is through them extended to the more scanty minority in the Colonies. Were the Church of England in this country a mere reflex of Bishop Gray's Church of South Africa, it is possible that the Bishop of Natal might think it right to withdraw from the battle-field, even though he had the full support of the civil tribunals. But the present condition of parties in the Establishment wholly relieves him even from the contemplation of any such alternative, while it also shews him that he is contending not only for his own liberties, but for those of the most uncompromising of his opponents.

For nothing is more certain than this, that the triumph. of Voluntaryism will be followed by the precipitation of the