ty in acting not only on
the cultivated classes but also on the poor is very manifest, and it has
done much to give the Church of England a democratic character which in
past generations it did not possess, and which in the conditions of
modern life is supremely important. The multiplication not only of
religious services but of communicants, and the great increase in the
interest taken in Church life in quarters where the Ritualist party
prevail, cannot reasonably be questioned. Its highly ornate services
draw many into the churches who never entered them before, and they are
often combined with a familiar and at the same time impassioned style of
preaching, something like that of a Franciscan friar or a Methodist
preacher, which is excellently fitted to act upon the ignorant. If its
clergy have been distinguished for their insubordination to their
bishops, if they have displayed in no dubious manner a keen desire to
aggrandise their own position and authority, it is also but just to add
that they have been prominent for the zeal and self-sacrifice with which
they have multiplied services, created confraternities, and penetrated
into the worst and most obscure haunts of poverty and vice.

The result, however, of all this is that the conflicting tendencies
which have always been present in the Church have been greatly deepened.
There are to be found within it men whose opinions can hardly be
distinguished from simple Deism or Unitarianism, and men who abjure the
name of Protestant and are only divided by the thinnest of partitions
from the Roman Church. And this diversity exists in a Church which is
held together by articles and formularies of the sixteenth century.

It might, perhaps, _a priori_ have been imagined that a Church with so
much diversity of opinion and of spirit was an enfeebled and
disintegrated Church, but no candid man will attribute such a character
to the Church of England. All the signs of corporate vitality are
abundantly displayed, and it is impossible to deny that it is playing an
active, powerful, and most useful part in English life. Looking at it
first of all from the intellectual side, it is plain how large a
proportion of the best intellect of the country is contented, not only
to live within it, but to take an active part in its ministrations.
Compare the amount of higher literature which proceeds from clergymen of
the Established Church with the amount which proceeds from the vastly
greate