ase of
men who, having engaged in its service, find their old convictions
modified or shaken, perhaps very gradually, by the advance of science or
by more matured thought and study. The stringency of the old form of
subscription has been much mitigated by an Act of 1865 which substituted
a general declaration that the subscriber believed in the doctrine of
the Church as a whole, for a declaration that he believed 'all and
everything' in the Articles and the Prayer-book. The Church of England
does not profess to be an infallible Church; it does profess to be a
National Church representing and including great bodies of more or less
divergent opinion, and the whole tendency of legal decisions since the
Gorham case has been to enlarge the circle of permissible opinion. The
possibility of the National Church remaining in touch with the more
instructed and intellectual portions of the community depends mainly on
the latitude of opinion that is accorded to its clergy, and on their
power of welcoming and adopting new knowledge, and it may reasonably be
maintained that few greater calamities can befall a nation than the
severance of its higher intelligence from religious influences.

It should be remembered, too, that on the latitudinarian side the
changes that take place in the teaching of the Church consist much less
in the open repudiation of old doctrines than in their silent
evanescence. They drop out of the exhortations of the pulpit. The
relative importance of different portions of the religious teaching is
changed. Dogma sinks into the background. Narratives which are no longer
seriously believed become texts for moral disquisitions. The
introspective habits and the stress laid on purely ecclesiastical duties
which once preponderated disappear. The teaching of the pulpit tends
rather to the formation of active, useful and unselfish lives; to a
clearer insight into the great masses of remediable suffering and need
that still exist in the world; to the duty of carrying into all the
walks of secular life a nobler and more unselfish spirit; to a habit of
judging men and Churches mainly by their fruits and very little by their
beliefs. The disintegration or decadence of old religious beliefs which
had long been closely associated with moral teaching always brings with
it grave moral dangers, but those dangers are greatly diminished when
the change of belief is effected by a gradual transition, without any
violent convulsion o