of
little moment. The real question is church or no church.'

CHANGED POSITION OF THE CHURCH

The position of the tory party as seen by its powerful recruit was, when
he entered public life, a state of hopeless defeat and discomfiture.
'But in my imagination,' wrote Mr. Gladstone, 'I cast over that party a
prophetic mantle and assigned to it a mission distinctly religious as
the champion in the state field of that divine truth which it was the
office of the Christian ministry to uphold in the church. Neither then
did I, nor now can I, see on what ground this inviolability could for a
moment be maintained, except the belief that the state had such a
mission.' He soon discovered how hard it is to adjust to the many angles
of an English political party the seamless mantle of ecclesiastical
predominance.

The changes in the political constitution in 1828, in 1829, and in 1832,
carried with them a deliberate recognition that the church was not the
nation; that it was not identical with the parliament who spoke for the
nation; that it had no longer a title to compose the governing order;
and--a more startling disclosure still to the minds of churchmen--that
laws affecting the church would henceforth be made by men of all
churches and creeds, or even men of none. This hateful circumstance it
was that inevitably began in multitudes of devout and earnest minds to
produce a revolution in their conception of a church, and a resurrection
in curiously altered forms of that old ideal of Milton's austere and
lofty school--the ideal of a purely spiritual association that should
leave each man's soul and conscience free from 'secular chains' and
'hireling wolves.'

CHANGED SOCIAL CONDITIONS

Strange social conditions were emerging on every side. The factory
system established itself on a startling scale. Huge aggregates of
population collected with little regard to antique divisions of diocese
and parish. Colonies over the sea extended in boundaries and numbers,
and churchmen were zealous that these infant societies should be blessed
by the same services, rites, ecclesiastical ordering and exhortation, as
were believed to elevate and sanctify the parent community at home. The
education of the people grew to be a formidable problem, the field of
angry battles and campaigns that never end. Trade, markets, wages,
hours, and all the gaunt and haggard economics of the labour question,
added to the