mpire, in its spiritual as well as its temporal
form. The dimensions of that proud dominion have shrunk with the
expansion of knowledge; new worlds have been opened out, geographical
and mental, which never owned its sway; the _caput orbis_ has become
provincial, and her authority is spurned even within her own borders.
There is no likelihood of the English people ever again accepting
'Catholicism,' if Catholicism is the thing which history calls by that
name. The movement which the Bishop hopes to lead to victory will
remain, as it has been hitherto, a theory of the ministry rather than of
the Church, and its strength will be confined, as it is now, mainly to
clerical circles.

Catholicism and Protestantism (in so far as they are more than names for
institutionalism and mysticism, which are permanent types) are both
obsolescent phases in the evolution of the Christian religion. 'The time
cometh when neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem shall men
worship the Father.'

A profound reconstruction is demanded, and for those who have eyes to
see has been already for some time in progress. The new type of
Christianity will be more Christian than the old, because it will be
more moral. A number of unworthy beliefs about God are being tacitly
dropped, and they are so treated because they are unworthy of Him. The
realm of nature is being claimed for Him once more; the distinction
between natural and supernatural is repudiated; we hear less frequent
complaints that God 'does nothing' because He does not assert Himself by
breaking one of His own laws. The divinity of Christ implies--one might
almost say it means--the eternal supremacy of those moral qualities
which He exhibited in their perfection. 'Conversio fit ad Dominum ut
Spiritum,' as Bengel said. The visible or Catholic Church is not the
name of an institution which has the privilege of being governed by
bishops. It is 'dispersed throughout the whole world,' under many
banners and many disguises. Its political reunion is (Plato would say)
an hen mhytho ehyche, and is at present neither to be expected nor
desired. Among those who are by right citizens of the spiritual kingdom,
those only are in danger of exclusion from it who entrench themselves in
a little fort of their own and erect barriers, which may make them their
own prisoners, but which will not hinder the great commonwealth of
seekers after truth from working out modern problems by modern lights,
until th