crumbling
the underpinning, while the full service is intoned above and the
pampered ceremonial swells the aisles.

If the opponents of liberal thinking ever bring an action against a
prominent dissenter from their views, the Privy Council gets rid of the
case by deciding it upon the purely technical position of the
Church,--as in the case of Dr. Williams, whose offence was the
publication of his Essay on Bunsen, and Mr. Wilson, whose essay was
entitled "Seances Historiques de Geneve--The National Church." The
Judicial Committee of the Privy Council decide that they have no power
to define what is true and what is false doctrine, but only what has
been established to be the law of the Church upon the true and legal
construction of her Articles and Formularies.

I. The Church does not require her clergy to believe in the inspiration
of _all_ portions of the Scriptures.

II. Nor that the Atonement operates by _substitution_ of Christ's
suffering for our sins.

III. Nor that the phrase "everlasting fire," in the Athanasian Creed, is
to be received as a final and hopeless statement.

As a specimen of the popular element which is at work among the
uneducated classes to make the people itself of England its real church,
it is worth while to observe what Mr. Spurgeon is doing. His chapel
stands on the southern side of the Thames, between the Victoria and
Surrey Theatres, where the British subject is served with the domestic
and nautical drama. On those stages the language struts and aspirates,
and the effects are borrowed from Vauxhall and Cremorne for plays which
are constructed to hold the greatest possible amount of cockneyism and
grotesqueness, with the principal object of showing how villany and
murder are uniformly overcome by virtue, whose kettle sings upon the hob
above a pile of buttered muffins at last; and the pit, which came in for
a shilling, pays the extra tribute of a tear. These shop-keepers of the
Surrey side sit on Sunday beneath Mr. Spurgeon's platform, whose early
preaching betrayed the proximity of the theatres, but was for that very
reason admirably seasoned to attract his listeners. If he ever did slide
down the rail of his pulpit-stairs, as reported, in order to dramatize
the swift descent of the soul into iniquity, and then painfully climb up
again to show its difficult return, the action was received, doubtless,
in its full ethical import, and shook the suburban heart. His blunt and
ordinary lan