of our later Church history, the end of that
wonderful experiment which has been going on from the sixteenth
century, with such great vicissitudes, but after every shock with
increasing improvement and hope, should at last be not only failure,
but failure with dishonour; and this, he says, could only come in one
of two ways. It might come from the Church having sunk into sloth and
death, without faith, without conscience, without love. This, if it
ever was really to be feared, is not the danger before us now.
Activity, conviction, energy, self-devotion, these, and not apathetic
lethargy, mark the temper of our times; and they are as conspicuous in
the Church as anywhere else. But these qualities, as we have had ample
experience, may develop into fierce and angry conflicts. It is our
internal quarrels, Mr. Gladstone thinks, that create the most serious
risk of disestablishment; and it is only our quarrels, which we have
not good sense and charity enough to moderate and keep within bounds,
which would make it "disgraceful."

The main feature of the Letter is the historical retrospect which Mr.
Gladstone gives of the long history, the long travail of the later
English Church. Hardly in its first start, under the Tudors, but more
and more as time went on, it instinctively, as it were, tried the great
and difficult problem of Christian liberty. The Churches of the
Continent, Roman and anti-Roman, were simple in their systems; only one
sharply defined theology, only the disciples and representatives of one
set of religious tendencies, would they allow to dwell within their
borders; what was refractory and refused to harmonise was at once cast
out; and for a certain time they were unvexed with internal
dissensions. This, both in the case of the Roman, the Lutheran, and the
Calvinistic Churches of the Continent, requires to be somewhat
qualified; still, as compared with the rival schools of the English
Church, Puritan and Anglican, the contrast is a true and a sharp one.
Mr. Gladstone adopts from a German writer a view which is certainly not
new to many in England, that "the Reformation, as a religious movement,
took its shape in England, not in the sixteenth century but in the
seventeenth." "It seems plain," he says, "that the great bulk of those
burned under Mary were Puritans"; and he adds, what is not perhaps so
capable of proof, that "under Elizabeth we have to look, with rare
exceptions, among the Puritans and Recusants