for an active and
religious life." It was not till the Restoration, it was not till
Puritanism had shown all its intolerance, all its narrowness, and all
its helplessness, that the Church was able to settle the real basis and
the chief lines of its reformed constitution. It is not, as Mr.
Gladstone says, "a heroic history"; there is room enough in the
looseness of some of its arrangements, and the incompleteness of
others, for diversity of opinion and for polemical criticism. But the
result, in fact, of this liberty and this incompleteness has been, not
that the Church has declined lower and lower into indifference and
negation, but that it has steadily mounted in successive periods to a
higher level of purpose, to a higher standard of life and thought, of
faith and work. Account for it as we may, with all drawbacks, with
great intervals of seeming torpor, with much to be regretted and to be
ashamed of, that is literally the history of the English Church since
the Restoration settlement. It is not "heroic," but there are no Church
annals of the same time more so, and there are none fuller of hope.

But every system has its natural and specific danger, and the specific
English danger, as it is the condition of vigorous English life, is
that spirit of liberty which allows and attempts to combine very
divergent tendencies of opinion. "The Church of England," Mr. Gladstone
thinks, "has been peculiarly liable, on the one side and on the other,
both to attack and to defection, and the probable cause is to be found
in the degree in which, whether for worldly or for religious reasons,
it was attempted in her case to combine divergent elements within her
borders." She is still, as he says, "working out her system by
experience"; and the exclusion of bitterness--even, as he says, of
"savagery"--from her debates and controversies is hardly yet
accomplished. There is at present, indeed, a remarkable lull, a "truce
of God," which, it may be hoped, is of good omen; but we dare not be
too sure that it is going to be permanent. In the meantime, those who
tremble lest disestablishment should be the signal of a great break up
and separation of her different parties cannot do better than meditate
on Mr. Gladstone's very solemn words:--

The great maxim, _in omnibus caritas_, which is so necessary to
temper all religious controversy, ought to apply with a tenfold
force to the conduct of the members of the Church of England. In