munities seems in a position to attempt.

VI

DISENDOWMENT[8]

[8]
_Guardian_, 14th October 1885.

This generation has seen no such momentous change as that which has
suddenly appeared to be at our very doors, and which people speak of as
disestablishment. The word was only invented a few years ago, and was
sneered at as a barbarism, worthy of the unpractical folly which it was
coined to express. It has been bandied about a good deal lately,
sometimes _de coeur leger_; and within the last six months it has
assumed the substance and the weight of a formidable probability. Other
changes, more or less serious, are awaiting us in the approaching
future; but they are encompassed with many uncertainties, and all
forecasts of their working are necessarily very doubtful. About this
there is an almost brutal clearness and simplicity, as to what it
means, as to what is intended by those who have pushed it into
prominence, and as to what will follow from their having their way.

Disestablishment has really come to mean, in the mouth of friends and
foes, simple disendowment. It is well that the question should be set
in its true terms, without being confused with vague and less important
issues. It is not very easy to say what disestablishment by itself
would involve, except the disappearance of Bishops from the Upper
House, or the presence of other religious dignitaries, with equal rank
and rights, alongside of them. Questions of patronage and
ecclesiastical law might be difficult to settle; but otherwise a
statute of mere disestablishment, not easy indeed to formulate, would
leave the Church in the eyes of the country very much what it found it.
Perhaps "My lord" might be more widely dropped in addressing Bishops;
but otherwise, the aspect of the Church, its daily work, its
organisations, would remain the same, and it would depend on the Church
itself whether the consideration paid to it continues what it has been;
whether it shall be diminished or increased. The privilege of being
publicly recognised with special marks of honour by the State has been
dearly paid for by the claim which the State has always, and sometimes
unscrupulously, insisted on, of making the true interests of the Church
subservient to its own passing necessities.

But there is no haziness about the meaning of disendowment. Property is
a tangible thing, and is subject to the four rules of arithmetic, and
ultimately to the force of the stro