ng arm. When you talk of
disendowment, you talk of taking from the Church, not honour or
privilege or influence, but visible things, to be measured and counted
and pointed to, which now belong to it and which you want to belong to
some one else. They belong to individuals because the individuals
belong to a great body. There are, of course, many people who do not
believe that such a body exists; or that if it does, it has been called
into being and exists simply by the act of the State, like the army,
and, like the army, liable to be disbanded by its master. But that is a
view resting on a philosophical theory of a purely subjective
character; it is as little the historical or legal view as it is the
theological view. We have not yet lost our right in the nineteenth
century to think of the Church of England as a continuous, historic,
religious society, bound by ties which, however strained, are still
unbroken with that vast Christendom from which as a matter of fact it
sprung, and still, in spite of all differences, external and internal,
and by force of its traditions and institutions, as truly one body as
anything can be on earth. To this Church, this body, by right which at
present is absolutely unquestionable, property belongs; property has
been given from time immemorial down to yesterday. This property, in
its bulk, with whatever abatements and allowances, it is intended to
take from the Church. This is disendowment, and this is what is before
us.

It is well to realise as well as we can what is inevitably involved in
this vast and, in modern England, unexampled change, which we are
sometimes invited to view with philosophic calmness or resignation, as
the unavoidable drift of the current of modern thought, or still more
cheerfully to welcome, as the beginning of a new era in the prosperity
and strength of the Church as a religious institution. We are entreated
to be of good cheer. The Church will be more free; it will no longer be
mixed up with sordid money matters and unpopular payments; it will no
longer have the discredit of State control; the rights of the laity
will come up and a blow will be struck at clericalism. With all our
machinery shattered and ruined we shall be thrown more on individual
energy and spontaneous originality of effort. Our new poverty will spur
us into zeal. Above all, the Church will be delivered from the
temptation, incident to wealth, of sticking to abuses for the sake of
gold; of s