hrinking from principle and justice and enthusiasm, out of
fear of worldly loss. It will no longer be a place for drones and
hirelings. It is very kind of the revolutionists to wish all this good
to the Church, though if the Church is so bad as to need all these good
wishes for its improvement, it would be more consistent, and perhaps
less cynical, to wish it ruined altogether. Yet even if the Church were
likely to thrive better on no bread, there are reasons of public
morality why it should not be robbed. But these prophecies and
forecasts really belong to a sphere far removed from the mental
activity of those who so easily indulge in them. These excellent
persons are hardly fitted by habit and feeling to be judges of the
probable course of Divine Providence, or the development of new
religious energies and spiritual tendencies in a suddenly impoverished
body. What they can foresee, and what we can foresee also is, that
these _tabulae novae_ will be a great blow to the Church. They mean
that, and that we understand.

It is idle to talk as if it was to be no blow to the Church. The
confiscation of Wesleyan and Roman Catholic Church property would be a
real blow to Wesleyan or Roman Catholic interests; and in proportion as
the body is greater the effects of the blow must be heavier and more
signal. It is trifling with our patience to pretend to persuade us that
such a confiscation scheme as is now recommended to the country would
not throw the whole work of the Church into confusion and disaster, not
perhaps irreparable, but certainly for the time overwhelming and
perilous. People speak sometimes as if such a huge transfer of property
was to be done with the stroke of a pen and the aid of a few office
clerks; they forget what are the incidents of an institution which has
lasted in England for more than a thousand years, and whose business
extends to every aspect and degree of our very complex society from the
highest to the lowest. Resources may be replaced, but for the time they
must be crippled. Life may be rearranged for the new circumstances, but
in the meanwhile all the ordinary assumptions have to be changed, all
the ordinary channels of activity are stopped up or diverted.

And why should this vast and far-reaching change be made? Is it
unlawful for the Church to hold property? Other religious organisations
hold it, and even the Salvation Army knows the importance of funds for
its work. Is it State property which