the State may resume for other
uses? If anything is certain it is that the State, except in an
inconsiderable degree, did not endow the Church, but consented in the
most solemn way to its being endowed by the gifts of private donors, as
it now consents to the endowment in this way of other religious bodies.
Does the bigness of the property entitle the State to claim it? This is
a formidable doctrine for other religious bodies, as they increase in
influence and numbers. Is it vexatious that the Church should be richer
and more powerful than the sects? It is not the fault of the Church
that it is the largest and the most ancient body in England. There is
but one real and adequate reason: it is the wish to disable and
paralyse a great religious corporation, the largest and most powerful
representative of Christianity in our English society, to exhibit it to
the nation after centuries of existence at length defeated and humbled
by the new masters' power, to deprive it of the organisation and the
resources which it is using daily with increasing effect for impressing
religious truth on the people, for winning their interest, their
confidence, and their sympathy, for obtaining a hold on the generations
which are coming. The Liberation Society might go on for years
repeating their dreary catalogue of grievances and misstatements.
Doubtless there is much for which they desire to punish the Church;
doubtless, too, there are men among them who are persuaded that they
would serve religion by discrediting and impoverishing the Church. But
they are not the people with whom the Church has to reckon. The
Liberationists might have long asked in vain for their pet
"emancipation" scheme. They are stronger men than the Liberationists
who are going in now for disendowment. They are men--we do them no
wrong--who sincerely think Christianity mischievous, and who see in the
power and resources of the Church a bulwark and representative of all
religion which it is of the first importance to get rid of.

This is the one adequate and consistent reason for the confiscation of
the property of the Church. There is no other reason that will bear
discussion to be given for what, without it, is a great moral and
political wrong. In such a settled society as ours, where men reckon on
what is their own, such a sweeping and wholesale transfer of property
cannot be justified, on a mere balance of probable expediency in the
use of it. Unless it is as a pu