nishment for gross neglect and abuse, as
was alleged in the partial confiscations of the sixteenth century, or
unless it is called for as a step to break down what can no longer be
tolerated, like slavery, there is no other name for it, in the estimate
of justice, than that of a deep and irreparable wrong. This is
certainly not the time to punish the Church when it never was more
improving and more unsparing of sacrifice and effort. But it may be
full time to stop a career which may render success more difficult for
schemes ahead, which make no secret of their intention to dispense with
religion. This, however, is not what most Englishmen wish, whether
Liberals or Conservatives, or even Nonconformists; and without this end
there is no more justice in disendowing a great religious corporation
like the Church, than in disendowing the Duke of Bedford or the Duke of
Westminster. Of course no one can deny the competence of Parliament to
do either one or the other; but power does not necessarily carry with
it justice, and justice means that while there are great and small,
rich and poor, the State should equally protect all its members and all
its classes, however different. Revolutions have no law; but a great
wrong, deliberately inflicted in times of settled order, is more
mischievous to the nation than even to those who suffer from it.
History has shown us what follows from such gratuitous and wanton wrong
in the bitter feeling of defeat and humiliation lasting through
generations. But worse than this is the effect on the political
morality of the nation; the corrupting and fatal consciousness of
having once broken through the restraints of recognised justice, of
having acquiesced in a tempting but high-handed wrong. The effects of
disendowment concern England and its morality even more deeply than
they do the Church.

VII

THE NEW COURT[9]

[9]
_Guardian_, 15th May 1889.

The claim maintained by the Archbishop in his Judgment, by virtue of
his metropolitical authority and by that alone, to cite, try, and
sentence one of his suffragans, is undoubtedly what is called in slang
language "a large order." Even by those who may have thought it
inevitable, after the Watson case had been so distinctly accepted by
the books as a precedent, it is yet felt as a surprise, in the sense in
which a thing is often a surprise when, after being only talked about
it becomes a reality. We can imagine some people getting up i