Roman Empire, or by the commoner under the form of the Holy Roman Church. The great Papal schism which immediately followed, and the seventy years' captivity at Avignon, were the beginning of the end. The dream was dreamed out. The vision of the unity of Christendom under a visible vicar of Christ vanished for ever. The vision which has replaced it is that of a Federal Christendom--a confederation of national churches, each under its national head, establishing in the spiritual some such order as the Commune dreams of establishing in the political sphere. But it is the same enterprise. We wish our able advocates of Establishment would consider it. It is the endeavour to build the Church on a basis of authority, whether external to the nation, as the Pope, in the ages in which Christendom was conceived of as a visible kingdom, or internal to the nation, as is necessary when the nation rises to the consciousness of individuality, and the assertion of the independence of the national life. It is an aiming at a kind of order in Christ's kingdom which has the root of all disorders in the heart of it; and it has for three centuries blocked the way of the true successor to the Mediæval idea of the unity of Christendom, a unity of spirit unexpressed in formularies or organizations, reigning in all the provinces of man's social, political, and national life. The Mediæval idea of the unity of the Church was a noble and beautiful vision; far nobler and more beautiful, broader, deeper, grander, than anything that is proposed or that can be proposed under the conditions of a Law-established National Church. The movement of the Reformation both in England and in Germany was a grand step of progress as regards the actual condition and relations of men. The overthrow of the Roman System, the branding it as of the Devil and not of Christ, was an unspeakable gain and progress. But, yet as regards the idea of the Church, in the form which the Reformation assumed in both countries, we hold that it was distinctly a fall. That which England had to substitute for the idea of a Church co-extensive with the Christian name, ruled by a power which professed and was believed to rest its rights and to draw its influence from a sphere beyond this world, perpetuating in Christendom the tradition and the right of apostolic rule, was a miserably narrow, shallow, and selfish assertion of the right of a class to represent Christ in legislating or the Church, and of a James I. to represent Him in ruling it. The inner life of the Church System which the Reformation established in England shines brightly only against the background of Roman atrocity; it is dark enough against any conception of Christ's Kingdom inspired by the Spirit or drawn from the word of God.