And surely it would have required either a deeply saturnine or a marvellously prophetic mind to foretell that, in ten or twelve more years, that powerful and distinguished generation of clergy would be broken up: that at least a moiety of the most gifted sons, whom Oxford had reared for the service of the Church of England, would be hurling at her head the hottest bolts of the Vatican: that, with their deviation on the one side, there would arise a not less convulsive rationalistic movement on the other; and that the natural consequences would be developed in endless contention and estrangement, and in suspicions worse than either, because even less accessible, and even more intractable. Since that time, the Church of England may be said to have bled at every pore; and at this hour it seems occasionally to quiver to its very base. And yet, all the while, the religious life throbs more and more powerfully within her. Shorn of what may be called the romance and poetry of her revival, she abates nothing of her toil; and in the midst of every sort of partial indiscretion and extravagance, her great office in the care of souls is, from year to year, less and less imperfectly discharged. But the idea of asserting on her part those exclusive claims, which become positively unjust in a divided country governed on popular principles, has been abandoned by all parties in the State. There was an error not less serious in my estimate of English Nonconformity. I remember the astonishment with which at some period,--I think in 1851-2,--after ascertaining the vast addition which had been made to the number of churches in the country, I discovered that the multiplication of chapels, among those not belonging to the Church of England, had been more rapid still. But besides the immense extension of its material and pastoral organisation, English Nonconformity (in general) appears now to have founded itself on a principle of its own, which forbids the alliance of the civil power with religion in any particular form or forms. I do not embrace that principle. But I must observe, in passing, that it is not less unjust than it is common to stigmatise those who hold it as "political Dissenters,"--a phrase implying that they do not dissent on religious grounds. But if they, because they object to the union of Church and State, are political Dissenters, it follows that all who uphold it are political Churchmen.