This change has been brought about, partly by the altered position of men in reference to each other, partly also by the altered circumstances of the archbishops themselves. We in our English life are daily approaching nearer to that republican level which is equally averse to high summits and to low depths. We no longer wish to have princes among us, and will at any rate have none of that mysterious kind which is half divine and half hocus-pocus. Such terrestrial gods as we worship we choose to look full in the face. We must hear their voices and be satisfied that they have approved themselves as gods by other wisdom than that which lies in the wig. That there is a tendency to evil in this as well as a tendency to good may be true enough. To be able to venerate is a high quality, and it is coming to that with us, that we do not now venerate much. In this way the altered minds of men have altered the position of the archbishops of the Church of England. But the altered circumstances of the sees themselves have perhaps done as much as the altered tendencies of men’s minds. It is not simply that the incomes received by the present archbishops are much less than the incomes of their predecessors,--though that alone would have done much,--but the incomes are of a nature much less prone to produce princes. The territorial grandeur is gone. The archbishops and bishops of to-day, with the exception of, I believe, but two veterans on the bench, receive their allotted stipends as do the clerks in the Custom-house. There is no longer left with them any vestige of the power of the freehold magnate over the soil. They no longer have tenant and audit days. They cannot run their lives against leases, take up fines on renewals, stretch their arms as possessors over wide fields, or cut down woods and put acres of oaks into their ecclesiastical pockets. They who understand the nature of the life of our English magnates, whether noble or not noble, will be aware of the worth of that territorial position of which our bishops have been deprived under the working of the Ecclesiastical Commission. The very loss of the risk has been much!--as that man looms larger to himself, and therefore to others also, whose receipts may range from two to six hundred a year, than does the comfortable possessor of the insured medium. The actual diminution of income, too, has done much, and this has been accompanied by so great a rise in the price of all princely luxuries that an archbishop without a vast private fortune can no longer live as princes should live. In these days, when a plain footman demands his fifty pounds of yearly wages, and three hundred pounds a year is but a moderate rent for a London house, an archbishop cannot support a semi-royal retinue or live with much palatial splendour in the metropolis upon an annual income of eight thousand pounds. And then, above all, the archbishops have laid aside their wigs.