In the Church, the old Calvinism is well-nigh dead: even the Low Church of the present day would have seemed, fifty years ago, a kind of veiled Popery. And the Church has grown greater and stronger. She will be greater and stronger still when she enlarges her borders to admit the great bodies of Nonconformists. The old grievances exist no longer: there are no pluralists: there is no non-resident Vicar: the small benefices are improved: Church architecture has revived: the Church services are rendered with loving and jealous care: the old reproaches are no longer hurled at the clergy: fat and lazy shepherds they certainly are not: careless and perfunctory they cannot now be called: even if they are less scholarly, which must be sorrowfully admitted, they are more earnest. [Illustration: M Faraday -MICHAEL FARADAY-] The revival of the Church services has produced its effect also upon Dissent. Its ministers are more learned and more cultured: their congregations are no longer confined to the humbler trading-class: their leaders belong to society: their writers are among the best _littérateurs_ of the day. That the science of warfare, by sea and land, has also changed, is a doubtful advantage. Yet wars are short, which is, in itself, an immeasurable gain. The thin red line will be seen no more: nor the splendid great man-o’-war, with a hundred guns and a crew of a thousand men. The Universities, which, fifty years ago, belonged wholly to the Church, are now thrown open. The Fellowships and Scholarships of the Colleges were then mostly appropriated: they are now free, and the range of studies has been immensely widened. As for the advance in physical and medical science I am not qualified to speak. But everybody knows that it has been enormous: while, in surgery, the discovery of anæsthetics has removed from life one of its most appalling horrors. In literature, though new generations of writers have appeared and passed away, we have still with us the two great poets who, fifty years ago, had already begun their work. The Victorian era can boast of such names as Carlyle, Macaulay, Thackeray, Dickens, Tennyson, and Browning, in the first rank of men of letters; those of Darwin, Faraday, and Huxley in science. Besides these there has been an immense crowd of men and women who belong to the respectable second rank--to enumerate whom would take pages. Who can say if any of them will live beyond the century, and if any will be remembered in a hundred years?