Worship is the language of conviction. To a large and rapidly increasing body of Anglicans, Christ is not, as He is to Protestants, a mere historical personage, the founder of Christianity, but is the centre of a religious system, the ever-present object of adoration for His people. A passionate love of Christ has floreated into splendour of worship. To curtail liberty of worship is to touch the rights of conscience; and to interfere with them has ever led to disastrous consequences--such is the verdict of History. A feverish eagerness to dissever Church and State has broken out among clergy and laity, and a schism would be the result, were the chain uniting Church and State indissoluble; but, as events of late years have made it clear, that with a little concerted energy the old rust-eaten links can be snapped, there will be no schism, but a united effort will be made by a body of resolute spirits within the Church to tear asunder crown and mitre. The disestablishment of the English Church will present a future absent from that of the Irish Church. In the latter case, there was an unanimous opposition to the measure by all within it; but, in the event of the severance of the union in England, it will take place amid the joyous acclamations of no inconsiderable section of its best and truest sons. If, from the following pages, it appears that my sympathies are with the National Assembly, and those who upset the _ancien régime_, it does not follow that they are with the Revolution in its excesses. The true principles of the Revolution are embodied in the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man. ‘Write at the head of that Declaration the name of God’ said Grégoire; ‘or you establish rights without duties, which is but another thing for proclaiming force to be supreme.’ The Assembly refused. Grégoire was right. Robespierre, Danton, and his clique made force supreme--as supreme as in the days of the Monarchy, and trampled on the rights, to protect which they had been raised into power. A Republic is one thing: the despotism of an Autocracy or of a Democracy is another thing. I propose following up this historical romance by a life of the Abbé Grégoire, which will illustrate the position of the Constitutional Church, of which he was the soul. I have chosen the form of fiction for this sketch, as it best enables me to exhibit the state of feeling in France in 1788 and 1789. That is no fiction; the incidents related and the characters introduced are, for the most part, true to History. S. B-G. DALTON, THIRSK, _March 25th, 1870_. IN EXITU ISRAEL. CHAPTER I.