Independently, however, of the high and solemn view of the vocation of Christian men to God’s work, I want you to look at the whole matter from a practical business point of view. What should you think if you heard of a house of business, where all the work was done by the managers? or of a shop where all the selling was done by the master? or of an army where all the fighting was undertaken by the officers? or of a navy, where all the ship’s work was done by those in command? You know well, that the very idea is too absurd to be entertained for one moment. Yet it is exactly the way in which you are acting about Christ’s work in the National Church. A Church without a working laity is as great an absurdity as (nay from its essential constitution, a greater absurdity than) a shop without serving hands, a ship without a working crew, or an army without fighting soldiers. The evil too is one which has avenged itself with a fearful power. Whence sprang the miserable notion, happily now passing away, that the Church consisted of the clergy alone? “From the arrogance of the priesthood” is the common answer. If I said, “From the apathy of an uninterested laity,” I should be at least quite as near the mark. If the laity will not bear their share of the Church’s burden, it follows as a necessary consequence that their place as counsellors is unrecognised; and then from the consequent elevation of the clergy and depression of the laity, results something very like a dislocation in the ecclesiastical body. There were some limbs broken in the last century and the early part of this, and it will take some time to set them, and make them serviceable again. A twofold difficulty has arisen from this violation of a primary law of church life. The clergy have a sort of lurking distrust of lay-help, and the laity are dissatisfied with their position. The clergy have been so unaccustomed to any help from the laity that the more conservative among them regard such help as a novelty to be introduced with great caution and surrounded by very definite safeguards. The laity on the other hand have been so unaccustomed to help that they either do too much or too little. They want sometimes to take the charge of the parish off the clergyman’s shoulders altogether; sometimes they have such a pious horror of trenching upon the ministerial office that they are practically of little use. These difficulties however, though troublesome, are not insurmountable, and are rapidly disappearing as clergy and laity come to know each other better. I should scarcely have considered it necessary to refer to them, had not some of the laity confessed their dissatisfaction somewhat strongly at the Conference held at Sheffield in May 1869, under the presidency of the Archbishop of York—a Conference, the Report of which is well worth the study of any one interested in the lay-help movement. It would take too