The Church as established in our midst to-day cannot work a social regeneration in the land, for it gives forth so little of the teaching of Christ to the people. The gold of truth it circulates is mixed with the dross of error of its own minting. It may bear the image and superscription of Christ on it and pass the world’s counter as genuine metal, but it is counterfeit coin of the kingdom. The Church does not grip the people. It is a fashionable institution of conventional high-grade orthodoxy, but it is a thing apart from the people. Its clergy socially are a multitude of pleasant, amiable, guileless folk spread over the tennis-lawns and garden-parties of England on a summer’s afternoon, mingling good-humouredly with their neighbours, but ecclesiastically they belt themselves in a compact phalanx of self-centred, intolerant men with a purpose in life, or by preference they are self-constituted "priests." They hold the Church as a close borough, consume its revenues, swear by its creed, and maintain its privileges. They are strong partisans; the same interest guides them which governs the business man in upholding his trade interests--the sacred rights of property. To defend their inherited rights they will fight doggedly, and surrender only in the last trench. Outside the charmed enclosure of the Church the clergy esteem their Christian neighbours ecclesiastical inferiors, not to be consorted with on equal footing, and they leave the Almighty to take charge of outsiders here and hereafter. As a class long years of clerical assumption has sapped the humanness out of their nature, and only a priest is left in their skin. There are honourable exceptions to this general rule. Many individual clergymen are thoroughly alive with the spirit of Christ. They are men of broad sympathies and of intense devotion to their work, but it is surprising how tightly the Church as an institution grips those who minister at her altars; the Church is the idol of their hearts, the centre of their adoration. If the centre of their adoration could be transferred to Christ; if they could love Christ as devotedly as they love the Church of England, the result of their ministrations amongst the people would be gloriously successful; if instead of coddling the one respectable sheep that never strayed away they rounded up the ninety-and-nine lost ones and settled them in the home pastures the work would make their hearts ring with joy.