lethargy, mark the temper of our times; and they are as conspicuous in the Church as anywhere else. But these qualities, as we have had ample experience, may develop into fierce and angry conflicts. It is our internal quarrels, Mr. Gladstone thinks, that create the most serious risk of disestablishment; and it is only our quarrels, which we have not good sense and charity enough to moderate and keep within bounds, which would make it "disgraceful." The main feature of the Letter is the historical retrospect which Mr. Gladstone gives of the long history, the long travail of the later English Church. Hardly in its first start, under the Tudors, but more and more as time went on, it instinctively, as it were, tried the great and difficult problem of Christian liberty. The Churches of the Continent, Roman and anti-Roman, were simple in their systems; only one sharply defined theology, only the disciples and representatives of one set of religious tendencies, would they allow to dwell within their borders; what was refractory and refused to harmonise was at once cast out; and for a certain time they were unvexed with internal dissensions. This, both in the case of the Roman, the Lutheran, and the Calvinistic Churches of the Continent, requires to be somewhat qualified; still, as compared with the rival schools of the English Church, Puritan and Anglican, the contrast is a true and a sharp one. Mr. Gladstone adopts from a German writer a view which is certainly not new to many in England, that "the Reformation, as a religious movement, took its shape in England, not in the sixteenth century but in the seventeenth." "It seems plain," he says, "that the great bulk of those burned under Mary were Puritans"; and he adds, what is not perhaps so capable of proof, that "under Elizabeth we have to look, with rare exceptions, among the Puritans and Recusants for an active and religious life." It was not till the Restoration, it was not till Puritanism had shown all its intolerance, all its narrowness, and all its helplessness, that the Church was able to settle the real basis and the chief lines of its reformed constitution. It is not, as Mr. Gladstone says, "a heroic history"; there is room enough in the looseness of some of its arrangements, and the incompleteness of others, for diversity of opinion and for polemical criticism. But the result, in fact, of this liberty and this incompleteness has been, not that the Church has declined lower and lower into indifference and negation, but that it has steadily mounted in successive periods to a higher level of purpose, to a higher standard of life and thought, of faith and work. Account for it as we may, with all drawbacks, with great intervals of seeming torpor, with much to be regretted and to be ashamed of, that is literally the history of the English Church since the Restoration settlement. It is not "heroic," but there are no Church annals of the same time more so, and there are none fuller of hope.