And if it be asked whether one grand and generous and dignified building will attract more worshippers than three of the ordinary type, my answer is “Yes, and the worshippers will be assisted to a reverent mind and attitude”. I speak what I know as a vicar for thirty years of a district church in East London. The building was always requiring repair, its fittings were oppressively cheap, and there were twelve other churches within much less than “a Sabbath day’s journey”. There is no doubt that the people preferred and were more helped by worship in the finer and better served parish churches. I used to feel what an advantage it would have been if the parish church, endowed and glorified with some of the money spent on the district churches, could have been the centre of a large staff of clergy, and have offered freely to all comers the noblest aids to worship. A feeling of patronage is incompatible with a feeling of worship, and the district church, with its constant need of money and its mean appearance, is always calling for the patronage of the people. The grandly built and imposing building, which gives the best and asks for nothing, provokes not patronage but reverence. There is, I believe, great need for such places of worship, as there is also need for meeting halls where in familiar talk and with simple forms of worship the clergy might lead and teach the people; but I do not see the need for the cheap churches, which are not dignified enough to increase habits of reverence, and often pretend to an importance which provokes impertinence. The Church has been powerful because it has called on its members to put their best thought and their best gifts into the buildings raised for the worship of God. It owes much to the stately churches and sumptuous cathedrals, for the sake of which men of old made themselves poor; and to-day the hearts of many, who are worn by the disease of modern civilization, are comforted and uplifted as in the greatness of these buildings they forget themselves. The Church is as unwise as it is unfaithful when it puts up cheap and mean structures. It is not by making excuses--whether for its members who keep the best for their own dwellings or for itself when it takes an insignificant place in the streets--that the Church will command the respect of the people. It must prove its faith by the boldness of its demand. But I have said enough to show that the Bishop of London’s Fund would serve its own object of providing the best aid to worship, if it would respond to the call of the present and seize the opportunity of taking a lead in town-planning. Church policy--as State policy--is often best guided by the calls which rise for present needs, and if our leaders, distrusting “their own inventions,” would set themselves to assist in town-planning it might be given them to do the best for the Church as well as for the health and wealth of the people. SAMUEL A. BARNETT. SECTION VI. EDUCATION.