By a higher, purer, worthier form of faith and worship, I do not mean improved formularies or liturgies; I mean rather that openness to improvement which is precluded by fixed forms, and which the very beauty and dignity of the Anglican Liturgy tends to impede. They want, I believe, a manner of worship which shall be simpler, more living and actual—truly higher and purer because less intellectually ambitious, and more freshly inspired by human needs and Divine help; and a manner of speaking about Divine things less conventional, less technical and artificial, arising more visibly from actual experience, and based more solidly upon common ground. They want not authorized teachers, but competent witnesses; not to listen to sermons and religious “services,” however admirable, which are delivered in fulfilment of a professional engagement, within prescribed bounds of orthodoxy, at stated times and in regular amount; but to come into personal contact with those who have seen, felt, encountered, the things of which they speak; and who speak not because they are officially appointed to speak, but out of the fulness of the heart because they must—people who dare to be silent when they have nothing to say, and who are not afraid to acknowledge their ignorance, their doubts, or their perplexities. We are becoming critical and impatient of conventionalities, not only, as I believe, because education is spreading, but also because we are hungry for reality, because we are brought face to face (by the astonishing circulation of everything) with all manner of problems which are awful enough for us all, and doubly awful for those whose foundation is in any way insecure. In the presence—and in these days every corner of the land, not to say of the world, is in a sense present to our mental vision—in the presence of every variety of human (and animal) misery, of vice and crime and violence, and inherited degradation and disease, of changes and dangers and crumblings away of every refuge, who can wonder if men and women refuse to be satisfied with shallow or conventional explanations of the fearful problems confronting them and challenging their faith? The glibness, the exasperating completeness, the unconscious blasphemy, of many “orthodox” vindications of Providence, are enough to disgust people with mere orthodoxy.