The Movement which issued from Oxford in 1833 introduced some improvement into the method of conducting ordinations, as into other departments of the Church's work. The examination became, though not yet very serious, at least a little less farcical, and some attempt was made in charges and sermons to urge upon the candidates the gravity of what they were undertaking. But, according to the late Bishop Woodford, "the evenings, during which they were left to themselves, became evenings of social enjoyment, if not of boisterous merriment, in which the features of an old college supper-party were reproduced, rather than intervals of solemn thought and retirement." Bishop Samuel Wilberforce raised the standard of what was expected in the way of Scriptural and theological knowledge; he made the examination a reality; he laid special stress on sermon-writing; and he made the Ember Week a season of spiritual retirement in which men about to take the most decisive step in life might be brought face to face with the responsibilities involved in their decision. The example set by Wilberforce was followed, sooner or later, by every bishop on the bench; the requirements have been raised, and the system has been developed and improved; but the credit of initiation belongs to that epoch-making episcopate, which began in 1845 and ended, through a false step made by a horse on the Surrey Downs, on the 19th of July 1873. It soon became apparent to those who had the spiritual interests of the Church at heart that something more than twelve months' book-work and a week of religious retirement was required to wean the ordinary B.A. from the puerilities--if nothing worse--of his Undergraduate life, and to equip him for a life of Pastorship and Teachership. The sense of this need gave rise to the creation of Theological Colleges, where a man who looked forward to Holy Orders might, after taking his ordinary degree at Oxford or Cambridge, apply himself to the studies more specially necessary for his chosen work, and--even more important still--might acquire the habits of methodical and self-disciplined life. The idea took shape in such foundations as the Theological Colleges of Wells, Cuddesdon, Sarum, and Ely, the _Scholæ Cancellarii_ at Lincoln, and the Clergy School at Leeds. Fighting their way through all manner of strange misrepresentations about Monasticism and Mediævalism, they have in the course of years attained to recognition, popularity, and apparent stability. The bishops patronize them warmly, and incumbents who desire curates not wholly ignorant of their craft are increasingly unwilling to engage one who has not passed through a Theological College. That the broad result of the training given in these seminaries is a general increase in clerical efficiency I cannot doubt, but perhaps a layman may be permitted to point out some curious gaps and lapses in that training which go some way towards making