Many who are by no means ardent Churchmen, or are outside the Church Communion, are interested to know the actual opinion of Convocation on social and industrial questions of the hour, as this opinion is expressed by educated men who reflect the views of their cloth at least as faithfully as the House of Commons reflects the views of the people. Thus, during the recent sittings of a single year, Convocation in its two provinces with their divisions into lower and upper Houses, has discussed and suggested solutions of subjects so varied as sisterhoods and deaconesses, betting and gambling, popular education, soldiers' marriages, marriage law amendment Bills, spiritual provision for workhouses, clergy discipline Bill, the relations between the Church and State in the Colonies. Even in its unreformed condition, this body can scarcely fail to be of some use in officially telling Parliament men the opinion of the Church, which, on any view of it, is at least a considerable corporation, on matters affecting clerical interests or popular morals. In the remote event of the Church being disestablished, Convocation is a useful drilling ground on which Churchmen of all degrees can be trained to collective action. What are the facts relating to the Church to-day? At the opening of this age, the beneficed clergy were often unfit for their posts; they were very largely indifferent to their duties. The attacks on the Establishment led by the Lord Henley of that day and others, shortly after the 1832 Reform Act, were more organized and plausible than anything which has been witnessed since. There are, after all, not many things more national in England than the Church. Even the differences of the clergy, and the professed desire of some among them to be free from State supervision, have not lessened the national regard for the Established Faith. The attack from within, therefore, seems likely to be weathered not less successfully than the attack from without. The parochial system of the Church--its clergy resident in every village where the squire is often an absentee, has struck its fibres too deep into the soil of English life, to be rooted out by any sectarian agitation. The best proof that Church endowments do not check, but rather encourage, private beneficence is the amount of money donations to the Established Church during the present age. Gifts to the Church, whether in the shape of lands, tithes, other rent charges, stock or cash, represent roughly a sum of £5,500,000, yielding a perpetual yearly income of £181,940.