instructed and intellectual portions of the community depends mainly on the latitude of opinion that is accorded to its clergy, and on their power of welcoming and adopting new knowledge, and it may reasonably be maintained that few greater calamities can befall a nation than the severance of its higher intelligence from religious influences. It should be remembered, too, that on the latitudinarian side the changes that take place in the teaching of the Church consist much less in the open repudiation of old doctrines than in their silent evanescence. They drop out of the exhortations of the pulpit. The relative importance of different portions of the religious teaching is changed. Dogma sinks into the background. Narratives which are no longer seriously believed become texts for moral disquisitions. The introspective habits and the stress laid on purely ecclesiastical duties which once preponderated disappear. The teaching of the pulpit tends rather to the formation of active, useful and unselfish lives; to a clearer insight into the great masses of remediable suffering and need that still exist in the world; to the duty of carrying into all the walks of secular life a nobler and more unselfish spirit; to a habit of judging men and Churches mainly by their fruits and very little by their beliefs. The disintegration or decadence of old religious beliefs which had long been closely associated with moral teaching always brings with it grave moral dangers, but those dangers are greatly diminished when the change of belief is effected by a gradual transition, without any violent convulsion or disruption severing men from their old religious observances. Such a transition has silently taken place in England among great numbers of educated men, and in some measure under the influence of the clergy. Nor has it, I think, weakened the Church. The standard of duty among such men has not sunk, but has in most departments perceptibly risen: their zeal has not diminished, though it flows rather in philanthropic than in purely ecclesiastical channels. The conviction that the special dogmas which divided other Protestant bodies from the Establishment rested on no substantial basis and have no real importance tells in favour of the larger and the more liberal Church, and the comprehensiveness which allows highly accentuated sacerdotalism and latitudinarianism in the same Church is in the eyes of many of them rather an element of strength than of weakness.