The attitude of laymen whose opinions have come to diverge widely from the Church formularies is less perplexing, and except in as far as the recent revival of sacerdotal pretensions has produced a reaction, there has, if I mistake not, of late years been a decided tendency in the best and most cultivated lay opinion of this kind to look with increasing favour on the Established Church. The complete abolition of the religious and political disqualifications which once placed its maintenance in antagonism with the interests of large sections of the people; the abolition of the indelibility of orders which excluded clergymen who changed their views from all other means of livelihood; the greater elasticity of opinion permitted within its pale; and the elimination from the statute-book of nearly all penalties and restrictions resting solely upon ecclesiastical grounds,--have all tended to diminish with such men the objections to the Church. It is a Church which does not injure those who are external to it, or interfere with those who are mere nominal adherents. It is more and more looked upon as a machine of well-organised beneficence, discharging efficiently and without corruption functions of supreme utility, and constituting one of the main sources of spiritual and moral life in the community. None of the modern influences of society can be said to have superseded it. Modern experience has furnished much evidence of the insufficiency of mere intellectual education if it is unaccompanied by the education of character, and it is on this side that modern education is most defective. While it undoubtedly makes men far more keenly sensible than in the past to the vast inequalities of human lots, the habit of constantly holding out material prizes as its immediate objects, and the disappearance of those coercive methods of education which once disciplined the will, make it perhaps less efficient as an instrument of moral amelioration.