“While I had thus been working my way through darkness into light—the sober light of sad reality—life had been bringing to all who belonged to me, as well as to myself, varied experiences of pain and sorrow. For their sake I had already done violence to my better nature. Was I now to render the previous sacrifice nugatory? Was the black shadow of my unbelief to enfold those who had already more than their share of the burden of life to sustain? Sympathising friends had early encouraged me to retain my position in the church. A beneficed clergyman, advanced in years, whose studies had ended, like my own, in the abandonment of dogmatic Christianity, had drawn up a statement of the motives which, as he argued, justified him in the retention of his preferment. This statement was forwarded to me. A celebrated and venerable German professor had sent me a message deprecating the abandonment of a post which, he thought, I might continue to occupy without dishonor to myself and with profit to others. I had hitherto deferred to the judgment of persons whom I regarded as superior to myself in knowledge of life and in ability to determine questions of moral obligation; but the progress of unbelief and enlarged experience decided me, at last, on the adoption of an independent course of thought and action. Taking counsel of my own heart, I resolved to terminate a conflict which had become intolerable. Painful and singular complications preceded, accompanied, and followed my retirement from the English Church.” Here is the “Robert Elsmere” of real life. Since Mr. Call left the Church of England, thirty-five years ago, it has become a largely rationalistic institution. Legal prosecutions of clergymen for heresy have resulted in proving that the evangelical and orthodox have no more right to the Church, in Law, than the liberals. They were usurpers of authority not guaranteed by the constitution, in which there is nothing requiring a clergyman to believe in hell, or the devil, or miracles, or the infallibility of the Bible. Many clergymen are now honestly preaching a simple theistic and humanitarian religion, and when told they ought to leave the Church need only reply, “If you think so you have a right to prosecute me.”