particular “duty of Churchmen with regard to Disestablishment,” which I shall try in few words to set forth, is the duty of taking care that dissensions from within shall not bring the Establishment to its end (applause). The last half-century has been a period of the most active religious life known to the Reformed Church of England. It has also been the period of the sharpest internal discord. That discord has of late been materially allayed, not, I believe, through the use of mere narcotics, not because the pulse beats less vigorously in her veins, but through the prevalence in various quarters of wise counsels, or, in other words, the application to our ecclesiastical affairs of that common-sense by which we desire that our secular affairs should always be governed (applause). What I wish now to urge is this. In the fact that such discord has prevailed there is not—nay, even were it to rise again into exasperation there ought not to be—ground for religious despondency or dismay. Divergence is to be expected, not only in all things human, but in all things divine which wear things human for their habiliment; and there were particular reasons why it was to be anticipated and to be patiently borne within the Church of England. We have still to look it in the face as an incident of our history, though it may lie less heavily upon us than in some former years as a present embarrassment. It is, under all circumstances, a cause of pain and a source of danger, but not always a demonstrative proof of weakness. On the contrary, when profoundly felt and yet borne, so to speak, without breach of continuity, it may be a test and a proof of strength (applause). In every living organism, in every institution or system, its health will depend upon the equilibrium of the elements out of which it is composed; but the maintenance of this equilibrium is more easy when the system is uniformly simple and its tendencies determinate and clear; more difficult when it is many-sided and when it aims at binding together and at directing towards a common end tendencies which are naturally divergent, and which more commonly find for themselves homes altogether severed. Let me borrow an illustration from the world of politics. Discord is comparatively rare and slight in a political club, because a political club is an institution formed to maintain some scheme of opinion current at the time and familiarly apprehended, though its tests be but rough, by those who join it. But the Houses of Parliament, in which these rival systems have to dwell together and to work themselves out into common results, are and must be the homes of frequent and serious contention. In the sixteenth century the Continental Churches of the West north of the Alps and Pyrenees were