imperatively demand to be filled up with concrete. But mercifully, most mercifully and providentially, a professional gentleman has been called in at the critical moment, exactly in the very nick of time, and now the dear old church may be saved, saved for our children’s children by being promptly restored. Thereupon the worthy parson--he, too, glad of a job--sets to work and the thing is done. But _what_ is done? The men that started this Society, this union for the protection of the noble structures that are a proud inheritance come down to us from our ancestors, they answered with an indignant protest: “An immense and irreparable wrong is done, and the state of things which makes it perfectly easy for a wrong like this to be repeated every week is a shameful national scandal, which we will not cease from lifting up our voices against till some means shall have been devised for preventing the periodical recurrence of these abominable mutilations, these cruel obliterations, these fraudulent substitutions up and down the land of new lamps for old ones.” At starting this was all that our pioneers ventured to proclaim. I have often heard people object, “These gentlemen are so vague, they don’t know what they would be at!” Now, I know that with some folk it is quite sufficient to condemn any men or any opinions to pronounce them _vague_. Why! Since the beginning of the world no great forward movement, no great social religious or political reform, has ever achieved its object and gone on its victorious course conquering and to conquer which did not pass through its early stage of vagueness--that stage when the leaders were profoundly conscious of the existence of an evil or an injustice or a falsehood which needed to be swept away, though they did not yet see what the proper manner of setting to work was, or where the broom was to be found to do the sweeping with. Oh ye merciful heavens! save us from cut-and-dried schemes, at least at starting! All honour to the men, say I, who did not pledge us all to a scheme, to a paper constitution, but who had the courage to say no more than this: “Here in the body politic there is a horrible mischief at work; the symptoms are very bad, very alarming. Do let us see if some remedy cannot be found. Do help us to see our way out of our perplexity.”