Looking at all the facts of the case, there is every reason why the Church should take courage. Never since the Reformation has she had so much real power for good—never has she been so free from abuses. Each year sees thousands returning to the fold from which they or their parents had strayed; each year sees her enemies more and more “dwindle, peak, and pine.” Everything, too, points to a daily acceleration of the process. At the very time that Convocation is resuming its functions, the Non-conformist Union is compelled by internal dissentions to abandon their yearly meeting. What Mr. Miall calls “the dissidence of dissent”—that is to say, all in it that is pre-eminently narrow-minded, ignorant, and infected with bigotry—is concentrating itself, and is thus getting free the more respectable elements of modern non-conformity. Meanwhile the better class of Dissenters are doing all in their power to cut the ground from under their own feet. They are building “steeple-houses,” inventing liturgies, and adopting even choral services; in other words they are expressing in the most emphatic manner their opinion that the whole theory of dissent is wrong. For a short time a Brummagem ecclesiology may satisfy them; but in the end they will no doubt rank themselves amongst the best sons of the Church. The truth is, there is no other religious community at the present day which can bid so high for the reverent attachment of Englishmen. Whatever the claims of Rome—her antiquity, her catholicity, her apostolicity—they are equally the Church of England’s. Her succession of bishops is the same, her regard for the primitive church greater, her conception of Christendom far more grand. The glories of the ancient rituals belong equally to the Book of Common Prayer. It contains nothing material which was not in them, there was nothing material in them (save only certain invocations and legends of the saints) which is not in it. The Prayer Book is, in fact, nothing but a translation (magnificently done) of the older offices, a little compressed and simplified. The structure is the same—the mode of using it the same; and if it has lost somewhat of the multiplied ceremonies which were anciently observed, it has gained far more in the majesty and breadth which it has acquired from its thoroughly congregational character. Besides, it is throughout a reality, whereas the office books of the Latin Communion have, to some extent at least, become a sham. Thus the Breviary has long since been practically abolished as a public form of prayer, and even as a manual of private devotions for the clergy, that which forms its staple, the Book of Psalms, has been virtually reduced to a fourth its bulk. In nearly a thousand churches belonging to the Anglican communion the whole Psalter is publicly recited every month, and in twenty times that number it is said through twice every year.