state of things the parochial system—perfect as it is where the Church has wholly subdued a country—miserably broke down. A signal failure was in fact inevitable; for what were the solitary parish priests of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford, St. Pancras, St. Marylebone, Islington, or Lambeth, amongst so many! For all practical purposes it may be asserted that at least half of the new population were as much beyond the reach of the Church of England as if they had settled in the woods of Canada or on the plains of Hindostan. Year after year the evil went on increasing, until at last the number of Englishmen who did not belong to the Established Church became so great that a Parliament of Churchmen were obliged to surrender their exclusive right of legislation and government. The prospects of the Church were at this time truly deplorable. Its very existence as an establishment was doubtful. The Whig Premier actually bade the bishops “set their house in order;” and the experiment of confiscation was begun. Humanly speaking it was only the difficulty of disposing of the plunder that saved the Church of these realms. The hour of danger, however, was not of long duration. A new school of theologians arose, who boldly asserted that the Church was not a creature of the State, to be dealt with at the pleasure or convenience of politicians, but a Divine institution, with laws, privileges, and a polity of its own; and that the duty of extending its usefulness belonged to individual exertions not less than to the Legislature. The effect of this new teaching, as it then appeared, was electric. Churchmen no longer sat with hands folded in blank despair, or amused themselves with irrefutable demonstrations that Parliament ought to do something. They set to work themselves. Sometimes it was the clergy who stimulated the laity; sometimes it was the laity who applied a gentle compulsion to the clergy. Churches, parsonages, and schools began to spring up in every direction, with a rapidity that would have borne comparison with the palmiest days of the mediæval builders. The ancient indigenous architecture of the country, and its cognate arts, were in a manner rediscovered, and were brought to a perfection scarcely less than that attained by the greatest masters of antiquity. Indeed, the spread of this new science of ecclesiology has been not the least marvel of the present century. It has pervaded every part of the community; it has slain outright the bastard classicalism of the Age of Pigtail; and it has reproduced itself in the Puginism of the Romanists, and the Ruskinism of Dissent. It has even crossed the Channel, and appeared in the very centre of European taste—in Paris itself—the fount and origin of the whole vast movement being the work of church-building and restoration in this country, which has proved a school of art more effective, because on an infinitely larger scale, than any which modern times have witnessed.