thus a conscience clause, a safety-valve left for special scruples. For all, in the past history of the English Church, there are names of peculiar attraction for some, Latimer, Bradford, Cowper, John Newton, Cecil; for some Laud, Ken, Dodwell, Sancroft; for some Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, Tillotson, Chillingworth, Paley. This freedom, this variety, which is the sign of life and thought, we owe, under God, to the supremacy of the law, to the control of the nation, which secures to the laity their power of guiding, modifying, stimulating, the Church, as they did in the primitive ages-which secures to the clergy that protection against their own besetting faults, and against the tyranny of a class or a majority, which they could in no other way secure so effectually. No doubt, at particular times the National Church of England has become exclusive and narrow and persecuting; but this almost from the very beginning has been against its fundamental principles, against the doctrine of freedom and comprehensiveness which both its friends and its enemies describe as its chief characteristic. Once lost, this common field of Christian action could hardly be replaced. Once gained, let it be our glory and our ambition to use it to the very utmost.

3. There is yet one other aspect of the Church of England, arising from its connection with the English nation. One of the names of its chief pastor is the Primate and Patriarch of all the Queen's Churches. We know not what was the exact force of this title when first given three hundred years ago, but it certainly well expresses his relation and the relation of the Church of England to all those other Churches within the dominion of England which, though not, strictly speaking, parts of the National Church, are yet in a certain sense the Church of the realm and of the sovereign, tolerated, recognised, and to a certain degree governed, by her laws. There are those Nonconforming communities which, from time to time, have broken off in this or that direction from the ancient Established Church, but which still remain more or less in connection with it—which in part, no doubt, derive their lineage from foreign Reformers, but also in part from ourselves, and certainly from their own native English character. The chief founders of the Nonconformist Churches, Robert Brown, Richard Baxter, and John Wesley, the founders of the Independents, the Presbyterians, and the Methodists, were all ordained ministers of the English Church, and received their

first spiritual life within its pale. The Baptists and Quakers, though not Anglican, are yet peculiarly English. And so, when we go farther yet, the Churches of the Colonies and the Churches of the United States of America, in their different shades and colours, all have a native English growth, some more and some less. They all look back to the Church of England as their common hearth and home. However independent of the Church of England those other communities may have become, yet they all feel and would acknowledge that their whole position would be altered if the mother Church, round which they revolve, were to be shattered to pieces-if there were henceforward to be no one centre of English religious life, out of which the others may go forth, and to which they may, at least from time to time, return. This is the position which, to some extent at least, the Church of England has occupied-which, perhaps, to a larger and larger extent it might occupy hereafter. This it is which gives to its ministrations, to its pastors, to its liturgy, something of a national character even in the eyes of those who are most widely estranged from it. The life and energy of these, its nonconforming children, come back into its bosom :

its toleration and world-wide grasp go out more or less to them. They fill up spaces in the English religious life which the Church of England itself can hardly reach, as the Church of England, on the other hand, keeps up a standard which they themselves gladly recognise. There is surely no Churchman so exclusive as not to claim for his own use the hymns of Isaac Watts or of Charles Wesley, the parable of the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' and the poem of Paradise Lost.' There is no Nonconformist, surely, so exclusive as not to find pleasure in the hymns of the 'Christian Year' and of Bishop Ken, in the magnificent prose of Hooker or Jeremy Taylor, in the touching prayers of the liturgy, or in the all-embracing charm of the Authorised Version. Abbey and cathedral, parish church and country churchyard, are surely, in many senses, theirs as well as ours. amongst the different Churches of Christendom there is still a common element which has come down from the earliest times of the Gospel, so among the different Churches of the AngloSaxon race there is a common element which belongs to all of them; and of that common element the hearth and cradle is the Church of England.

As

I have thus very briefly gone through the

main peculiarities of the constitution of the English Church. I have not dwelt upon details, nor have I dwelt on those characteristics of a church which, as I said at the beginning, are common to all churches-the part which every church takes, or ought to take, in the enlightenment, the amelioration, the elevation, the sanctification, of those committed to its charge. All churches do this, or attempt to do this, more or less, and only so far as they do it are they worthy of their name and place. But what I have wished to point out is the means, the peculiar and precious opportunities, which the English Church has for this great work, over and above the energy of man and the grace of God which all churches alike claim and possess. There are many points, doubtless, in which the Church of England may have fallen short of its great opportunities; there are some points in which those opportunities themselves fall short of other churches. The Church of England, is inferior in venerable antiquity to the Greek, in imperial power to the Roman, in enlightening research to the German, in independence of spirit to the Swiss Protestant or the Scottish. But, nevertheless, it has its own pre-eminent vantage-grounds in the three points which I named