the English nation has never recognised any Church of England but itself. It has recognised various functions within the Church; and it has established, as corporations sole or aggregate, the responsible ministers of public worship, while giving, as we have seen, full liberty of worship to all its members. But it never1 incorporated or established as a Church a body of persons distinct from the nation. There is, therefore, within the nation a body of established clergy, but no established Church. The question which is erroneously spoken of as the question of Church and State is really the question whether the Christian community, the nation or national Church, ought by public act and recognition to maintain the system of worship, instruction, and beneficence administered by the clergy. It may justly be felt that, the more the nation accepts, according to the view taken in these Lectures, the position of a Christian Church, and opens itself to the teaching and influence of Christian ministers in all its parochial divisions, the more likely it will be to maintain and reform the existing system as a function of the national life. But, if the clergy,

1 Perhaps the case of the Church of Ireland forms an exception to this. The Act under which it was set up is in form permissive; but the Corporate Body of the Church becomes by that Act a recognised and established institution with legal attributes: and the Act lays down many binding conditions as to the framework of the Church. We have therefore the paradox that in England there is no established Church, and that the only established Church existing in the British Empire is the so-called disestablished Church of Ireland; and further that, so far as it is proposed to apply the Irish precedent to England, what is aimed at is not the disestablishment of the Church (for there is no corporate body to overthrow), but the setting up or establishment of that which has never before existed, a great, and I may add clerical, corporation endowed with great powers and emoluments by the nation, yet severed from the national life.

with the tacit consent of the people, enter upon a course which narrows the sphere of their ministry and influence, and reduces the system committed to their charge to the bare functions of worship, preaching, and charity, caring almost exclusively for those who take part in these functions, and having hardly any regard for the general life; if the organization for public worship inculcates a moral system antiquated, onesided, disowned by the national conscience; if it refuses all brotherly intercourse with the voluntary societies for worship; if, in a word, it becomes clerical and congregational instead of parochial and national, a sect instead of a branch or inner circle of the Church, the national Church could not treat it otherwise than as it treats the family or those parts of human life which are best left under private management. The Church, the Christian nation, would remain; but the system of worship, thus shrunk, would be left to the conduct of private associations.

And yet it is hardly possible that this should come to pass where the provision for worship forms a vast system conterminous with the nation: for either this system is regarded as being itself the Church, or it is a function, according to our contention, of the nation which is the Church. In the former case it can hardly be left to itself; for the necessary tendency of a Church is to grow into a State, or at least to absorb the functions of the State; so that to cut off the Church from the State, were it possible, would be to construct an imperium in imperio, a source of unceasing discord. In the latter case, that is, if the nation acknowledges

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itself to be a Church, it can hardly do otherwise than have its own system of worship, maintaining its parochial character, and giving it such reforms as will make it minister to the national wants.

2. We turn now to the Family Life, the second of the social circles within the greater whole of humanity and of mankind.

its

The family life is so necessary and so Christian in very nature, that its highest, most ideal condition does not lie out of sight of our ordinary Christian experience. We cannot doubt its continuance, nor the continuance of the sanctions and safeguards which support it. We may trace, not perhaps without some misgivings, reasons for believing that, in our own country at least, it is fulfilling its functions progressively better, and that the narrowness which is apt to cling to it will be purged away. But it is menaced by two grave dangers, each of which it must be the work of the Christian spirit to dissipate.

It is of no use to hide the fact that, both in France and in the United States of America, two branches of the Church each of which is in a different way specially advanced, there is a disposition to decline or to limit very narrowly the duty of parentage. Not to dwell upon the means by which this is effected, supposing that those means are innocent, which is exceedingly doubtful, the result cannot but be most pernicious. In the family life it destroys much of the tenderness of both the married and the parental relation. In public life it diminishes the inventiveness which is called forth by the necessity of the sup

port of children, and limits the fresh supply of citizens. If in America the supply is made up from Europe, yet the predominance of heterogenous elements is by no means desirable; and the moral conditions of selfishness and lack of hope, which it reveals and which it fosters, are becoming the subject of grave alarm. In France it is felt by statisticians and economists as a matter of life and death, and appearances at present point to the latter and worse alternative1. In reference to the more general life of the world, the evil is still more serious; for commerce, colonisation, invention, are of the essence of its fuller life, which demands the reclamation of the waste parts of the earth and the influence of the advanced upon the backward races. These enterprises require the extension of the energies of the leading nations; and, if these grow weak and become inadequate to the task, our best hopes for the world will be frustrated. In England it may be said that this danger is little felt the fears conceived by Malthus eighty years ago have proved groundless; our population is healthily

1 The facts as to the decrease of the French population (except in the towns and in one or two of the Northern Departments) are notorious. They are well summed up in a statistical paper in the Times of Jan. 25, 1883. The writer speaks of the causes of this decrease as follows: The increasing sterility of the nation can have no other causes assigned to it but those of habit and calculation.' No reason can be sustained except that before mentioned, the growing indisposition of the people to have large families; and, with the increase of wealth in the country, it is probable that this indisposition will increase instead of diminishing.' Similar testimonies are constantly borne to the decrease of the old stock in New England, and indeed of the unwillingness to have families in the native population of the United States generally, even in the flourishing states of the west. The evils connected with this (which indeed can hardly escape the notice of any one travelling in America) were described in the concluding chapter of Mr. Barham Zincke's 'Last Winter in the United States.' Murray, 1868.

increasing; and there is no reason for more than the ordinary restraint in postponing marriage according to the dictates of prudence. Yet there have not been wanting phenomena among ourselves of a contrary tendency; and that which is a recognised custom in France and America, can hardly fail to affect England. It is necessary, therefore, to strengthen by religious hope, and by destroying the illusions which breed despair, the foundations of family life. The more its blessedness and sanctity as an inner circle of Christ's Church is realised, the more also the duty is felt of making our private ease give way to the benefit of mankind in the largest sense, the less disposed shall - we be to place an unhealthful limit to the growth of the family.

The other danger is that social evil, the vast extent of which, whether it be or be not upon the increase, is certainly a ground for alarm and for exertion. The preaching of discipline and self-restraint to individuals, the inculcation of purity as a Christian duty, is no doubt a powerful deterrent from this evil, and so is the knowledge of the physical misery entailed by it, not on individuals merely, but on generation after generation. But the evil is still more one to be dealt with by the Church itself in its largest capacity. The healthier and fuller development of the various forms of life which we have traced out, through their recognition as branches or functions of the Church, will, we may confidently expect, have a beneficial influence: especially will this be the case when women are more fully admitted to an equality with men, and receive