I entirely agree with Professor Huxley's assertion that the language both of materialism and of spiritualism has only a relative truth. I believe the idealism which tries to expel our conception of matter to be as false as the materialism which tries to banish our conception of life or spirit. In this respect the language of the vulgar is infinitely more true and more subtle than the language of philosophers. I have spoken elsewhere of "the profound but conscious metaphysics of human speech." And it has been all the more profound in proportion as it has been unconscious. Language is a self-registering index of the operations of mind. The conceptions of which it is a witness may be defined and traced, but are not to be explained away. All the truth that there is in the phraseology of materialism is reflected accurately in the ordinary use of language. When metaphysicians attempt to get behind that use, they generally do so only to "meddle and muddle." A man may speak of his brains as synonymous with his intellect, and nobody will derive an erroneous impression from language referring to a connection which is the most familiar of all facts, although its nature is incomprehensible. But this is a very different thing from attempting deliberately to confound connection with identity under the cover of some ambiguous word. The half-truth of materialistic phraseology ceases when that phraseology pretends to represent a whole-truth. Moreover, the fallacy which it then becomes is in the nature of nonsense. And this only is my point now. Nor is it surprising that when men try to explain away their own ideas, they should get into the atmosphere of bulls. When we try to get outside ourselves, our attitudes are not likely to be otherwise than ludicrous-as may be seen in the case of our canine friends when they take it into their heads to gyrate in energetic pursuit of their own tails.

The metaphysicians and physicists with whom I have been dealing seem to me to be one and all men who walk up to some idea-some old and familiar acquaintance of the mind-recognise it, peer into its face, and then accost it, as the Irishman accosted his acquaintance in Miss Edgeworth's story: "When I first saw you, I thought it was you, but now I see you are another."

INVERARY, November.

"Reign of Law," Fifth Ed. p. 303

ARGYLL.

THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE.

TATE Establishments may be made to rest upon the ground of right or of expediency. It is time that the controversy be narrowed as much as possible, if all hope of a compromise between contending parties is not to be for ever abandoned. These days, in which public opinion ripens rapidly, are not the days in which we can safely depend upon historical privileges or conservative traditions. The advocate of Disestablishment must dispossess his mind of political prejudices, to which his forefathers were strangers, whose secession never involved consciously any political issue, if he expects his adversary in turn to look at the question dispassionately, and not through the medium of traditional prepossessions.

There will be hope of agreement when both sides are content to argue the question as one of simple expediency. The supporter of Disestablishment must recognise the principle that what was morally right in the sight of the Almighty under the old dispensation, cannot be morally wrong at any time. And the advocate of a State Establishment must abandon his illogical inference, that what was politically right under a given set of circumstances, must be therefore politically right under every new development and phase of human thought whatever. It may be morally wrong, because morally degrading, to surround a grown-up man with the same defences against tempta

tion which are demanded by the ignorance and inexperience of youth.

In examining the question how far it is impossible to unite Nonconformists with Churchmen in any compromise which shall be satisfactory to the conscience of both, we must determine whether either need be called upon to sacrifice any real principle, for the maintenance of which they separately exist.

I. The case of the Nonconformists shall be first considered. The able writer in the June number of this Journal, who defends the principle of Disestablishment, says-"To sacrifice themselves for an institution for the common good would be both patriotism and religion." But if the care of religion on the part of the State be for the common good, or, in other words, if the Establishment be really a "social and religious benefit," it is difficult to understand wherein lies the self-sacrifice, inasmuch as all religious denominations, so far as they are purely religious, with no political ingredients, cannot be supposed to exist for any other object. What is meant probably is this, that Nonconformists are unwilling to part with that amount of religious freedom which they now enjoy. But every system that aims at union must involve individual sacrifice. Such sacrifice is the payment which is due from each for the general good, and which, in another shape, comes back to him. Whether in the case of individuals or churches, laws are enacted for the protection, not the restraint, of freedom. Moreover, schism is essentially reproductive: the spirit of division is the spirit of sub-division. If none will conform to any system in which he finds something from which to dissent, then Nonconformity has no ultimate refuge but in Individualism. The liberty, which adhesion to the Establishment would require to be sacrificed, whether in regard to patronage, dependent upon the will of the Sovereign, or to those who have alienated property for endowments, is to be counterbalanced by the greater diffusion of religious instruction throughout the neglected deserts, unreached by the more wasteful and isolated action of a sect-torn Christianity. The privilege to be sacrificed is the right to defend some one-sided view of Christian teaching or discipline: the benefit which will be secured by such surrender is the recognition of national brotherhood, and the worship of a common Father. The original Nonconformists were seceders because of violence done to the religious conscience; but can the followers of Owen or Wesley urge this motive with any show of justice now? And if the true ground for continual secession be the restriction of freedom imposed by the Establishment, how is it that Nonconformists hold aloof from the Church in all our colonies, where the last remnant of Establishment has faded? "It would be as easy to restore the Heptarchy," says Mr. Allon, "as to bring back the Wesleyan Church to the bosom of the Establishment."

If this statement is intended to illustrate the objection to an Establishment, felt by men who were most unlikely to feel it, as soon as they could view it from a position outside of itself, the objection surely loses much of its force when we observe the like reluctance to return to the bosom of the Church in the various colonies of the British Empire. The true motive must be found, not in any peculiarity of an Establishment, but in the force of habit, which can reconcile men to the evils of schism, as soon as they have tasted the exciting pleasures of strife.

There can be no question that, on historic grounds, the objection to the principle of a State Church is an after-thought. Such objection cannot be made to rest upon moral grounds, discovered by reason or revelation, for in the only instance where God has seen fit to instruct us upon such a subject, He has enjoined the principle of an established religion. The rational ground upon which the objection can be made to rest, is that it exercises a prejudicial influence upon the interests of religion, according to the views of the majority. An Established Church can, in no true sense, be called a national Church, unless it expresses the views, and carries with it the sympathies of the nation. The Irish Church was not, except in name and mockery, a national Church, and its days have been numbered. In Scotland, the attempt to establish an Episcopal Church was to fight against the conscience of the nation; while in England a like failure attended the attempt to set up, on the part of the Puritans, a system built upon the Westminster Confession. But, on the other hand, the English Church, from the days of Elizabeth, has on the whole hitherto expressed the national conscience. If, by the rightful exercise of reason in the matters of religion, a large proportion of the nation has discerned, or thought that it has discerned so much error, some in one direction, some in another, as to justify secession, and, if it sees fit, to demand for such variegated secession, not only toleration, but a co-ordinate position with the Church from which it has seceded, then the dominant Church must do one of two things. It must either cease to be dominant, that is, to be the instrument of the State for the wider dissemination of religious truth, or it must widen its basis, and allow a greater divergence of religious opinion. The practical question is, need such divergence of opinion, being the necessary outcome of the exercise of private judgment, deprive the State of its most economical defence and the surest safeguard of its prosperity, the hitherto-trusted organ for the diffusion of religious ordinances, and the education of the religious conscience among all classes of the people?

The English nation, perhaps to the surprise of Nonconformists, has lately, by a most unmistakable popular vote, determined that national education shall not be entrusted to the fitful enthusiasm

of the voluntary principle. It has done more.

It has determined

in favour of a religious education; that the children shall be taught, if not by formularies, yet by some means, that there is a Divine law higher than man's law, and an inheritance beyond the present one of toil and trouble.

II. And when we come to settle the terms of the compromise, if compromise be possible, which shall reconcile Nonconformists to an Establishment, what sacrifice on the part of the Church will they expect? It may with safety be said that the demands made by their Puritan fathers have already been surrendered, partly, it must be owned, by their own determination and fortitude, and partly by the force of circumstances, and by the growth of public opinion. They will not, in fairness, require the surrender of Episcopal order, for they acknowledge the primitive, if not Apostolic precedent of Episcopacy, so long as they are not compelled to declare its Divine authority. To refuse to combine with their fellow-Christians, who do recognise such authority, so long as their own recognition of it were left voluntary, would be an act of intolerance. For if they regard a bishop as nothing more than a chief presbyter, does not the law of Presbyterianism and Congregationalism require ordination at the hand of presbyters? Again, Congregationalists do not ground their doctrine of the independence of Christian communities upon Apostolic command, but simply upon Apostolic precedent, and there would be no inconsistency in their submitting to any modification that was demanded by the scruples of others, or by the law of brotherly love and unity. The successors of those English Presbyterians of 1662, who profess to see in the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ the outgrowth of a later age, unknown to the Apostolic and primitive Creeds, would probably be content to conform to the Church, and eventually yield to a better mind, if the Creed of St. Athanasius was reserved as a weighty document containing the decision of a past age to be read at leisure, but not enforced as a test of communion.

Again, the freedom now enjoyed by non-established Congregationalists need not be sacrificed. At the present moment neither the individual member of a congregation, nor an individual Congregational church is at liberty to formulate its own doctrine, or to regulate its own worship, apart from some central authority called "the Congregational Union." And wherein lies the substantial difference between a controlling power vested in an assembly made up of nonconforming laymen and divines, and one vested in the synod or convocation of the Church, whose decisions, before they become binding, must receive the sanction of the lay members assembled in Parliament? The anomaly indeed may lie in the fact