admit. The party, if not Roman, is assuredly not Anglican in its feelings and interests. There are two futures before them. On the one side is, of course, the risk of a popular riot, from which those who are labouring for the restoration of genuine English ritual, and who recollect the terrible autumn of 1850, will be certain to emerge sufferers. If this is happily avoided, this party, secure in the immunity of a latitudinarian régime, will shrink within itself into a Petite Eglise—each clergyman satisfied with the maintenance of his own congregation, and each a material hostage for some corresponding divarication on the deficient or ultra-Protestant side by some other loose-sitting incumbent. And in this way single, and as it were private, churches will be pointed to and marked off, and each will not improbably be a check to the healthy development of ritual in some twenty others. If inhibitions come to trouble the calm of the scene, the example of the wandering deacon playing at abbot in the streets of Norwich will furnish a dangerous precedent for indiscriminate disobedience.
Still the problem of the Unity of Christendom will rest unsolved. Will visible unity ever be again vouchsafed this side of the Day of Judgment? Prayers and hopes say, yes. Reason says that the idea is a pious aspiration, not a stable assurance. The basis of the Anglican theory—the possibility of intrinsic oneness without visible unity—is a doctrine which is not measured by centuries; either it may presumably hold good to the end, or it cannot have held good up till now. If the Sacraments are the same lifegiving ordinances wherever they are duly administered, we may conceive the number of God's elect being accomplished age after age, and yet the ages debating, as they now do, in the various branches of Christ's Church. But if in God's counsels ultimate unity is decreed while the world is still in its actual attitude of expectation, we might almost dare to say, pax paritur bello. Many debates—general disintegration—man's wickedness working as much as man's religion—country against country, diocese against diocese—must, short of a miracle, be the state of the Christian world before the huge inert masses can be sufficiently broken up to admit of the freed atoms being reunited as a homogeneous whole. Again, when the Churches which now own the Apostolic ministry are fused together, what will be the condition of the Protestant communities all over the world? While striving to magnify the wisdom and mercy of God by scheming to reunite the Roman, Greek, and Anglican communions, are we to refuse to bestow a thought on the future of those huge bodies of Christians? Who will dare to call that 'unity' which would leave those, by that time ancient, communities of baptized men—men working out their own salvation
