operation, dissent self-immolated, prelates leading senates, and adjudicating from the heights of the world's tribunals, have faded into the evening twilight. A much humbler, more prosaic line of duty has been opened out, if not to our ambition, at least to our persistent exertions. Keeping things well at home has been acknowledged as an aim not unworthy even of unspotted holiness, high intellect, and practical indefatigability. There are those who will attack this open acceptance of a more confined sphere of activity, this abdication of a lively hope of ever beholding in the flesh any extraordinary manifestation of the long prayed-for salutare Israel in our generation, as a proof of blunted faith, debased motives of action, or even of incipient worldliness. We are prepared for the imputations, which we can only meet by an appeal to the providential order of the world's course, as a standing protest against the lawfulness of expecting extraordinary manifestations; and as a proof that those who do their duty most straightforwardly under ordinary circumstances are the best prepared to grapple effectively with unexpected contingencies. A few years ago we seemed to be playing double or quits; now the preservation of the Church being assured, we may more confidently exert ourselves in strengthening its bulwarks. If there is no great hope of any abnormal amelioration of the Church of England in our time, so there is no great fear of any hopeless deterioration. We are neither likely to hear the call to assemble in universal council, nor yet the warning voice to go hence and abandon our desecrated altars. The battle of Church life is incessant, and it covers a wide field, and so our pickets must be both numerous and vigilant. We are not for the moment discussing the accidents of the ceaseless conflict with the visible powers of evil; we are merely looking to those exertions which are destined to maintain the bene esse of the existing English Church, as a movement towards the most hopeful evangelization of our masses. The sustentation of a learned and well-trained, and therefore influential clergy, is not the least difficult or least needful of these endeavours. The necessity of learning and of training is now theoretically acknowledged. R. H. Froude's crude sally in favour of a 'snob clergy' is no longer appealed to as a prophetical utterance. But the broad fact remains behind, that the heedless subdivision of parishes, and the scant endowment of district churches, has lowered the standard of requirements for the Christian ministry, and rendered reconstructive reformation more difficult than it would have been, had the problem of missionary development in populous places been put before the Church, with the enlarged lights of its actual experience. We
