place this peril in the front, because we esteem it the most dangerous, because insidious, foe of the Church. It is very closely allied to that delusion of the day, which confounds scenic self-abasement with self-denying Christian humility; which says that Apostles are commissioned to serve tables, and applauds the histrionic enthusiasm which would abandon the study or the cathedral, to harangue cadgers from the steps of an omnibus, as though this were the beginning and end of the Church's work. Theatre preaching is, after all, but the abuse of this way of thinking, and as its abuse, it has its utility in startling worthy persons, who might otherwise have continued bound in the entanglements of the specious delusion.
Apart from this danger, the Church of England is, just now, as far as we can judge, in that condition of arrested change, which promises permanence, and renders amelioration possible. Recent appointments to the episcopate, made by the ci-devant 'man of God,' indicate the tardily-attained conviction that the function of the Church is not to ape the conventicle; for certainly Wigram, Philpott, and Thomson, are not names which we connect with platform clap-trap. Dr. Vaughan, who was for a few days a 'designate,' would have been a living proof that earnestness does not exclude learning, and that all is not Exeter Hall outside the ranks of professed High Churchmanship. The appointment of Dean Ellicott is also a recognition of the right functions of a cathedral. To be sure, the throne of S. Cuthbert, Cosin, and Butler, has just been mounted by a prelate, who alone among the Episcopate has pronounced himself favourable to an alteration of the Prayer-Book. But it remains to be seen whether this ill-judged charge of Bishop Baring, at Gloucester, is to be accepted as a policy for the future, or the laboured renunciation of an impossible theory. The anti-Prayer-Book agitation may still simmer on, but in the meanwhile its discomfiture is safe so long as its advocacy continues to be the apanage of the amiable but not judicious peer who stands identified with that hopeless cause. The world's politics have grown too serious for people to run gratuitously into any such entanglement as the minute disputations attending a Prayer-Book Reform Bill, or Commission of Revision, would infallibly produce, and Lord Ebury is too compromised to have any great prospect of persuading any influential body to listen to his alternative schemes of petty disturbance. In the meanwhile, the real inconvenience which he blunderingly strove to rectify, is reforming itself, in the ever increasing, and now officially permitted system of dividing services, and of having separate litanies and communions.
Of course a necessary accident of this settling down of Church
