unusual periods, and still more of the holy Communion, as sanctifying occasional events, would have been remarked upon as a badge of extreme partizanship. It is now accepted on all sides as a seemly and wholesome thing. Journals to which we used to look with scared anxiety for the attacks which they made upon our exertions, are now half trusted as friends, half listened to as candid monitors.
We do not impute this change of feeling formally to the Church Unions—bodies of a defensive and not a legislative or missionary character. But we have a right of appeal to it as alike giving grounds for asserting that Church Unions have been very useful, and for explaining why they have now fallen into neglect. In their place has grown up a series of organizations, composed on different principles, and termed generally Church Defence Societies. The immediate cause of their rapid success was the notoriety which the blundering effrontery of some of their own leaders gave to a wide conspiracy against the Church in its political and proprietary aspects, under the specious appellation of the Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Control and Patronage—more compendiously entitled the Liberation Society. Churchmen were fairly frightened and disgusted by the insolence of this association, and began to form Church Defence Societies, on the principle of uniting Churchmen of all shades of opinion for all such objects as they could combine in promoting, and particularly in antagonism to the assaults of the Liberation Society. The central body which undertakes to control the action of the local societies is that Church Institution of London, to whose first beginnings we alluded in our former article. We need not now recapitulate how this Institution was moulded out of Mr. Hoare's system of lay consultees, or explain its somewhat complex organization, by which an exclusively lay society in town acts as at once the mouthpiece and the adviser of clergy all over the country. It has certainly made its influence directly felt, and it has indirectly screwed up the clergy to better views of combined action, and more appreciation of systematic co-operation.
The congress of Rural Deans, assembled in London last spring under its auspices, was an evidence of the sort of influence which the Institution was able to bring to bear upon the country. The office of those who composed that meeting gave it a kind of synodical character; and the persons who were present at it were sufficiently pleased with their day's work to make it probable that the experiment would be repeated. If this were done, the often desiderated infusion of a larger proportion of the parochial clergy into the Church's synodical action would be some-
