what irregularly, but still practically effected. Convocation could not fail to attach much weight to the judgment of such a body as a congress of the Rural Deans of England, and that congress would no doubt assemble in concert with the sessions of the constitutional synod. The influence of the Church Institution has, of course, its concomitant disadvantages, as it can only be worked at the expense of a perpetual compromise within the Society's own Committee-room, where many questions of vital interest, in various ways, to different members of the body, are never allowed to be broached. Yet this very compromise has its good side, in tending to bring together persons who, but for such an institution, would have gone on blooding over and exaggerating their points of difference, while now they are driven to seek joint action upon those matters in which they agree, and can co-operate together.
It is somewhat curious that the particular question—to which more than any other the Church institution owes its existence, should be the one on which it has to confine itself to generalities, and to repeated condemnations of Sir J. Trelawny's particular Bill. To be sure, at the recent congress of Church Defence Societies, holden at Cambridge, the same policy was adopted. The reason is obvious, namely, that there is unfortunately a division of opinion among Churchmen as to the best method of taking advantage of that remarkable turn of fortune which has converted the majority of seventy-four for the total abolition of Church-rates, into the Speaker's casting-vote against it. There on one side is a considerable body whom it is, perhaps, rather unfair to describe as the no-surrender men, for they are, most of them, willing to surrender all the constitutional safeguards, which place it in the power of a majority to defeat a rate, but are wholly unwilling to offer any relief to the conscientious objector. The policy, generally speaking, of this section, is to assimilate the levying of the rate to that of the poor-rate, to emancipate districts from the control and Church taxation of the mother Church, and to allow the vestry itself, at its good pleasure, to excuse or else insist on payment from each objector. Another, and we should hope a larger party agrees with this one in the emancipation of districts and in the improvement of the method of levying, but offers in return the quid pro quo of excusing those from payment who object to the rate—some plans insisting on, and others dispensing with the assurance on the part of the objector that his scruples are conscientious or that he is a Dissenter. In compensation, they insist that the man who will not pay shall not have a seat at the Church vestry, but that its concerns be managed by bonâ fide
