reign of Charles II, when, supported by the full power of a tyrannical government, she was allowed to multiply political tests in supreme scorn of conscience, and held Nonconformist ministers imprisoned in every gaol. To the period of intolerance and persecution naturally succeeded a period of general scepticism. During this period, was the eucharist, as a qualification for office, refused to scoffers at Christianity? And can we imagine a more deplorable or a more instructive union of political tyranny with spiritual laxity, than the administration of the eucharist to an unbeliever as a qualification for office would afford? Bolingbroke, at once an infidel and a persecutor of Nonconformists, was in fact the lay head of the Church in his day, and might have communicated, if he deigned to communicate, on any terms he pleased: and generally speaking, any one who will look over the history of an established Church will see that she has seldom been independent enough to ask what were the religious convictions or what was the character of her political chief. The saine thing may be said, with at least equal force, of the Churches established by the State in Roman Catholic countries. The Church of the Dragonades was the Church of Dubois; and it formed at once the terror of sincere Nonconformity, and the decent veil of royal and aristocratic lust. Men of the world, in fact, have found by experience that a Church supported by political power, and dependent on that support, is the best antidote to the active influence of religion, which they choose to regard as a dangerous and disturbing element in

society; and in paying their homage and lending their protection to a state religion, whether it be that of Jupiter or that of the Anglican Church, they are actuated partly by this view, and partly by the belief that the clergy are useful as a police. The kingdom of the Author of Christianity, after all, is not a kingdom of this world; nor can the kingdoms of this world be made those of the Author of Christianity by the process of political legislation, though they may, and, as we believe, will be in the end, by a process of religious conversion.

And so, on the other hand, it must not be supposed that those who most desire the removal of these tests, and of all interference of political power with conscience, seek to impugn, in any way, the spiritual integrity of the Anglican Church, or to force her to abandon anything which she holds to be an essential part of her proper duty as the guardian of religious truth. They may hope-some of them certainly do hope that when, the hand of political power being withdrawn, the Churches of Christendom cease to be divided by political and social barriers from each other, and to be shut up each in the legal creeds and formularies imposed on it by the State, charity and the sense of a common life derived from the same sources and producing essentially the same fruits, will work their way through the hard integument of exclusive dogma.in which each State Church is cased: and that a reconciliation, if not a reunion, of Christendom, will ultimately take place. But they expect this result from conscience, reason and Christian sympathy, not from

political compromise: and they are as far as possible from wishing to liberalize any Church by legislative action-above all by the action of a Parliament which has lost the last vestige of a title to legislate in matters of religion-or to force any Church to surrender for the convenience of secular interests any portion of what it deems the truth.

We now come to the distinct question as to the opening of the Universities to Dissenters. Dissenters or Nonconformists they shall be called here, to avoid multiplying issues. But if liberty of conscience be the principle of English society, the proper name of these communities is not Dissenters but Free Churches.

The relations between Church and State, and the rights as citizens of persons not belonging to the Anglican Church, are a subject on which it has become necessary that statesmen, if they would be worthy of the name, should at least have some definite principle distinctly before their minds. In the times of the Tudors, when the relations between Church and State were settled, and in the time of Charles II, when that settlement was restored, it was assumed that Church and State were one, and that conformity and citizenship were coextensive: nor did the aristocratic revolution which is associated with the name of William III. alter the principle, although it qualified the practical rigour of intolerance; and although the State, led by political exigencies, to which its so-called religious principles invariably yield, accepted, at the union with Scotland, the absurd and fundamentally sceptical position of

establishing one religion on the North, and another on the South of the Tweed. The Nonconformists were persecuted under the Tudors and the Stuarts: under William and his successors they were tolerated; and the measure of toleration was enlarged as they grew in numbers and in influence, and as, by the softening influence of time on religious antipathies, and by the gradual diffusion of free thought in Europe, their enemies, the fanatical clergy, lost hold on the power of the State. But under neither dynasty were they regarded as entitled to the rights of citizens, or as placed in any other than a penal condition, the penalties of which the State, out of mercy or policy, was pleased to mitigate or suspend. At the same time it must be remembered, that no statesman of the Tudor age, or even of that which succeeded the Tudors, looked upon this state of things as perpetual, or supposed that a large part of the nation would always remain politically and socially cut off, as Nonconformists, from the rest, deprived wholly or in part of the privileges of citizens, and therefore malcontent and disaffected. These politicians were in fact misled, in a great measure, by their passionate desire to produce perfect national unity, and their inability to understand that perfect national unity might exist notwithstanding diversities in religion. The complete identity of Church and State, of churchman and citizen, which they regarded and propounded as the ideal polity, they also fully expected to realise in fact. They more or less definitely looked upon Nonconformity as a transient malady, which would disappear in the end, provided

the rulers of the State persevered in the system of encouraging the Established Church and discouraging all others. Such was their expectation even with regard to Ireland, where their theory and the ecclesiastical law in which it was embodied were most signally and most obstinately confronted by adverse facts. What were their ideas as to the relations of the State Church of England to the other Churches of Christendom ; whether they expected that the whole Christian world would in the end be converted to the doctrines of the Thirty-nine Articles, the last revision of the Prayer Book, and the Homilies, or whether they were content that each Christian nation should continue to have its own national religion, and consequently its own national God, after the fashion of polytheistic antiquity, it would probably be difficult to determine. They were not men of high spiritual aspirations or of very ample vision in the spiritual sphere: and their chief aim was the complete subordination of the people to the purposes of the government, and the consolidation of a great and compact power. When a philosophical mind undertook to supply a religious basis to their political theories, the result was such as the concluding books of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity display.

It is now for statesmen to determine whether the experience of three centuries is not conclusive as to the vanity of these expectations: whether there remains any ground whatever for hoping that Nonconformity will cease, and that national unity will be brought about by the adherence of all citizens to the Anglican religion. In forming their opinion they will consider