Mr. Frederic Harrison gave a lecture on Tuesday in the
Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, on "The Practical Modes of Disestablishment," in which there were a good many very good words. He warned his hearers against permitting a kind of disestablishment which should " unawares convert the political ascendancy of a Parliamentary Church into the unlicensed ascendancy of a sacerdotal sect." It would be easy to disendow the Church " in such a way that all we took out of one of its pockets would be passed round and slipped into the other." "Now in that case," said Mr. Harrison, " the last state of that Church would be worse than the first, and we should be only getting rid of the spirit of Ascendancy, to find her house swept and garnished with the seven spirits, of Sacerdotalism, Exclu- siveness, Arrogance, Covetousness, Formalism, Oppression, and Luxury, entered in and dwelling there." Very effectively rounded indeed, but why did Mr. Harrison limit his accumulations of these nice words, which admitted of almost an indefinite number of additions quite as apposite, to seven, merely for the sake of availing himself of a familiar echo from a book which he regards as full of arrant superstition ? For our own parts, we fear very much that if the Christian faith is ever exorcised, the spirits which enter in and dwell in its place may be those of Windi- ness, Wordiness, Tentativeness, Ambiguity, Emotionalism, Un- reality, Grandiosity, &c., ad infinitum, which seem to have got such an extraordinary ascendancy over the minds of the most eloquent of the Negative school.
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