(To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR-1
Sin,—Our points of view are not the same, but my instinct in con- troversy is to discover and emphasize first of all the broadest possible basis of agreement. On the main point it seems to me we differ less than you suppose. You urge that the Church of England is the nation on its spiritual aide, but yet you say that to belong to it a man must profess and call himself a Christian. But, alas ! there are in the nation some who do neither the one nor the other. There is a condition : those who do not fulfil it are excluded. The Church therefore is, so far, exclusive. That is all I suggested. We might not agree in formulating the condition, but as to the necessity of some condition apparently we do not differ. We must recognize two laws. First, intensity varies inversely with extension. The more bread, the less butter. All workers know the difficulty of associations overloaded with dead-heads, mere nominal members. That is the Bishop of Oxford's point. Secondly, energy of motion varies directly with the mass. An eight should row faster than a four. That is your point. But for energy the mass must be homo- geneous. An eight will not go faster than a four unless they pull together. And unless in the Church of England there is some unity of principle to secure that we pull the same way, and not different ways, there can be no effective energy. I see in one point I misunderstood Dr. Rashdall's letter, and have expressed to him my regret for doing so. I still think he read the Report with a suspicion and attributed to it a bias for which there is no real ground.—I am, Sir, &c., T. FIELD, D.D. S. Mary's, Nottingham.
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