6 JANUARY 1912, Page 36

forcibly and clearly. His conclusion is that the proposed spoliation

has " neither support nor sanction in history, law, reason, morality, or religion." Of course, if Congregationalists still assert, as their chief organ did within the memory of living men, that the proto- type of the Church is to be found in the Second Boast, then the sooner they do away with the unclean thing the better. As a matter of fact many of them acknowledge that it is doing a great work. Can they possibly be right in reducing its ministers to the grinding poverty to which they condemn their own pastors? (.£80 is their average income.) Can they possibly believe that Wales will bo better off with so many places of worship less and so many athenaeums and libraries more P What about their own endowments ? Those who strove for the abolition or Church rates acknowledged that their argument did not touch tithes. And if the Irish settlement which left the disestablished Church in possession of four-fifths of its property were right, how can the proposal to leave the Welsh Church one-thirteenth be defended P