Lord Ripon's conversion to the Roman Catholic faith was announced
formally last Saturday, and the English journals have since been employed in vying with each other in a helpless sort of lament over it. It is to be deplored mainly as illustrating the growing anarchy of the time in relation to faith, and as suggest- ing the wrong way out of it ; but as hi. John Lemoinne remarks, in a very clever article in Thursday's De bats, the boasted liberty of conscience which we so carefully guard in England is hardly illustrated by railing at a statesman who turns Roman Catholic, and telling him he has forfeited thereby for ever the confidence of the English people. "The truth is," infers M. Lemoinne, "that the English religion is a reli- gion purely national, local, territorial ; that when one abandons the Church of the country, one is excused of betraying the country itself. We have read somewhere that it is not Christianity which is the,religion of the Englishman, it is England. It is not the Gospel, it is Magna Charts. For him the mystery of the thrice Holy Trinity is naught but the equilibrium of the three powers,—Crown, Lords, and Commons. He is religious by patriotism. He respects all the national institutions, and the Established Church as one of them, like trial by jury, habeas corpus, horse-races, and portrait-painting." The sarcasm strikes home. Lord Ripon's crime is not his change of religion, but the new attraction which he is supposed to feel towards a centre which is not English. We wonder the Pall Mall Gazette has not remarked that it would be a very good thing if M. Lemoinne's description of the Englishman's religion were true, —on the ground that the worship of England and English insti- tutions is a great deal better than most forms of Christianity.
