The Princess Louise is to be married on the 21st
March, and the Guardian is in despair over a Lent festival. One of the most powerful arguments, it says, for an Established Church is the 4' indirect influence it exercises over that large area of society which lies between the inner circle of the devout and the multi- tude of the unattached outside the consecrated ground,"—and here is royalty exercising its influence in a sense opposite to that of the Church, so as to set this intermediate circle more free to take its own way ! This piety of the " intermediate circle," which is thus a resultant of the forces of Church opinion acting in one line of direction and of royal example in another, does not strike us as likely to be of a very impressive kind, even if the two forces were to coalesce.
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