[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR, — I do not
wish to prolong a correspondence upon this topic, especially as I am about to leave England for a few weeks ; but I hope you will allow me to submit a few remarks upon the comments on my former letter which you have made in your article of July 26th.
It seems to me that you have rather put on one side the only point which I raised, and have brought forward others which I did not raise at all. My one point was, that any argu- ment which bases the obligations of the Church to the people, or the right of the State to deal with the property of the Church, on the assumption that the State endowed the Church, or made a compact with it, is a worthless argu- ment, because the assumption on which it rests is false. But I never questioned the right or power of the State to deal with the property of the Church. The State can, we all know, confiscate the property of any one (yours or mine, for instance) if it deems it desirable to do so for the benefit of the community at large. It can, e.g., take our houses for Government offices, or cut a slice out of our land to make a railway. The State suppressed and confiscated the possessions of the alien priories in the reign of Henry V.; of the monasteries in the reign of Henry VIII.; of the chantries in the reign of Edward VI.; and in our own day it has dis- established, and partially disendowed, the Irish Church, a measure which I, for one, have always defended as wise and just on the whole, although it was advocated by many on false grounds. In none of these instances was the property which the State confiscated derived from the State. In none of them was the State taking back what it had given. The property of these institutions was in no special sense national property. And, in like manner, the property of the Church of England is only national so far as all property whatever is national ; and therefore the State has not a greater right to deal with it than with property of any other kind. We must not allow people to be misled by the expression "National Church." That expression suggests probably to many minds the idea that the Church was at some time formally estab- lished and endowed by the nation, whereas in truth it only indicates the fact that the Church was once, what it has now ceased to be, co-extensive with the nation, and that, not having been disestablished, it still "represents," as Lord Selborne has expressed it, "in various public ways the religion of the
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