ITo THE Enrroa Or Tae " SPECTATOR.")
SM.—Churchfolk in the country, and especially perhaps in the North, seta great store on their ancient parish churches in a way that dwellers in cities and towns scarcely realize. Cut off, more or less, from cosmopolitan life, their venerable and holy fares, wherein for many generations their forbears have worshipped, afford not only, practically speaking, their only opportunities of Christian-social foregathering, but their weekly re-creation of body, soul, and spirit Hence they naturally deplore any movement that might possibly jeopardize this boon.
"Life and Liberty " is a right subtle slogan. It is surprising how a clever catchword captures the unwary and the loose- thinking, who do not altogether perceive the true trend of the movement, which on the surface would appear to be a call for life and liberty in the English breach of the Catholio Church, but is really an innocent-looking scheme to fetter laity and clergy alike in the mediaeval slavery of thought and action which the English people deliberately and advisedly burned down, ae being bedrockedly opposed to life and liberty, at the time of the Reformation.
English folk must be free, but were this sophistical movement to mature, the glorious heritage of our National Church would be reduced to a private sect, engineered and controlled by a vociferous and compact clique who ache to approximate the English Church to those principles of autocratic government on which the Latin Church 113 worked, and this method is absolutely foreign to the democratic spirit of the English Church. He is the free man wham the truth makes free, but this specious movement is a sinister scheme for bringing about disciplinary methods by hierarchical authority and priestly control. No matter bow innocuous this "Life and Liberty" movement may seem in form, it is certainly aimed at disinte- grating the comprehensive and tolerant character of the National Church, and surely it would be sheer madness at the present time, when a blessed sense of unity ie, happily, to the fore, to increase the divisions we all deplore. "Establishment and endowment are an incomparable instrument of spiritual service" is a statement distinctly as true as its phraseology is admirable, for it would be rank folly to throw aside these national advantages. In the Church of England there is ample life wherever the minister is a live and spiritually minded man and not a mechanically disposed seminarist. There is no pulpit in the world which has fuller liberty than that of the Church of England, with her open Bible, to preach the full and free Gospel of Jesus, the Christ. —I am, Sir, &c.,
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