Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/202

 cast-off progenitor at the Vatican, in placing the Church's authority above that of Scripture, and thus committing herself to an independent highway of her own?

If, then, the Church, with Scripture in one hand, and her Prayer-book in the other, must needs revise her position, might she not invite the whole Christian people to her help? While we still called ourselves the National Church, yet, from one cause and another, one-half of the nation, or more, was outside our pale. Here was a grand opportunity; and the large-minded primate of that day fully appreciated all its possibilities, when he made his memorable national appeal for the reconstruction of a national church upon the sole basis of Scripture. There was, to begin with, a frank acknowledgment, in the interests of historic truth, that the original "Episcopus" of the earlier church was not what time and society's developments had afterwards made him.

This national appeal was not made in vain. The tendency of the new movement was towards collecting all the steady religious elements into a great national church. If the old distinctive sects still survived, they were comparatively dwarfed in numerical membership and influence, resembling a narrow but varied border to the great central floor of society. These small but zealous bodies were ever attacking and denouncing the central mass; but even still more were they at eternal strife with each other. There was, as one remarkable feature, a large accession of the "Liberal Catholic" element, a section which had latterly been at increasing variance with the Ultramontane extremes of