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 duty to do something to pull together, if they meant to continue members of the same Church; and in another, they felt that there were certain things which ought to be done at the cost of a certain amount of mutual concession, so long as conscience was not violated. Naturally, the possibilities of joint action were limited to practical and political Churchmanship—any attempt at hasty doctrinal fusion would have risked opening out the ugly discrepancy as to the value of the Sacraments, which is the essence of the difference between High and Low. The old game of cross-purposes which Churchmen and ministers have been playing was also, in its way, conducive to the issue of a joint Church action, after the model of a company with limited liability. Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell had, some time since, stultified themselves in the eyes of most zealous Churchmen of either complexion, by the votes they gave in favour of the Church-rates Abolition Bill. But, in compensation for this blunder, Lord Palmerston held the proxies of the entire Evangelical party, in return for the concession of episcopal patronage which he had, a few years previously, made to them; while—still preserving their favours—he was filling the four primatial sees with men bearing the orthodox names of Longley, Thomson, Beresford, and Trench; and the dioceses of Gloucester and Ely with Professors Ellicott and Harold Browne. No doubt these appointments were subsequent to the rise of the new associations. But assuredly they helped to complete the entanglement. Churchmen felt that aide-toi was not a meaningless adage, when it had to do with the faith they were told to put in ministers. The Church Institution was the first shape which the experiment took, and the activity of that body soon galvanized the obsolete and obscure office of rural dean into a new line of usefulness, as convener and chairman of little social societies of joint clergy and laymen, periodically meeting to debate on topics of Church interest. Of course, in a system of such novel, not to say hasty introduction, based on so little of precedent, and so much less of positive authority, the amount of talk talked, in proportion to work done, was frequently excessive. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that these meetings have done considerable service of a protective kind, besides directing public attention to questions of progressive improvement, such as diocesan synods, more bishops, and so forth; and that, above all, they have made the people who attend them feel, that to belong to a Church is to have contracted obligations of an objective kind to a visible corporate body. Withal, the rural office has been worked very hard, and cynics might be tempted to say that at bottom a zealous Church Institutionist looked on a rural dean as the keystone of the