Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/310

 fictions. Edward the Confessor had a wife, and the kingdom sorely wanted an heir to the crown; but the saintly character of the monarch could only be sustained by practical celibacy. Was this asceticism rational sanctity? Again, the salvation of some millions of unfortunate Swedes was made to turn on the sufficiency of the consecration of a particular bishop of the sixteenth century. Was this reasonable theology? Clearly the chaff of ritualism must be separated from the older and more solid grain of Anglicanism.

The tractarian movement was not, however, all loss to Mr. Freeman. It made him a profound student of architecture, and a clever sketcher of ecclesiastical buildings. In such matters he has often been consulted by the greatest authorities, among others by Sir Author:Gilbert Scott. His "History of Architecture" (1849), "An Essay on Window Tracery" (1850), and "The Architecture of Llandaff Cathedral" (1851), his earliest publications, are still works of acknowledged merit.

While I am dealing with church matters, I may as well note the progress which this enlightened churchman has made in respect of the question of disestablishment and disendowment. He heartily supported the abolition of the Irish establishment; and in 1874 he published a curiously tentative volume, in which he discussed the position of the English Church, arriving at the somewhat novel conclusion that the property of the national church is not national property. Its revenues, he argues, are in precisely the same position as those of Nonconformist communions. The sovereign power, however, being absolute, may appropriate whatever it has a mind. A neater little juggle with Austin's defini-