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 the history of Christianity he sees the traces of God's working in the world: he feels the need of setting forth against unbelief the plain unvarnished story of the work which the Church, however hampered by faults or corruptions, has nevertheless been enabled to work in the world. He burns to show how the Church has, through strange vicissitudes, knit together European society in the past, and must be its bond in the future. How that bond can best be made firmer, how the organisation of the Church can best be fitted for its work, these are momentous questions on which the experience of the past may well be consulted with eagerness. The opinions, the organisations of all religious bodies, the successes attending on various manifestations of religious zeal, these are points which demand careful consideration. The relations between Church and State open up an endless field of inquiry and present a problem which has no logical solution, but which each age has solved in its own fashion, and which each age needs wisdom and moderation to solve aright.

On all these points and many more than these, Englishmen of to-day look with a singularly impartial spirit. It will be my aim in dealing with them to show no clerical or Anglican bias. Ecclesiastical history is common to all religious bodies, and the time is, I trust, past and gone when any man thinks that he can best defend his own opinions by blackening those who opposed them in the past. Our political life is vigorous enough to enable us to understand that ideas or systems prevail because they meet some pressing need. The essence of fruitful investigation