Page:The Conscience Clause (Oakley, 1866).djvu/67

55 some religious organisation will never cease to have pre-eminence, and to be in some way associated with the State, in this religiously-disposed and highly-cultivated country, I fully believe. My point is that any change may so easily be a change for the worse. The supremacy of the civil over the ecclesiastical organisation will never be relaxed. It is not relaxed in other countries, though very differently organised, both religiously and politically, from our own. The French Government asserts itself by forbidding the publication of Bishops' pastoral letters. The Italian Government will not nominate Bishops to please the Pope, nor pay the Bishops whom the Pope nominates. The Portuguese and Spanish Governments suppress convents and monasteries by the score, and sequestrate millions of Church property, and the latter Government imprisons a fanatical nun who exerts political influence. Even America talks of the secular arm for the suppression of Mormonite disorder, and will have to employ it. Nor will England, where "Freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent," forget her history, and consent to be baffled by the Church. Ecclesiastical supremacy is gone for ever. It is a question only of the extent and the mode of adapting Church organisation to this accomplished fact. One detail of this adaptation is under discussion in England now, in the shape of the Conscience Clause, and I agree with Archdeacon Denison that no small part of our ecclesiastical and religious future depends upon the Church's answer.

17. "Because the Church may not hope for a blessing upon expedients when brought into the place of principles; nor may allow any amount of real, much less of supposed, difficulties, to make her lose faith in her position or compromise her trust."

1. Let me take the less important points in this objection first. The "difficulties" are not "supposed" only, they are real. Correspondence has flowed into the Council Office, deputations have attended there, to complain of the hardship