was brought upon the Church of England. It will not be found so easy to create a religious panic among English churchmen to-day as it was when Essays and Reviews ' shocked orthodox minds, or when Bishop Colenso's opinions on the Pentateuch were received with an explosion of resentment. The Bishop of Zanzibar represents a point of view which is Roman, not Anglican, and discloses a temper which is no longer normal among religious people.

If, therefore, the bishops, and not the law courts, are to be the judges of doctrine within the Anglican Communion, and to wield the truly formidable power of staking out the limits of religious thinking for the English clergy, it is essential that the Church should know in what character they propose to address themselves to the fulfilment of their awful duty. It is of little service to say shortly with the Bishop of Zanzibar that ‘if the student sees in the limits imposed by the Creeds 'the boundaries of accurate thinking upon God, let him go 'where he will, and say what he please,' for the creeds can have no greater authority than Scripture gives them, and are patently susceptible of various interpretations. One of the creeds, the so-called Athanasian Creed, the absence of which from the provisional agreement effected at Kikuyu moves the Bishop's indignation, is openly criticised as misleading, if not actually untrue, in some of its statements, and this not merely by irresponsible' heretics' but by eminent and respected Bishops. What the Church needs to be assured of is that serious arguments will be seriously met, that real difficulties will be honestly admitted, and that devout and competent students shall have such a measure of liberty as is properly indispensable for their invaluable work. Every Church must accept the risks of inadequate government; but no Protestant Church can accept the authority of a government which repudiates responsibility, and limits itself to enforcing the decisions of a past which neither possessed our knowledge nor was confronted by our problems. The one precedent of Christian history which never loses its relevance to ecclesiastical conditions is that of courageous innovation; the one warning of Christian history which may never wisely be forgotten is that conveyed by the reiterated failure of intolerance.

Dr. Hort has drawn from the record of the apostolic age conclusions which every successive age does but emphasise,

when he says that the lesson-book of the Ecclesia, and of ' every Ecclesia, is not a law but a history.' And that history, we may add, is not to be limited arbitrarily to the first four centuries, or to the first six, or to the Middle Ages, or to the post-Reformation epoch; but must be read as a continuing revelation, partly already on record, partly in the process of being recorded, partly still awaiting disclosure in the future. Bishops can only be accepted as competent judges and rulers if it be known that they are reverent and teachable disciples of history, as well as devout guardians of a tradition. What Lord Acton said of history generally, is specially true of history as the instrument of religious knowledge, and the discipline of religious judgment: 'History compels us to fasten on abiding issues, and rescues us from the temporary and 'transient.' The facile panics of orthodox theologians are as superfluous as they are discreditable. Time can be trusted to sift the opinions of men; the truth which is worth preserving does not need to be shielded from questioning, and made exempt from discussion.

'Modernism,' like every other human achievement, is a mingled thing, not wholly trustworthy, not wholly to be condemned. The proper business of the Church's leaders is not to stimulate heresy-hunts' against individuals, but to raise the standard of intellectual honesty and religious living in themselves first, and next in the society which they are appointed to rule. There are, of course, limits which no liberty which is something more than mere licence would seek to transgress, and which certainly no Christian Church could rightly permit to be transgressed. If the necessity of enforcing these should ever arise, the bishops could count on the willing support of all considering Churchmen in taking whatever action might seem to be necessary; but of these limits there is no question in the case of devout and candid students like the authors of 'Foundations.' They surely deserve episcopal encouragement rather than episcopal censure, for even if their specific theories be found unacceptable, they will have facilitated by their labours the very process of study and thought which will correct their errors. They are at least performing this great service to the Church: that they are preventing the breach between modern knowledge and traditional theology from growing too wide to be bridged, and proving to the most

suspicious that Christianity maintains its claim to embrace all truths. It is not their achievements that matter, but themselves and their efforts. For the rest, suppression of honest error by the action of authority has always in the past failed to serve the purpose for which it was undertaken; while it always lowers the level of sincerity within the Church. It is humiliating, indeed, that it should seem to have become necessary to insist on such a postulate of Protestantism in a Church which could once be proudly and justly described by her sons as the beauty and crown of the Reformation.'

While thus the interest of truth stands to lose by such a return to the discredited method of authority in handling opinion as the Bishop of Zanzibar insists upon, the interest of Christian unity is thereby nowise really served. If ever the Christian Society is to achieve again an effective measure of external unity, it can never be by returning to the merely political conception of the Church which was definitely abandoned at the Reformation, and has now through the advance of civilisation during the last four centuries become completely impracticable. Even if by some unimaginable miracle the Bishop of Zanzibar could realise his dream of a church governed divino jure by the Universal College of Catholic Bishops,' and including within itself by their voluntary surrender all the non-episcopal churches, such a church would not continue united for a year. Can it, indeed, be truly said that there ever has been an united church on earth? In the remote past when, as we vainly suppose, cheated by the deluding distance, there was an undivided church,' so frequent were the disputes, and so obstinate the separations, that devout men regarded with fear the assembling of bishops as the certain presage of strife, and were tempted to look upon the episcopate, less as the pledge of harmony, than as the make-bate of Christianity. Throughout the Middle Ages such unity as existed was only secured by an elaborate and ubiquitous system of coercion; and, within the sphere of the Reformation, the national churches could only secure the semblance of unity by that practice of persecution which was their damnosa hereditas from the medieval past.

In the modern world such coercion is inconceivable; and, at the same time, the quickening of human intelligence and the enlargement of human knowledge have increased enormously

the probability of intellectual revolt. The Bishop of Zanzibar and his friends are pursuing a phantom, which is also an anachronism, when they seek the unity of the Church by an effort to resuscitate from the tomb of Time ideas, methods, and ideals which have for ever perished. Whatever unity is attainable by Christians must represent, not a return to what has been and is no more, but an advance towards what never has been yet, and which when it comes will imply a more sensitive respect for the individual conscience, and a higher standard of intellectual attainment, as well as a more effective organisation of the forces of a common Christianity. After all, if we follow Dr. Johnson's counsel, and 'clear our minds ' of cant,' there is nothing necessarily inconsistent with Christian unity in a variety of ecclesiastical systems, and it may well be the case that such a variety matches best the needs of a humanity which is almost infinitely various in type and circumstance. What is religiously hurtful, and deeply inconsistent with the principles of the Gospel, is the strife, mutual belittlement, competition, over-lapping, political intrigue, and the like, which have transformed a situation, not essentially wrong, into the intolerable scandal which now shocks all truly pious men in all the Churches. Not a successful diplomacy is needed, but a new spirit, in order that 'our unhappy divisions' should cease. When that new spirit of fraternity burns in Christian minds, the practical questions, such as those which engaged the thought of the missionaries at Kikuyu, will receive satisfactory answers. It is because the Conference at Kikuyu expressed that new spirit, that it has been generally hailed in this country with warm approval. It is because, where the spirit of Fraternity thus manifestly prevails among Christian men, their united reception of the Holy Communion appears so congruous as to be inevitable, that the action of the Bishop of Mombasa in communicating with the representatives of the other churches, though nonepiscopal in their government, commands the general approbation of English churchmen.

H. HENSLEY HENSON.

THE POSITION AND PROSPECTS OF BRITISH

AGRICULTURE

I. Agriculture and Live Stock Returns. 1912. XLVII. Part I. Acreage and Live Stock Returns. Board of Agriculture. 1913. 2. The Agricultural Output of Great Britain. Report by the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries in connection with the Census of Production Act of 1906. Board of Agriculture. 1912.

3. English Farming Past and Present. By R. E. PROTHERO. Longmans, Green and Co. 1912.

4. A Pilgrimage of British Farming. By A. D. HALL. John Murray. 1913.

5. The Colonisation of Rural Britain. By JESSE COLLINGS. Rural World Publishing Co. 1914.

6. Report of the Departmental Committee appointed by the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries to enquire, . . into Agricultural Education. 1908.

7. Annual Report on the Distribution of Grants for Agricultural Education and Research. Board of Agriculture. 1914.

8. Third Report of the Development Commissioners. 1913.

To ofen back to his youth, the present public

O anyone of middle age, whose acquaintance with agri

interest in the land must afford considerable matter for wonderment, so complete and so widespread has been the shift of opinion. A generation ago the country was sinking into the trough of the wave of agricultural depression, prices were still falling and farms being thrown back on to the owners' hands. Royal Commissions sat and reported on the disasters that were overtaking farming, but Parliament and the people at large were quite apathetic. So far as there was a defined opinion it was sharp and clear cut, to the effect that agriculture had ceased to be more than a side issue in an industrial community such as Great Britain had become. The country was to become the playground for the towns, where the rich man could have his hunting and shooting,