CARTING AWAY THE RUBBISH.
Du Lords have signalized the week by two important steps. On Monday evening they agreed, without a division, to an address to the Crown, which will be the death-blow to the political services of the Church. On Thursday they yielded, at last, upon the Jewish question. It was time. There is something consolatory in seeing the ground thus becoming cleared for more positive ap- plications to our modern national and social life of the religious principle, which was only obscured and falsified by the facts, as they have stood up to the commencement of this year. The poli- tical services are a mere blot and deformity of the Liturgy. 'fie exclusion of the Jews was based on an identification of Christianity with chance legislative mechanism, that degraded it below the level of fetichism. It is significant of the moral movement of the times that men can hold by these dry bones of the past no longer. But are we Utopian in hoping that this uprooting of a tree whose trunk was withered into dust, is destined to be the precursor, at no distant date, of a new order of political-religious development deriving its force from, and acting in cordial concert with an age of free science, free adventure, free inquiry ? We shall cherish this belief, for we ace in various regions of the religions morld, using that phrase in a somewhat large sense, indications of such a growth and action. It is clear that this English nation has reached the point of free spiritual growth, at -which mere statu- tory applications of Christianity to political things are felt to be a falsehood, unworthy alike of the nation and the Church. It is clear that the nation is thoroughly possessed with the truth, than which none is more thoroughly Christian, that no form of dogma- tism should repeal the general law of humanity, or unloose that social bond which was the work of God long before the Christian era. It is clear, on the other hand, that the Church is, in the persons of its better members, and indeed of its large majority, be- coming ashamed of the help of the " secular arm," when that arm is made the substitute for her own glorious mission in winning souls, in purifying and exalting lives. We do not think that ;his awakening of both the State and the Church, will lead to what is called a separation of the two. On the contrary, we are strongly of opinion, that, with the fall of that theory of state exclusiveness, state tests, state perse- cutions of any kind, little and great, with which that union has in past ages been too much identified, will fall too that merely negative cry of a separation of Church and State. We are firmly convinced that this rebaptism of both Church and State in the sacred waters of freedom and justice, will eventuate in a new, a closer, a more vital union and relation between them than the world has yet seen. We sympathize with those who look back lovingly upon the past, with its organized theocracy, its social state, in which everything symbolized the union of earth and heaven. But we cannot join in any regrets for it, believing, as we do, that the future is destined hereafter to far brighter things, under the influence of free thought and free organization ; being, as it is, under the government of Him, of whom we are expressly told, that " He is light, and in Him is no darkness at all." We rejoice at the destruction of all these mere withered remnants of the past, which had no other function than that of stand- ing between the old things, which have passed away never more to return, and the new, of which the growth is more than above the ground. We rejoice that the mind of the Church is being freed from the slavish belief in the efficacy for human weal of those dead tests and statutes, which surely had not, like the preaching of the gospel, the promise of the perpetual presence of her Lord. We believe that, freed from that heavy and ignoble fetter of disbelief in her own power and work, she will learn more and more to apply the vast intellect, and the noble spirit of self-sacrifice, the temperate wis- dom, the practical instinct for which she is eminent, in dealing with the social spiritual problems of the present hour. Instead of being merely enthroned among principalities and powers, like a heathen pontifex, to watch the struggles of the gladiators in the arena of the every-day secular world, she will go down into its dust to mitigate the miseries, the sins, the crimes and follies of that fight. If she will scan with an intelligent eye the phe- nomena of the present time in this our England, she will see an immense uprising of intellectual desires throughout the length and breadth of the community. It depends upon the Church whether those intellectual desires shall, under her free, genial, sympathetic teaching, develop into spiritual desires, and definite religious growth. It is a homely and a simple comparison, but why may we not hope, in this great region of spiritual things, to see results analogous to what we have seen in fiscal and material legislation ? Excise-duties press upon the material industry of the people, and most curious has been the elastic rebound of in- ventiveness when the pressure of those duties has been lightened. Well, we are getting rid, by God's mercy, of our spiritual exoise, and we will hope, nay almost predict, that religious teachers and preachers will be for this all the more stimulated in their business of competing for souls and lives of men, and for the politics of nations, with " the world, the flesh, and the devil." For we have confidence in the adventurous temperament of our English race in this high argument of preaching and realizing in society the gospel, just as in all other departments of activity, when the hateful obstruction of mere privilege is taken off. And we believe that there is a deep and growing need for religious development in this country which must, in some shape or other, receive satisfaction. Bishops are beginning to be stirred with an unwonted life. Political society is decaying from its old types and awaiting new influences, new motives, new elements for its reconstruction. Great masses of the lower strata of society are upheaving, and claiming, not with the rioting that might be dis- persed, and which would be mere weakness, but with the steady and resistless force of natural growth, a share in political power. We would have the spiritual and social guides of the country remember, and act upon the truth, that all this movement, all this growth, all this transformation may be safety, health, righteousness, wealth, and peace, or danger, disease, crime, poverty, and strife. And this, according as they are or are not faithful and busy, in lifting up for us as the standard and guide of action, the worship and reverence which transmute, by a subtle alchemy, the dull dross of temporal life into the fine gold of the Kingdom of God.
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