TWO YEARS OF CHURCH PROGRESS.
It is two years since we gave a sketch of the growth and actual attitude of the Church cause and the Church party. In the interval which has elapsed, various Church questions have, more or less, shifted their ground, so it will not be unprofitable to review their present condition under the additional light of recent events. At that time the S. George's-in-the-East scandal was at its height, and the theatre-preachings had not arisen to stimulate the sated palate of religious emotionists; while 'Essays and Reviews' were still unpublished and unanticipated. The Convocation of York was not yet a deliberative body, and those frequent conglomerate meetings of clergy and laity combining the two sides of Church politics—never acknowledged, but always felt within them—which had grown out of the revival of regular synods and the decay of Church Unions, were new to their equally useful and diplomatic mission. Lord Ebury's raid on the Prayer-Book had not yet got into straits between the solid opposition of the ten thousand clergy and the hardly less damaging burlesque of his own offspring, on his own showing, yawning over the Good-Friday Collects. The House of Commons had not yet acted out that immortal series of Wednesdays which, in scattering right and left the various anti-Church projects of many liberal members, inflicted a grave repulse on the marriage-law amendment intrigue, snubbed the 'Liberation' aggression on churchyards and endowed schools, extinguished Mr. Locke King's attempts to introduce universal disorder, and placed the church-rate controversy in a position which has imposed its equitable compromise as a duty upon Churchmen, and branded the rejection by Dissenters of any fair proposition as an anti-social offence. The Education Commissioners' verdict was still an object of anxious speculation; and the new education minute had not yet exploded like a shell in the middle of our quiet village schools.
The chief vicissitudes in secular affairs which have checkered these twenty-four months, have been the union of Italy, minus Rome and Venice, under one sovereign, with constitutional institutions; in England, the formal abandonment by politicians of simulated zeal for parliamentary reform as an engine of political
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