strong objection to Church of England services. On the whole, Anglicanism is a vague and loose general expression of religious desires and aspirations, and so long as a man keeps carefully aloof from the sacerdotal section of that Church, he does not by attending its services do himself much harm, or commit himself to any rigid and exclusive view of the universe. Every one is aware that the Church of England is not a self-ruling association, but is only the religious side of the national institutions, and that its doctrines are open to eventual change and development. Its face is, I consider, turned in the right direction. I am indeed quite willing to support the established Church as the best barrier which present circumstances allow against the inroads of really dangerous superstition. But the Church of Rome is a wholly different matter. This Church makes the attempt to subjugate the free opinion to the control of an independent theocracy or spiritual power, centred at Rome, and restricting to the paths which it chooses to mark out the march of the human intellect. It is a real, distinct power, a rival and foe in every country to the State, which

does, or should, guide the education of each nation by the light of reason in its latest and highest stage of development. History, philosophy, economics, ethics, even natural science, are all taught by the Catholic Church, not with a view to truth, but to suit its own present interests or preconceived ideas fossilised in an earlier stage of intellectual evolution. The triumph of this Church—it is really almost too obvious a thing to write down-would mean the arrest of the course of development of the European races. The energy which might have made of them a magnificent tree, so to speak, would waste itself in contortion and disease. Artificial restrictions of natural growth always have the same results, whether the subject is a baby, a plant, a nation, or an intellectual or moral civilisation. Only in freedom, whether in political or religious matters, lies salvation; the work of government should merely consist in pruning away of excrescences, watering, manuring, or hoeing.

I thought that you and I were agreed at Oxford that, so far as regards the Christian religion, the deification of Jesus Christ was,

at best, but a personification, in an intense degree, of an ideal of moral goodness, and that when this moral goodness had infused itself into the life of the European races-in other words, when these races had accomplished a stage of moral evolution, the personification could be dispensed with by all-and could even now be dispensed with by the stronger and more advanced among us. How you, born as you were in the post-Darwin age, and educated in the Oxford, not of Pusey and Newman, but of men like Jowett, can have receded from this position, and joined the international association which of all others fights against it, passes my imagination to conceive. I can easily understand how people bred Roman Catholics can adhere more or less sincerely to their Church, out of inertia or family pride; I can understand women joining it, or weak men who never give themselves the labour of thought or have had no sound training. They are led by a kind of sexual emotion to seek spiritual satisfaction, or they are thrown into a condition of alarm about a future life and then offered refuge and shelter, or they wish to assert

themselves in the face of contradictory relatives, or they wish (this, I suspect, is very common) to arouse new interest in themselves among other people. But, unless you are changed indeed, I cannot believe that you could be influenced by any such motives, and thus I remain lost in wonder. It really would gratify my scientific curiosity if you would let me have some explanation of your step.

I should desire to preserve my friendship with you as much as possible. The difficulty is that you must have become so different a man from what you were, that I feel as if the once Bertram Bevor was dead, and that if we are to be friends I should have to make friendship over again with a new and probably less congenial person. Of course I am aware that every one is constantly changing in some degree of rapidity, and that therefore no relations between men can remain absolutely the same for a year together; but it makes an immense difference whether men develop on somewhat parallel lines in the same direction or upon lines in diametrically opposite directions. Two men may walk from Grantham towards London at

different rates of speed and be further apart after ten hours than they were after four, but they are not nearly so far apart as if one had walked towards York while the other walked towards London.-Yours sincerely,

COURTENAY BENSON.

The next letter, in an illiterate handwriting, differing by the whole scale of education from Mr. Courtenay Benson's intellectual characters, came from an old family servant, the second gardener at Denham Court :

SIR,

THROSTLE LODGE, DENHAM COURT, 39th April.

I humbly ask your pardon for a liberty which I take as an old servant of your family who was with you in your father's time when you were a boy, in writing to you about what we have heard here of your becoming a Roman Catholic. Sir, I had no education and I do not know much about these things, but so much is said against Roman Catholics that I