WEST. Ah, true! I was analysing the composition of the Judicial Committee and the extent to which it represented the interests of the Church and you rejected the representative claims of the Archbishop of York. Well, if the prelates in the Court are too secularly-minded, you may, as I have said, redress the balance with clerical laymen. I have given you Lord Selborne already, and now let me remind you of the silver-tongued Lord Coleridge-a Chrysostom in the less precious metal. You would find plenty of clericalism in him surely?

WILB. Yes, he is not as destitute of religious instincts. as are some distinguished lawyers.

WEST. You are a master of ironical adjectives, Bishop; but I suppose I may take the first half of your sentence as serious. Lord Coleridge has the requisite amount of clericalism-how come by I know not; but I suppose he felt bound to take to it out of respect for his greatuncle's habit of stupefying himself with theology, as a variation upon opium. However there is Lord Coleridge— with his clericalism inherited or acquired. And now who else is there? let me see. No; I can think of no others— Lord Coleridge, I imagine, exhausts the list.

WILB. Completely, my lord. You need not pursue your inquiries further. The race of eminent lawyers who are also sound Churchmen is becoming extinct. As for lawyers who, without attaining eminence in their profession, are yet winning their way, by the political road, to the final Court of Appeal in ecclesiastical causes, what nowadays is to be expected from them? One shudders to think that some mere unforeseen accident of politics might raise that—how

shall I describe him?-that burly Erastian, Sir William Harcourt, to the woolsack?

WEST. Aha! I welcome the importation of that name into our colloquy.

WILB. Indeed! The name of Sir William Harcourt? WEST. No; of Erastian. Do you know, Bishop, I have been called an Erastian myself?

WILB. You distress rather than surprise me. The world is very censorious.

WEST. I do not fear its censures, but I confess I like to comprehend them. Your lordship will recollect Dr. Johnson's famous triumph in the fish market. Obscurity may lend such a sting to vituperation, as not even the most callous can endure. I have smarted under "Erastian" like the Billingsgate lady under the contumely of "nounsubstantive;" and have sought far more patiently for a definition. Am I right in believing that "Erastus" is simply the Græco-Latinised form of the name of Lieber, a German physician of the sixteenth century, who opposed the Calvinistic system of ecclesiastical discipline?

WILB. Yes; your lordship may so far trust the theological encyclopædia which you have been evidently studying.

WEST. I thank you for the assurance, Bishop, and forgive you the sneer. If theologians would only consult lawyers in the lawyer's art as readily as we consult them in theirs, it would be better for them, and worse, professionally speaking, for us. But I confess a desire to economise the time consumed in such researches. Does your lordship think that in order to form correct ideas

of the doctrine of Erastus, it would be absolutely necessary for me to study that series of Theses which he afterwards, I believe, collected into the treatise "De Excommunicatione"?

WILB. No; I think you may spare yourself so distasteful a labour. In the modern political usage of the word, Erastianism need not take long to define. It is the name of a system which is at once a usurpation and a despotism, an encroachment of Cæsar upon the kingdom of Christ, and the imposition of a heavier tax upon His people than the hardest of the Cæsars ever levied from a conquered race. It is Tiberius exacting the tribute money, only with the souls of the faithful for denarii.

WEST. Thanks, Bishop. I admire the rhetorical fervour of your analysis. But I have noticed that the definitions of Churchmen are often as animated as lay invectives. Meanwhile, however, though I now know that my enemies did not mean to compliment me in calling me an Erastian, I am afraid I know little more.

WILB. Perhaps it would be simplest to define an Erastian as one who would degrade the Church into a "Department of the State"-one who holds the State to be not only the creator and arbiter of the temporal rights of the Church, but to have supreme authority over her as regards her spiritual functions also.

WEST. Is that an Erastian, Bishop? "Par ma foi," as M. Jourdain says, "il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j'en susse rien." Why, my dear Bishop, that is simply the plain prose of the relations. between Church and State as talked by ninety-nine

Englishman out of every hundred, "sans qu'il s'en sussent rien." The man you meet in the omnibus has been an Erastian all his life without knowing it.

WILB. That is likely enough, my lord; but it is lamentable to find such ignorance in high places.

WEST. Enlighten it then, Bishop. Explain these things to the benighted master of Israel who sat so long on the judgment-seat, the victim, in a double sense, of judicial blindness. Delineate, I beg of you, this sharp boundary between the temporal rights and spiritual functions of the Church-this landmark which it is Erastianism to overstep. Is its recognition traceable in the suit instituted by one of your lordship's right reverend brethren against a certain Essayist and Reviewer, and carried on appeal to the Court of which I was an unworthy member? Was there no Erastianism in the conduct of a bishop who asked us to examine the defendant's doctrines for heresy, and to deprive him of his benefice as a heretic? Or was the only Erastianism ours for deciding against the episcopal promoter, and, as profane jesters described it, dismissing his formidable client "with costs"?

WILB. The tone of your questions is hardly seemly, Lord Westbury, but I will answer them. It is, doubtless, the function of the State to affirm, through its judges, the doctrines of the Church; but it is for the Church herself to define them.

WEST. Where and when has she done so independently of the State? In which of the transactions or documents of the Reformation was any such claim allowed? Did

the policy of Henry VIII. or of Elizabeth recognise it? Do even the Articles themselves assert it?

WILB. Unquestionably. "The Church," says the Twentieth Article, "hath power to decree rites or ceremonies, and authority in controversies of faith."

WEST. Where, then, does this authority reside? In Convocation? Take care, Bishop. It was once my painful duty to rebuke you for an attempted encroachment on the ecclesiastical authority of the Crown; and I am not clear as a lawyer that, even here, it might not be possible for you to expose yourself to the penalties of a premunire.

WILB. I wonder, I must say, at your lordship's recalling the memory of an altercation in which I was generally held to have had the best of it.

WEST. It would ill become me, Bishop, to dispute your account of the matter. You undoubtedly had the last word, and that is an advantage which even the House of Lords was able to appreciate.

WILB. Surely, Lord Westbury, my reply was more warmly applauded than your attack.

WEST. A reply generally is, unless the speaker is too angry to be articulate; but the reply of an indignant Bishop would, I make bold to say, receive encouragement from any assembly in the world. You must surely have noticed-at least if such scenes are ever witnessed by episcopal eyes-you must surely have noticed how the sympathies of the spectators gather round the ladycombatant in a street encounter between husband and wife. A Bishop at blows with a temporal peer, and still