in bringing together opposite schools among members of the Church of England. Such societies as those for the benefit of poor livings in Oxford and other dioceses, are organized on a similar but less hazardous system of fusion, in reference to single methods of unpolemical usefulness. Larger and more complex schemes of practical improvement sometimes are and sometimes are not worked conjointly. There are those which are carried on upon the give-and-take principle; while, in other cases, each side has quietly dropped into a tacit understanding to work its own machinery with uncordial peacefulness. A large experiment has, however, been made in that city whose population reckons by millions, and whose area is a province, to introduce the system of friendly compromise into a complicated experiment of manifold aggressive energizing. The Bishop of London's Fund tumbled, there is no doubt, into bigness. Bishop Tait, with great good feeling, called a large select meeting of picked men rather early in 1862, to talk over the spiritual destitution of the metropolis. The men he brought together happened, at the moment, to be full of energy and full of suggestions, and before any one, Bishop or invited, very well knew where he was standing, they all found themselves pledged to a large promise of raising and distributing a grand sum. Since then, this Fund has gone on increasing and modifying itself—perhaps too much so—till, instead of a conduit pipe with a well perforated rose, it has become a species of tribunitiate for overhauling the spiritual concerns of all London north of the Thames. Hitherto, give-and-take have done their work, and, as outside critics, we are bound to note the Fund as a remarkable phenomenon.
In no diocese of England, since Exeter in 1851, has a Diocesan Synod been held; but the idea of the necessity of such institutions is steadily gaining ground, and any irregular gathering of Churchmen is a fresh argument in favour of their orderly revival. Only we trust that the Bishop who convokes the next will have duly weighed the various constitutions that he can give to the body, before endowing it with life. A synod of all the clergy of any diocese would probably be too unwieldy for cool deliberation, and so would sink into a machine for registering the Bishop's determinations. Again: the laity must somehow find their place in the synod, if the institution is intended to secure general acquiescence. How the laity had best be represented in it is a question far too wide for the present discussion. Our own idea is, that some method of representation by orders might be devised, which would be a break upon the more democratic plan of the mere representation of numbers or even of parishes.
From political and practical Church questions, we now pass
