active or so well served by her members as she is at present.

At the same time, there are great forces of change ahead. Outside the
Anglican Church stands quite half the nation, gathered in the various
non-conformist bodies--Wesleyan, Congregational, Baptist, Presbyterian,
and so on. Between them and the Church exists a perpetual warfare,
partly of opinion, partly of social difference and jealousy. In every
village and small town this warfare exists. The non-conformist desires to
deprive the Church of her worldly and political privileges; the churchman
talks of the sin of schism, or draws up schemes of reunion which drop
still-born. Meanwhile, alike in the Church, in non-conformity, and in the
neutral world which owes formal allegiance to neither, vast movements of
thought have developed in the last hundred years, years as pregnant with
the germs of new life as the wonderful hundred years that followed the
birth of Christ. Whether the old bottles can be adjusted to the new wine,
whether further division or a new Christian unity is to emerge from the
strife of tongues, whether the ideas of modernism; rife in all forms of
Christianity, can be accommodated to the ancient practices and given a
share in the great material possessions of a State Church; how individual
lives are affected in the passionate struggle of spiritual faiths and
practical interests involved in such an attempt; how conscience may be
enriched by its success or sterilized by its failure; how the fight
itself, ably waged, may strengthen the spiritual elements, the power of
living and suffering in men and women--it is with such themes that this
story attempts to deal. Twenty-two years ago I tried a similar subject in
"Robert Elsmere." Since then the movement of ideas in religion and
philosophy has been increasingly rapid and fruitful. I am deeply
conscious how little I may be able to express it. But those who twenty
years ago welcomed the earlier book--and how can I ever forget its
reception in America!--may perhaps be drawn once again to some of the old