ABSTRACT
Mr. Gladstone throughout his long leadership of the Liberal party, has shown, on all matters of Church reform, not the spirit of a Liberal and a reformer, but that of a favourer of clericalist pretensions. The ecclesiastical side of Tait's trust in England's Christianity was his attempt to make the Church of England think of itself primarily as a national institution. In contrast to Huxley and Arnold on the one hand and to Wood and the ECU on the other, Archbishop Tait advocated modest reform, not revolution, to make his Church more effectively national. Archbishop Tait was annoyed, all the more because other legislation upon which he claimed that the Church and in particular Convocation was agreed had not been enacted. He wrote privately to Gladstone stressing the need to pass the proposed lectionary, and publicly to the bishop of London in an attempt to elicit a still wider expression of Church opinion.
