THE pungent episcopal criticisms and censures from which in times past we have gained so much amusement and profit have now become so lamentably rare that it is a real pleasure to discover one in the Lincoln Diocesan Magazine, a pleasure enhanced by the opportunity which it gives us of correcting Dr Hicks upon a point of fact. His lordship laments that the Life and Liberty Movement is finding it so hard to enlist the attention of Churchpeople. — “Apparently The Church Times, with its tendency to reaction and to mediævalism, represents the general mind, or drift, of the Church; and there is a real danger lest this agitation, in spite of its powerful advocacy and its undoubted claims, should fizzle out into nothing.” If Dr Hicks had spared time to read The Church Times before criticizing it, he would have become aware that in no other journal have the great meetings of the Life and Liberty Movement been so fully reported, although in days of narrowly restricted space; and that our leading articles on the Movement, though not blindly uncritical, have been invariably sympathetic with the chief aim of the Movement, that of recovering legislative freedom for the Church. If Dr Hicks has not recognized these facts at least the leaders of the Movement have, and we are content to accept their judgment. As to the “tendency to reaction and to mediævalism”, we are uncertain what Dr Hicks may have in mind. . .

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