unchristian custom. This is how Sir Walter Scott describes it in his preface letter to The Death of the Laird's Jock in August 1831. Bernard Gilpin, the apostle of the north, the first who undertook to preach the Protestant doctrines to the Border dalesmen, was surprised, on entering one of their churches, to see a gauntlet or mail-glove hanging above the altar. Upon enquiring the meaning of a symbol so indecorous being displayed in that sacred place, he was informed by the clerk that the glove was that of a famous swordsman, who hung it there as an emblem of a general challenge and gage of battle, to any who should dare to take the fatal token down. Reach it to me, said the reverend churchman. The clerk and sexton equally declined the perilous office, and the good Bernard Gilpin was obliged to remove the glove with his own hands, desiring those who were present to inform the champion that he, and no other, had possessed himself of the gage of defiance. But the champion was as much ashamed to face Bernard Gilpin as the officials of the church had been to displace his pledge of combat. Gladstone's Tribute His theological position was not in accord with any of the religious parties of his age. William Ewart Gladstone thought that the catholicity of the Anglican Church was better exemplified in his career than in those of more prominent ecclesiastics. In a letter addressed to me in 1888, Mr. Gladstone, whom I had asked in what sense he understood the existence of a spiritual continuity between the ancient Catholic Church and the existing Church of England, replied, In the Elizabethan interval, and before Anglicanism had a recognised existence as a form of thought, I should look for the spiritual continuity in men like Bernard Gilpin, as, before the Reformation, mainly in men like Colet. Although this hardly involves continuity in the sense in which the question was asked, the conjunction of these two names strikes me as particularly happy : for, while both of them were Catholic priests by ordination, neither of them could he described as Roman in their sympathies; indeed, it would be truer to say of both that their tone of mind, as ecclesiastics and as educationists, was more what would now he reckoned as Anglican. And the name of Bernard Gilpin suggests the lines on which a