And all this hesitancy, this tampering with conviction for fear of its consequences, this want of faithful dealing in the highest matters, is being intensified, aggravated, driven inwards like a fatal disorder toward the vital parts, by the existence of a State Church.  While thought stirs and knowledge extends, she remains fast moored by ancient formularies.  While the spirit of man expands in search after new light, and feels energetically for new truth, the spirit of the Church is eternally entombed within the four corners of acts of parliament.  Her ministers vow almost before they have crossed the threshold of manhood that they will search no more.  They virtually swear that they will to the end of their days believe what they believe then, before they have had time either to think or to know the thoughts of others.  They take oath, in other words, to lead mutilated lives.  If they cannot keep this solemn promise, they have at least every inducement that ordinary human motives can supply, to conceal their breach of it.  The same system which begins by making mental indolence a virtue and intellectual narrowness a part of sanctity, ends by putting a premium on something too like hypocrisy.  Consider the seriousness of fastening up in these bonds some thousands of the most instructed and intelligent classes in the country, the very men who would otherwise be best fitted from position and opportunities for aiding a little in the long, difficult, and plainly inevitable work of transforming opinion.  Consider the waste of intelligence, and what is assuredly not less grave, the positive dead-weight and thick obstruction, by which an official hierarchy so organised must paralyse mental independence in a community.

We know the kind of man whom this system delights to honour.  He was described for us five and thirty years ago by a master hand.  ’Mistiness is the mother of wisdom.  A man who can set down half a dozen general propositions which escape from destroying one another only by being diluted into truisms; who can hold the balance between opposites so skilfully as to do without fulcrum or beam; who never enunciates a truth without guarding himself against being supposed to exclude the contradictory,—­who holds that scripture is the only authority, yet that the Church is to be deferred to, that faith only justifies, yet that it does not justify without works, that grace does not depend upon the sacraments, yet is not given without them, that bishops are a divine ordinance, yet that those who have them not are in the same religious condition as those who have,—­this is your safe man and the hope of the Church; this is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to guide it through the channel of no meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No.’[4] The writer then thought that such a type could not endure, and that the Church must become more real.  On the contrary, her reality is more phantom-like now than it was then.  She is the sovereign pattern and exemplar of management, of the triumph of the political method in spiritual things, and of the subordination of ideas to the status quo.