It is true that all other organised priesthoods are also bodies which move within formularies even more inelastic than those of the Establishment.  But then they have not the same immense social power, nor the same temptations to make all sacrifices to preserve it.  They affect the intellectual temper of large numbers of people, but the people whom they affect are not so strongly identified with the greater organs of the national life.  The State Church is bound up in the minds of the most powerful classes with a given ordering of social arrangements, and the consequence of this is that the teachers of the Church have reflected back upon thorn a sense of responsibility for these arrangements, which obscures their spirituality, clogs their intellectual energy and mental openness, and turns them into a political army of obstruction to new ideas.  They feel themselves to a certain extent discharged from the necessity of recognising the tremendous conflict in the region of belief that goes on around them, just as if they were purely civil administrators, concerned only with the maintenance of the present order.  None of this is true of the private Churches.  Their teachers and members regard belief as something wholly independent of the civil ordering of things.  However little enlightened in some respects, however hostile to certain of the ideas by which it is sought to replace their own, they are at least representatives of the momentous principle of our individual responsibility for the truth of our opinions.  They may bring their judgments to conclusions that are less in accord with modern tendencies than those of one or two schools that still see their way to subscribing Anglican articles and administering Anglican rites.  At any rate, they admit that the use of his judgment is a duty incumbent on the individual, and a duty to be discharged without reference to any external considerations whatever, political or otherwise.  This is an elevating, an exhilarating principle, however deficiencies of culture may have narrowed the sphere of its operations.  It is because a State Church is by its very conception hostile to such a principle, that we are justified in counting it apart from the private Churches with all their faults, and placing it among the agencies that weaken the vigour of a national conscience and check the free play and access of intellectual light.

Here we may leave the conditions that have made an inquiry as to some of the limits of compromise, which must always be an interesting and important subject, one of especial interest and importance to ourselves at present.  Is any renovation of the sacredness of principle a possible remedy for some of these elements of national deterioration?  They will not disappear until the world has grown into possession of a new doctrine.  When that comes, all other good things will follow.  What we have to remember is that the new doctrine itself will never come, except to spirits predisposed to their own liberation.  Our day of small calculations and petty utilities must first pass away; our vision of the true expediencies must reach further and deeper; our resolution to search for the highest verities, to give up all and follow them, must first become the supreme part of ourselves.