come to take his place, and preach against dissent as I have so foolishly preached against the church—­then, and not until then, will the time be to gather together your savings and build yourselves a house to pray in.  Then, if I am alive, as I hope I shall not be, come, and I will aid your purpose liberally.  Do not mistake me; I believe as strongly as ever I did that the constitution of the Church of England is all wrong; that the arrogance and assumption of her priesthood is essentially opposed to the very idea of the kingdom of Heaven; that the Athanasian creed is unintelligible, and where intelligible, cruel; but where I find my Lord preached as only one who understands Him can preach Him, and as I never could preach Him, and never heard Him preached before, even faults great as those shall be to me as merest accidents.  Gentlemen, every thing is pure loss—­chapels and creeds and churches—­all is loss that comes between us and Christ—­individually, masterfully.  And of unchristian things one of the most unchristian is to dispute and separate in the name of Him whose one object was, and whose one victory will be unity.—­Gentlemen, if you should ever ask me to preach to you, I will do so with pleasure.”

They rose as one man, bade him an embarrassed good morning, and walked from the room, some with their heads thrown back, other hanging them forward in worshipful shame.  The former spread the rumor that the old minister had gone crazy, the latter began to go now and then to church.

I may here mention, as I shall have no other opportunity, that a new chapel was not built; that the young pastor soon left the old one; that the deacons declared themselves unable to pay the rent; that Mr. Drake took the place into his own hands, and preached there every Sunday evening, but went always in the morning to hear Mr. Wingfold.  There was kindly human work of many sorts done by them in concert, and each felt the other a true support.  When the pastor and the parson chanced to meet in some lowly cottage, it was never with embarrassment or apology, as if they served two masters, but always with hearty and glad greeting, and they always went away together.  I doubt if wickedness does half as much harm as sectarianism, whether it be the sectarianism of the church or of dissent, the sectarianism whose virtue is condescension, or the sectarianism whose vice is pride.  Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men, than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken.  It is the half-Christian clergy of every denomination that are the main cause of the so-called failure of the Church of Christ.  Thank God, it has not failed so miserably as to succeed in the estimation or to the satisfaction of any party in it.

But it was not merely in relation to forms of church government that the heart of the pastor now in his old age began to widen.  It is foolish to say that after a certain age a man can not alter.  That some men can not—­or will not, (God only can draw the line between those two nots) I allow; but the cause is not age, and it is not universal.  The man who does not care and ceases to grow, becomes torpid, stiffens, is in a sense dead; but he who has been growing all the time need never stop; and where growth is, there is always capability of change:  growth itself is a succession of slow, melodious, ascending changes.