Nothing is more common than for people to confound the inward peace and satisfaction which follows the subduing of the obvious faults of our animality with what I may call absolute inward peace and satisfaction,—­ the peace and satisfaction which are reached as we draw near to complete spiritual perfection, and not merely to moral perfection, or rather to relative moral perfection.  No people in the world have done more and struggled more to attain this relative moral perfection than our English race has.  For no people in the world has the command to resist the devil, to overcome the wicked one, in the nearest and most obvious sense of those words, had such a pressing force and reality.  And we have had our reward, not only in the great worldly prosperity which our obedience to this command has brought us, but also, and far more, in great inward peace and satisfaction.  But to me few things are more pathetic than to see people, on the strength of the inward peace and satisfaction which their rudimentary efforts towards perfection have brought them, employ, concerning their incomplete perfection and the religious organizations within which they have found it, language which properly applies only to complete perfection, and is a far-off echo of the human soul’s prophecy of it.  Religion itself, I need hardly say, supplies them in abundance with this grand language.  And very freely do they use it; yet it is really the severest possible criticism of such an incomplete perfection as alone we have yet reached through our religious organizations.

The impulse of the English race towards moral development and self-conquest has nowhere so powerfully manifested itself as in Puritanism.  Nowhere has Puritanism found so adequate an expression as in the religious organization of the Independents.[402] The modern Independents have a newspaper, the Nonnconformist, written with great sincerity and ability.  The motto, the standard, the profession of faith which this organ of theirs carries aloft, is:  “The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion."[403] There is sweetness and light, and an ideal of complete harmonious human perfection!  One need not go to culture and poetry to find language to judge it.  Religion, with its instinct for perfection, supplies language to judge it, language, too, which is in our mouths every day.  “Finally, be of one mind, united in feeling,"[404] says St. Peter.  There is an ideal which judges the Puritan ideal:  “The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion!” And religious organizations like this are what people believe in, rest in, would give their lives for!  Such, I say, is the wonderful virtue of even the beginnings of perfection, of having conquered even the plain faults of our animality, that the religious organization which has helped us to do it can seem to us something precious, salutary, and to be propagated, even when it wears such a brand