disciples; but it falls a good deal short of one’s idea of what a British College of Health ought to be.  In England, where we hate public interference and love individual enterprise, we have a whole crop of places like the British College of Health; the grand name without the grand thing.  Unluckily, creditable to individual enterprise as they are, they tend to impair our taste by making us forget what more grandiose, noble, or beautiful character properly belongs to a public institution.  The same may be said of the religions of the future of Miss Cobbe and others.  Creditable, like the British College of Health, to the resources of their authors, they yet tend to make us forget what more grandiose, noble, or beautiful character properly belongs to religious constructions.  The historic religions, with all their faults, have had this; it certainly belongs to the religious sentiment, when it truly flowers, to have this; and we impoverish our spirit if we allow a religion of the future without it.  What then is the duty of criticism here?  To take the practical point of view, to applaud the liberal movement and all its works,—­its New Road religions of the future into the bargain,—­for their general utility’s sake?  By no means; but to be perpetually dissatisfied with these works, while they perpetually fall short of a high and perfect ideal.  For criticism, these are elementary laws; but they never can be popular, and in this country they have been very little followed, and one meets with immense obstacles in following them.  That is a reason for asserting them again and again.  Criticism must maintain its independence of the practical spirit and its aims.  Even with well-meant efforts of the practical spirit it must express dissatisfaction, if in the sphere of the ideal they seem impoverishing and limiting.  It must not hurry on to the goal because of its practical importance.  It must be patient, and know how to wait; and flexible, and know how to attach itself to things and how to withdraw from them.  It must be apt to study and praise elements that for the fulness of spiritual perfection are wanted, even though they belong to a power which in the practical sphere may be maleficent.  It must be apt to discern the spiritual shortcomings or illusions of powers that in the practical sphere may be beneficent.  And this without any notion of favoring or injuring, in the practical sphere, one power or the other; without any notion of playing off, in this sphere, one power against the other.  When one looks, for instance, at the English Divorce Court—­an institution which perhaps has its practical conveniences, but which in the ideal sphere is so hideous; an institution which neither makes divorce impossible nor makes it decent, which allows a man to get rid of his wife, or a wife of her husband, but makes them drag one another first, for the public edification, through a mire of unutterable infamy,—­when one looks at this charming institution, I say, with