to?  It means an equal division of intellect!  It is mental agrarianism! a thing that never was and never will be until national and individual idiosyncrasies have ceased to exist.  The man of thirty-nine beliefs holds the man of one belief a pauper; he is not going to give up thirty-eight of them for the sake of fraternizing with the other in the temple which bears on its front, “Deo erexit Voltaire.”  A church is a garden, I have heard it said, and the illustration was neatly handled.  Yes, and there is no such thing as a broad garden.  It must be fenced in, and whatever is fenced in is narrow.  You cannot have arctic and tropical plants growing together in it, except by the forcing system, which is a mighty narrow piece of business.  You can’t make a village or a parish or a family think alike, yet you suppose that you can make a world pinch its beliefs or pad them to a single pattern!  Why, the very life of an ecclesiastical organization is a life of induction, a state of perpetually disturbed equilibrium kept up by another charged body in the neighborhood.  If the two bodies touch and share their respective charges, down goes the index of the electrometer!

Do you know that every man has a religious belief peculiar to himself?  Smith is always a Smithite.  He takes in exactly Smith’s-worth of knowledge, Smith’s-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity.  And Brown has from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to excommunicate him, to anonymous-article him, because he did not take in Brown’s-worth of knowledge, truth, beauty, divinity.  He cannot do it, any more than a pint-pot can hold a quart, or a quart-pot be filled by a pint.  Iron is essentially the same everywhere and always; but the sulphate of iron is never the same as the carbonate of iron.  Truth is invariable; but the Smithate of truth must always differ from the Brownate of truth.

The wider the intellect, the larger and simpler the expressions in which its knowledge is embodied.  The inferior race, the degraded and enslaved people, the small-minded individual, live in the details which to larger minds and more advanced tribes of men reduce themselves to axioms and laws.  As races and individual minds must always differ just as sulphates and carbonates do, I cannot see ground for expecting the Broad Church to be founded on any fusion of intellectual beliefs, which of course implies that those who hold the larger number of doctrines as essential shall come down to those who hold the smaller number.  These doctrines are to the negative aristocracy what the quarterings of their coats are to the positive orders of nobility.