sort of Philistine than ours, and with the pressure and false ideal of our Barbarians taken away, but left all the more to himself and to have his full swing!  And as we have found that the strongest and most vital part of English Philistinism was the [xxxi] Puritan and Hebraising middle-class, and that its Hebraising keeps it from culture and totality, so it is notorious that the people of the United States issues from this class, and reproduces its tendencies,—­its narrow conception of man’s spiritual range and of his one thing needful.  From Maine to Florida, and back again, all America Hebraises.  Difficult as it is to speak of a people merely from what one reads, yet that, I think, one may, without much fear of contradiction say.  I mean, when, in the United States, any spiritual side in a man is wakened to activity, it is generally the religious side, and the religious side in a narrow way.  Social reformers go to Moses or St. Paul for their doctrines, and have no notion there is anywhere else to go to; earnest young men at schools and universities, instead of conceiving salvation as a harmonious perfection only to be won by unreservedly cultivating many sides in us, conceive of it in the old Puritan fashion, and fling themselves ardently upon it in the old, false ways of this fashion, which we know so well, and such as Mr. Hammond, the American revivalist, has lately, at Mr. Spurgeon’s Tabernacle, been refreshing our memory with.  Now, if America thus [xxxii] Hebraises more than either England or Germany, will any one deny that the absence of religious establishments has much to do with it?  We have seen how establishments tend to give us a sense of a historical life of the human spirit, outside and beyond our own fancies and feelings; how they thus tend to suggest new sides and sympathies in us to cultivate; how, further, by saving us from having to invent and fight for our own forms of religion, they give us leisure and calm to steady our view of religion itself,—­the most overpowering of objects, as it is the grandest,—­and to enlarge our first crude notions of the one thing needful.  But, in a serious people, where every one has to choose and strive for his own order and discipline of religion, the contention about these non-essentials occupies his mind, his first crude notions about the one thing needful do not get purged, and they invade the whole spiritual man in him, and then, making a solitude, they call it heavenly peace.

I remember a Nonconformist manufacturer, in a town of the Midland counties, telling me that when he first came there, some years ago, the place had no Dissenters; but he had opened an Independent [xxxiii] chapel in it, and now Church and Dissent were pretty equally divided, with sharp contests between them.  I said, that seemed a pity.  “A pity?” cried he; “not at all!  Only think of all the zeal and activity which the collision calls forth!” “Ah, but, my dear friend,” I answered, “only think of all the nonsense which you now