But now to evince the disinterestedness which culture, as I have said, teaches us.  We have seen the narrowness generated in Puritanism by its hole-and-corner organisation, and we propose to cure it by bringing Puritanism more into contact with the main current of national life.  Here we are fully at one with the Dean of Westminster; and, indeed, he and we were trained in the same school to mark the narrowness of Puritanism, and to wish to cure it.  But he and others would give to the present Anglican Establishment a character the most latitudinarian, as it is called, possible; availing themselves for this [xxxvi] purpose of the diversity of tendencies and doctrines which does undoubtedly exist already in the Anglican formularies; and they would say to the Puritans:  “Come all of you into this liberally conceived Anglican Establishment.”  But to say this is hardly, perhaps, to take sufficient account of the course of history, or of the strength of men’s feelings in what concerns religion, or of the gravity which may have come to attach itself to points of religious order and discipline merely.  When the Rev. Edward White talks of “sweeping away the whole complicated iniquity of Government Church patronage,” he uses language which has been forced upon him by his position, but which is, as we have seen, devoid of any real solidity.  But when he talks of the religious communities “which have for three hundred years contended for the power of the congregation in the management of their own affairs,” then he talks history; and his language has behind it, in my opinion, facts which make the latitudinarianism of our Broad Churchmen quite illusory.  Certainly, culture will never make us think it an essential of religion whether we have in our Church discipline “a popular authority of elders,” as Hooker calls [xxxvii] it, or whether we have Episcopal jurisdiction.  Certainly, Hooker himself did not think it an essential; for in the dedication of his Ecclesiastical Polity, speaking of these questions of Church discipline which gave occasion to his great work, he says they are “in truth, for the greatest part, such silly things, that very easiness doth make them hard to be disputed of in serious manner.”  Hooker’s great work against the impugners of the order and discipline of the Church of England was written (and this is too indistinctly seized by many who read it), not because Episcopalianism is essential, but because its impugners maintained that Presbyterianism is essential, and that Episcopalianism is sinful.  Neither the one nor the other is either essential or sinful, and much may be said on behalf of both.  But what is important to be remarked is that both were in the Church of England at the Reformation, and that Presbyterianism was only extruded gradually.  We have mentioned Hooker, and nothing better illustrates what has just been asserted than the following incident in Hooker’s own career, which every one has read, for it is related in Isaac Walton’s Life of Hooker, but of which, [xxxviii] probably, the significance has been fully grasped by not one-half of those who have read it.