And yet—­let us beware of that expression—­Parochial System.  It seems to imply that the parish is a mere system; an artificial arrangement of man’s invention.  Now that is just what the parish is not.  It is founded on local ties; and they are not a system, but a fact.  You do not assemble men into parishes:  you find them already assembled by fact, which is the will of God.  You take your stand upon the merest physical ground of their living next door to each other; their being likely to witness each other’s sayings and doings; to help each other and like each other, or to debauch each other and hate each other; upon the fact that their children play in the same street, and teach each other harm or good, thereby influencing generations yet unborn; upon the fact that if one takes cholera or fever, the man who lives next door is liable to take it too—­in short, on the broad fact that they are members of each other, for good or evil.  You take your stand on this physical ground of mere neighbourhood; and say—­This bond of neighbourhood is, after all, one of the most human—­yea, of the most Divine—­of all bonds.  Every man you meet is your brother, and must be, for good or evil:  you cannot live without him; you must help, or you must injure, each other.  And, therefore, you must choose whether you will be a horde of isolated barbarians—­your living in brick and mortar, instead of huts and tents, being a mere accident—­barbarians, I say, at continual war with each other:  or whether you will go on to become civilized men; that is, fellow-citizens, members of the same body, confessing and exercising duties to each other which are not self-chosen, not self-invented, but real; which encompass you whether you know them or not; laid on you by Almighty God, by the mere fact of your being men and women living in contact with each other.

Out of this great and true law arises the idea of a parish, a local self-government for many civil purposes, as well as ecclesiastical ones, under a priest who—­if he is to be considered as a little constitutional monarch—­has his powers limited carefully both by the supreme law, by his assessors the church-wardens, and by the democratic constitution of the parish—­influences which he is bound, both by law and by Christianity, to obey.

Arising, in the first place, from the fact that our forefathers colonized England in small separate families, each with its own jurisdiction and worship; our country parish churches being, to this day, often the sites of old heathen tribe-temples, and this very place, Notting-hill, being possibly a little colony of the Nottingas--the same tribe which gave their name to the great city of Nottingham; arising from this fact, and from the very ancient institution of frank-pledge between local neighbours, this parochial system, above all other English institutions, has helped to teach us how to govern, and therefore how to civilize, ourselves.  It was overlaid, all but extinguished, by the monastic