system, during the latter part of the Middle Ages.  It re-asserted itself, in fuller vigour than ever, at the Reformation.  But with its benefits, its defects were restored likewise.  The tendency of the mediaeval Church had been to become merely a church for paupers.  The tendency of the Church of England during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, was to become merely a church for burghers.  It has been, of late, to become merely a church for paupers again.  The causes of this reaction are simple enough.  Population increased so rapidly that the old parish bounds were broken up; the old parish staff became too small for working purposes.  The Church had (and, alas! has still) to be again a missionary church, as she became in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when feudal violence had destroyed the self-government of the parishes—­often the parishes themselves—­ and filled the land with pauperism and barbarism.  But that is but a transitional state.  Her duty is now becoming more and more (and those who wish her well must help her to fulfil her duty) to reorganize the ancient parochial system on a deeper and sounder footing than ever; on a footing which will ensure her being a church, not merely for pauper, nor merely for burgher, but for pauper and for burgher equally and alike.

But some will say that parochial civilization is only a peculiar form of civilization, because its centre is a church.  Peculiar?  That is the last word which any one would apply to such a civilization, if he knows history.  Will any one mention any civilization, past or present, whose centre has not been (as long as it has been living and progressive) a church?  All past civilizations—­whether heathen or Mussulman, Jew or Christian—­have each and every one of them, as a fact, held that the common and local worship of a God was a sign to them of their common and local unity; a sign to them of their religion, that is, the duties which bound them to each other, whether they liked or not.  To all races and nations, as yet, their sacred grove, church, temple, or other place of worship, has been a sign to them that their unity and duties were not invented by themselves, but were the will and command of an unseen Being, who would reward or punish them according as they did those duties or left them undone.  So it has been in the civilizations of the past.  So it will be in the civilization of the future.  If the Christian religion were swept away—­as it never will be, for it is eternal—­and a civilization founded on what is called Nature put in its place, then we should see a worship of something called Nature, and a temple thereof, set up as the symbol of that Natural civilization.  So the Jacobins of France—­ when they tried to civilize France on the mere ground of what they called Reason—­had, whether they liked it or not, to instal a worship of Reason, and a goddess of Reason, for as long as they could contrive to last.