Church cannot but exert a powerful pressure on the minds of its
individual members. It would need no ordinary rebellion of the will for
a thoughtless girl to shake her mind so free of that influence as to
live happily in the state of revolt. But where in addition to this the
Church is viewed as speaking in the name of God, and as so representing
Him on earth that her ban or blessing is inseparable from His, it is
obvious that such a belief in her claims will give her a power for good
over the unreligious majority analogous to that possessed by a parent
over an untrained child--a power, that is, of discipline and external
motive which serves to supplement or supply for the present defect of
internal motive.

Thus it is that the Church reckons among her obedient children thousands
of very imperfect and non-religious people for whom Protestantism can
find no place among the elect.

Again, the solid faith of men with so little intellectual or emotional
interest in religion as Squire Riversdale or Marmaduke Lemarchant is
something very puzzling to the Protestant critic who, for the reasons
just insisted on, can have nothing corresponding to it in his own
experience. It is a psychological state of which his own religious
system takes no account. Where there is no intermediating Church, the
soul is either in direct and mystical union with God or else wholly
estranged and indifferent. A man is either serious and religious-minded,
or he is nothing. Like an untutored child, if he is not naturally good,
there is no one to make him so. But when the Church is acknowledged as
our tutor under God, as empowered by Him to lead us to Him; a middle
condition is found of those who are not naturally disposed to religion,
and yet who are submissive to that divine authority whose office it is
to shape their souls to better sympathies. Riversdale is a far truer