It is the half-Christian clergy of every denomination that are the main
cause of the so-called failure of the Church of Christ. Thank God, it
has not failed so miserably as to succeed in the estimation or to the
satisfaction of any party in it.

But it was not merely in relation to forms of church government that the
heart of the pastor now in his old age began to widen. It is foolish to
say that after a certain age a man can not alter. That some men can
not--or will not, (God only can draw the line between those two _nots_)
I allow; but the cause is not age, and it is not universal. The man who
does not care and ceases to grow, becomes torpid, stiffens, is in a
sense dead; but he who has been growing all the time need never stop;
and where growth is, there is always capability of change: growth itself
is a succession of slow, melodious, ascending changes.

The very next Sunday after the visit of their deputation to him, the
church in Cow-lane asked their old minister to preach to them. Dorothy,
as a matter of course, went with her father, although, dearly as she
loved him, she would have much preferred hearing what the curate had to
say. The pastor's text was, _Ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin,
and have omitted the weightier matters of the law--judgment, mercy, and
faith_. In his sermon he enforced certain of the dogmas of a theology
which once expressed more truth "than falsehood, but now at least
_conveys_ more falsehood than truth, because of the changed conditions
of those who teach and those who hear it; for, even where his faith had
been vital enough to burst the verbally rigid, formal, and indeed
spiritually vulgar theology he had been taught, his intellect had not
been strong enough to cast off the husks. His expressions, assertions,
and arguments, tying up a bundle of mighty truth with cords taken from
the lumber-room and the ash-pit, grazed severely the tenderer nature of