operation for disestablishing the Irish Church by the power of the
Nonconformists' antipathy to religious establishments and endowments.
And we see Liberal statesmen, for whose purpose this antipathy
happens to be convenient, flattering it all they can; saying that
though they have no intention of laying hands on an Establishment
which is efficient and popular, like the Anglican Establishment here
in England, yet it is in the abstract a fine and good thing that
religion should [xviii] be left to the voluntary support of its
promoters, and should thus gain in energy and independence; and Mr.
Gladstone has no words strong enough to express his admiration of the
refusal of State-aid by the Irish Roman Catholics, who have never yet
been seriously asked to accept it, but who would a good deal
embarrass him if they demanded it. And we see philosophical
politicians, with a turn for swimming with the stream, like Mr.
Baxter or Mr. Charles Buxton, and philosophical divines with the same
turn, like the Dean of Canterbury, seeking to give a sort of grand
stamp of generality and solemnity to this antipathy of the
Nonconformists, and to dress it out as a law of human progress in the
future. Now, nothing can be pleasanter than swimming with the
stream; and we might gladly, if we could, try in our unsystematic way
to help Mr. Baxter, and Mr. Charles Buxton, and the Dean of
Canterbury, in their labours at once philosophical and popular. But
we have got fixed in our minds that a more full and harmonious
development of their humanity is what the Nonconformists most want,
that narrowness, one-sidedness, and incompleteness is what they most
suffer from; [xix] in a word, that in what we call provinciality they
abound, but in what we may call totality they fall short.

And they fall short more than the members of Establishments. The
great works by which, not only in literature, art, and science