generally, but in religion itself, the human spirit has manifested
its approaches to totality, and a full, harmonious perfection, and by
which it stimulates and helps forward the world's general perfection,
come, not from Nonconformists, but from men who either belong to
Establishments or have been trained in them. A Nonconformist
minister, the Rev. Edward White, who has lately written a temperate
and well-reasoned pamphlet against Church Establishments, says that
"the unendowed and unestablished communities of England exert full as
much moral and ennobling influence upon the conduct of statesmen as
that Church which is both established and endowed." That depends upon
what one means by moral and ennobling influence. The believer in
machinery may think that to get a Government to abolish Church-rates
or to legalise marriage with a deceased wife's sister is to exert a
moral and ennobling influence [xx] upon Government. But a lover of
perfection, who looks to inward ripeness for the true springs of
conduct, will surely think that as Shakspeare has done more for the
inward ripeness of our statesmen than Dr. Watts, and has, therefore,
done more to moralise and ennoble them, so an Establishment which has
produced Hooker, Barrow, Butler, has done more to moralise and
ennoble English statesmen and their conduct than communities which
have produced the Nonconformist divines. The fruitful men of English
Puritanism and Nonconformity are men who were trained within the pale
of the Establishment,--Milton, Baxter, Wesley. A generation or two
outside the Establishment, and Puritanism produces men of national
mark no more. With the same doctrine and discipline, men of national
mark are produced in Scotland; but in an Establishment. With the
same doctrine and discipline, men of national and even European mark
are produced in Germany, Switzerland, France; but in Establishments.
Only two religious disciplines seem exempted; or comparatively
exempted, from the operation of the law which seems to forbid the