comes to mistake for essential, and a thousand times the more readily
because he has chosen it of himself; and religious activity he
fancies to consist in battling for it. All this leaves him little
leisure or inclination for culture; to which, besides, he has no
great institutions not of his own making, like the Universities
connected with the national Establishment, to invite him; but only
such institutions as, like the order and discipline of his religion,
he may have invented for himself, and invented under the sway of the
narrow and tyrannous notions of religion fostered in him as we have
seen. Thus, while a national Establishment of religion favours
totality, hole-and-corner forms of religion (to use an expressive
popular word) inevitably favour provincialism.

But the Nonconformists, and many of our Liberal friends along with
them, have a plausible plan for getting rid of this provincialism,
if, as they can hardly quite deny, it exists. "Let us all be in the
same boat," they cry; "open the Universities to everybody, and let
there be no establishment of [xxv] religion at all!" Open the
Universities by all means; but, as to the second point about
establishment, let us sift the proposal a little. It does seem at
first a little like that proposal of the fox, who had lost his own
tail, to put all the other foxes in the same boat by a general
cutting off of tails; and we know that moralists have decided that
the right course here was, not to adopt this plausible suggestion,
and cut off tails all round, but rather that the other foxes should
keep their tails, and that the fox without a tail should get one.
And so we might be inclined to urge that, to cure the evil of the
Nonconformists' provincialism, the right way can hardly be to
provincialise us all round.