establishments tend to give us a sense of a historical life of the
human spirit, outside and beyond our own fancies and feelings; how
they thus tend to suggest new sides and sympathies in us to
cultivate; how, further, by saving us from having to invent and fight
for our own forms of religion, they give us leisure and calm to
steady our view of religion itself,--the most overpowering of
objects, as it is the grandest,--and to enlarge our first crude
notions of the one thing needful. But, in a serious people, where
every one has to choose and strive for his own order and discipline
of religion, the contention about these non-essentials occupies his
mind, his first crude notions about the one thing needful do not get
purged, and they invade the whole spiritual man in him, and then,
making a solitude, they call it heavenly peace.

I remember a Nonconformist manufacturer, in a town of the Midland
counties, telling me that when he first came there, some years ago,
the place had no Dissenters; but he had opened an Independent
[xxxiii] chapel in it, and now Church and Dissent were pretty equally
divided, with sharp contests between them. I said, that seemed a
pity. "A pity?" cried he; "not at all! Only think of all the zeal
and activity which the collision calls forth!" "Ah, but, my dear
friend," I answered, "only think of all the nonsense which you now
hold quite firmly, which you would never have held if you had not
been contradicting your adversary in it all these years!" The more
serious the people, and the more prominent the religious side in it,
the greater is the danger of this side, if set to choose out forms
for itself and fight for existence, swelling and spreading till it
swallows all other spiritual sides up, intercepts and absorbs all
nutriment which should have gone to them, and leaves Hebraism rampant
in us and Hellenism stamped out.