that the very example which they bring forward to help their case
makes against them; and that when they triumphantly show us America
without religious establishments, they only show us a whole nation
touched, amidst all its greatness and promise, with that
provincialism which it is our aim to extirpate in the English
Nonconformists.

But now to evince the disinterestedness which culture, as I have
said, teaches us. We have seen the narrowness generated in
Puritanism by its hole-and-corner organisation, and we propose to
cure it by bringing Puritanism more into contact with the main
current of national life. Here we are fully at one with the Dean of
Westminster; and, indeed, he and we were trained in the same school
to mark the narrowness of Puritanism, and to wish to cure it. But he
and others would give to the present Anglican Establishment a
character the most latitudinarian, as it is called, possible;
availing themselves for this [xxxvi] purpose of the diversity of
tendencies and doctrines which does undoubtedly exist already in the
Anglican formularies; and they would say to the Puritans: "Come all
of you into this liberally conceived Anglican Establishment." But to
say this is hardly, perhaps, to take sufficient account of the course
of history, or of the strength of men's feelings in what concerns
religion, or of the gravity which may have come to attach itself to
points of religious order and discipline merely. When the Rev.
Edward White talks of "sweeping away the whole complicated iniquity
of Government Church patronage," he uses language which has been
forced upon him by his position, but which is, as we have seen,
devoid of any real solidity. But when he talks of the religious
communities "which have for three hundred years contended for the
power of the congregation in the management of their own affairs,"