and well merits Sir Henry Wotton's rebuke:--"Take heed of thinking
that the farther you go from the Church of Rome, the nearer you are
to God." True, one of the best wishes one could form for Mr.
Spurgeon or Father Jackson is, that they might be permitted to learn
on this side the grave (for if they do not, a considerable surprise
is certainly reserved for them on the other) that Whitfield and
Wesley were not at all better than St. Francis, and that they
themselves are not at all better than Lacordaire. Yet, [l] in spite
of all this, so noble and divine a thing is religion, so respectable
is that earnestness which desires a prayer-book with one strain of
doctrine, so attaching is the order and discipline by which we are
used to have our religion conveyed, so many claims on our regard has
that popular form of church government for which Nonconformists
contend, so perfectly compatible is it with all progress towards
perfection, that culture would make us shy even to propose to
Nonconformists the acceptance of the Anglican prayer-book and the
episcopal order; and would be forward to wish them a prayer-book of
their own approving, and the church discipline to which they are
attached and accustomed. Only not at the price of Mialism; that is,
of a doctrine which leaves the Nonconformists in holes and corners,
out of contact with the main current of national life. One can lay
one's finger, indeed, on the line by which this doctrine has grown
up, and see how the essential part of Nonconformity is a popular
church-discipline analogous to that of the other reformed churches,
and how its voluntaryism is an accident. It contended for the
establishment of its own church-discipline as the only true [li] one;
and beaten in this contention, and seeing its rival established, it
came down to the more plausible proposal "to place all good men alike
in a condition of religious equality;" and this plan of proceeding,
originally taken as a mere second-best, became, by long sticking to