If the Establishment principle, as some of its passionate advocates seem to imagine, is to be the permanent form of church life which is to supplant in Christendom the idea which the Roman Church enshrined, but marred and murdered in embodiment, then we say deliberately, Europe, in the long run, will have lost immensely by the Reformation; then the hope of the establishment of a Kingdom of Christ, in which the weary heart of humanity shall realize the fulfilment of the hope which poets and prophets have kept bright before the mind of the world, will be forever dead. The words Dissenter and Non-conformist are in one sense ugly words; and Protestant must be put in the same category. They define unhappily by negation, that which in its essential nature is strongly affirmative, that which has the spirit of the 'Everlasting Yea' in it as fully as any belief which has ever been formulated by or promulgated among men. It is most unfortunate that the creeds and principles which are most closely related to the political and industrial, as well as to the spiritual progress of mankind, have by accident, as it were, assumed this negative shape in their proclamation of themselves to the world. It is their aspect to their opponents which has become their definition; and this has affixed to them a kind of stigma which has acted most injuriously on their progress. We little realize how this negation has stood in our way. The 'Dis' or the 'Non' is the essential part of us in the estimation of a large number of Churchmen; while the Romanist still finds in the word Protestant a perpetual justification of his antipathy, and a mark for the shafts of his scorn. We have in all generations been regarded as a dissatisfied and dissident race; strong only in opposition, and living by envy and hatred of that which commands the support of the great majority of mankind. It has been believed, in fact, that we rather nurse our grievances, and make the most of them, lest if they were to cease, our _raison d'être_ would at once expire. We believe that this has been to a very large extent the popular notion of us among the members of the Establishment; and the main reason for the impression, were it probed, would be found to be the negation implied in our name. To this day the term Protestant is perhaps the gravest difficulty in the way of the spread of Evangelical ideas and of the Evangelical spirit among the Latin nations of the West.