But in truth the 'yea' is with us rather than with our opponents. The Establishment is the natural home of the true 'Negative Theology.' 'The moderation of the Church of England' is the chief boast of her children--that is, of those who are most loyal to her principle of Establishment, and to whom the term Erastian conveys nothing of which they feel the slightest disposition to be ashamed. And it describes something which is very characteristic of her policy, and which fills a large place in the various 'Apologies' which several schools of Essayists have recently given to the world. Moreover, it seems to us to set forth something which must be maintained if the Established Church is to endure. Just in the measure in which Church parties feel themselves possessed by very positive convictions, and inspired by burning zeal, so the limits of the system grow irksome; while the strongest parties which have arisen within her communion, those with the most intense convictions and the most spiritual aims, have been driven to develope themselves outside her pale. At this moment the party in the Church which is the most strongly devoted to the Establishment principle is, theologically, the most colourless. The most solid argument, as it seems to us, which sustains the Establishment platform, would lead us to regard its ministers as a kind of Levitical order--the clerisy, as Coleridge has it--which would aim at little higher than a civilising, humanizing mission to the ignorant, the vicious, and the wretched in the land. God forbid that we should for a moment speak slightingly of such a service, rendered by such men as are now at the disposal of the State for this most blessed work. But it is no longer specially clerical work. The world is busy about it by a thousand agencies, which more than compete with the clerical; and it is hardly a question whether the world at large would be prepared to maintain a costly and highly-favoured order of men to do the work which in these days is the general charge of society. But the work of the Gospel, of which St. Paul strikes the key-note in the first chapters of his first Epistle to the Corinthians, is of a widely different order. The school of which we have spoken deals chiefly with the diffused light of Christianity which is abroad in the atmosphere of a Christian state; the preacher after the Pauline type (and the world cannot spare him yet) unveils the solar light and fire. The affirmative force, the penetrating, searching fire of Christianity, has from the first been mainly with the communities which have been unable to find room within the bosom of the moderation of the Church of England for their truth and for their zeal. The moderation paled the one and chilled the other, and drove them forth into a separation which seemed to them in those days as bitter and unnatural as the violent disruption of a Christian home, so strongly did the idea of the family life of a nation possess men's