on which they believe that a man, rather than be untrue to his own convictions, should be prepared to die. It appears to us that this growing freedom in the Church, the fact of which we gladly recognise, is revealing, by the new decisions which it is constantly challenging, the miserably narrow and uncertain basis on which this boasted culture and liberty rest. What progress the advance of society compels Church teachers to make is made in violation of the fundamental pact on which the community rests; and it seems to be inevitable that sooner or later this fact will become so glaring, that the attempt to maintain the articles of religion in face of the opinion of Churchmen will be abandoned in very shame. So much the better, many broad Churchmen will say. The articles are the skeleton of a dead theology, it would be well if it were buried out of sight. Not so, say Sir R. Palmer and the great body of zealous Churchmen whom he represents so ably. And of the rest--the synagogue of the Libertines, we might call them--we may surely say that a Church in which all sorts of opinions are endowed and invested with such sanction and influence as a State establishment can impart, would become in time more like a synagogue of Satan than a Church. We contend, then, strenuously for an _honest_ liberty of thought, bounded only by the broad limits of Scripture and the teachings of the Holy Ghost; and we hold that it is only possible to realize it under our independent conditions. The attempt to square the free movements of the Christian mind of the community with the legal construction of ancient Church documents must grow increasingly impracticable, and in the end hateful to all upright, earnest, truth-loving souls. But it is not as the minister to the intellectual progress of the community, though the progress of an age is never secure until it is keyed by its theology, that the genius of Nonconformity has rendered the most conspicuous service to the world. Its great mission in all ages has been to care for the purity and intensity of the spiritual life of society. Power to live in holier, closer fellowship as Christians, to make the Church more like what Christ meant it to be, and through the Church the world, has been the one thing which Nonconformists have striven to secure by separation, and to cherish for the help and salvation of mankind. They have done much for the light of divine truth; they have done more for the life of God in society. It may be said of them with a truth of which Lucretius little dreamed, noble dreamer as he was-- 'Et quasi cursores vitäi lampada tradunt.' And to estimate this fairly we must turn again to the past, to the _fons et origo_ of our power.