And this separation is the reverse of isolation. 'In the world, not of the world,' is the Christian rule, and it is the very opposite of that of the ascetic. It is the glory of England that there is the freest opportunity for the play of the influence of the smaller communities, which are held together by some special sympathies and beliefs, on the great community at large. And now at last the nation, by opening the Universities, has allowed to these communities the fullest advantages for the culture of their own individual life. It appears to us, to sum up the argument, that the subjection of the free Christian spirit, which seeks and strives to gather light and inspiration continually in fellowships which rest on the word of truth and watch for the guidance of the Spirit, to the regimen of legal authority, just destroys that in it which makes it mordant to the lust and the selfishness of the world around it, that which has been kept in comparative purity through all these ages by being Nonconformist, and which will remain Nonconformist, or, at any rate--for when there is no Church there can be no Nonconformity--will remain free with the freedom which reigns where the Spirit of the Lord is, while the world endures. No doubt it is at first sight a fair vision, this inclusion of all decently orderly and decently Christian ministries in the land within one pale of order and law: one service, one liturgy, one recognised ministry, one administration of ordinances, throughout the whole country,--the whole people taught out of the same books, at the same time, and by men who have the same claim to their attention, until the nation, in the visible uniformity of its religious acts and expressions, presents a fair image of one visible Church. But it is a mere _mirage_, a mocking image, no more. The kind of spiritual order which would grow up under such conditions would be deathlike and not lifelike; and the visible uniformity could be maintained only by the strong repression of all that makes the life and progress of a Church.