The broad truth about our times from a spiritual point of view is--and it is a truth on which both Churchmen and Nonconformists may stand--that we have utterly outgrown the power of Establishment to help us, if it ever had any; and that the spiritual conversion and education of the community must be carried on by some higher method, or abandoned in despair. We are struggling out of the _pupa_ state of protection, when the ark of our religious estate was slung tenderly by a net-work of bands and ligatures to the government wall. Slowly, with sore effort and pain, as is the way with all these supreme acts of development, we are emerging into a higher, because freer and more spiritual stage of our religious life as a people. Anxiously and fearfully those who have been trained under the shadow of Protection watch the process. We Independents, who have been nursed in a freer school, look calmly on the pains and struggles: we have faith in the destiny of the fair, bright-winged creature which is being born. FOOTNOTES: [36] Wordsworth's 'Excursion.' [37] He must not be confounded with Thomas Goodwin, also an Independent, who was a member of the Assembly. [38] This was not, so to speak, Robinson's private word. It was the tradition of the Separatists. Greenwood writes from his prison to the same effect in Elizabeth's days. [39] The action of Nonconformity in reviving religious life, as in the Free Church of the Canton de Vaud, is a very instructive chapter of modern Continental ecclesiastical history. ART. VI.--_The Dialogues of Plato._ Translated into English, with Analyses and Introductions, by B. JOWETT, M.A., Master of Balliol College, Oxford and Regius Professor of Greek. Four vols. 8vo. Oxford, 1871.