It is, then, by a practical rather than a theoretic test that our Establishments of religion should be tried. In applying this practical test, we must be careful to do it with those allowances, which are as necessary for the reasoner in moral subjects, as it is for the reasoner in mechanics to allow for friction or for the resistance of the air. An Establishment that does its work in much, and has the hope and likelihood of doing it in more: an Establishment that has a broad and living way open to it, into the hearts of the people: an Establishment that can commend the services of the present by the recollections and traditions of a far-reaching past: an Establishment able to appeal to the active zeal of the greater portion of the people, and to the respect or scruples of almost the whole, whose children dwell chiefly on her actual living work and service, and whose adversaries, if she has them, are in the main content to believe that there will be a future for them and their opinions: such an Establishment should surely be maintained. But an Establishment that neither does, nor has her hope of doing, work, except for a few, and those few the portion of the community whose claim to public aid is the smallest of all: an Establishment severed from the mass of the people by an impassable gulph, and by a wall of brass: an Establishment whose good offices, could she offer them, would be intercepted by a long unbroken chain of painful and shameful recollections: an Establishment leaning for support upon the extraneous aid of a State, which becomes discredited with the people by the very act of lending it: such an Establishment will do well for its own sake, and for the sake of its creed, to divest itself, as soon as may be, of gauds and trappings, and to commence a new career, in which, renouncing at once the credit and the discredit of the civil sanction, it shall seek its strength from within, and put a fearless trust in the message that it bears. _September 22, 1868._ LONDON: PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, DUKE STREET, STAMFORD STREET, AND CHARING CROSS. * * * * * FOOTNOTES: [1] From a placard just published at Berwick. [2] 'The State in its Relations with the Church,' ch. ii., sect. 71, p. 73. Editions 1-3. [3] 'Edinburgh Review,' April, 1839, p. 235. [4] p. 252. [5] 'Mirror of Parliament,' Monday, July 30, 1838. The passage, which is full and clear, is more briefly given, but to the same effect, in 'Hansard,' vol. xliv. p. 817. [6] June 1, 1836. 'Hansard,' vol. xxxiii. p. 1317. [7] Hor. Ep. ii. 3. 31. [8] 'Speech on the Second Reading of the Maynooth College Bill,' 1845, p. 44. [9] _Ibid._, p. 33. [10] See 'Life of Archbishop Whately.' [11] The case of Sir R. Peel, in 1829, I do not consider an exception to this remark, as he gave back the charge into the hands of the electors. [12] Mr. Coleridge's speech at Exeter, August, 1868. From the 'Manchester Examiner' of August 22.