Enter the State Church, not of the Romanist, but the Protestant, where you are told you are made a child of God in baptism, where the cure of souls is sold in the market-place, and where the Bishop, or overseer of the Church, often is put into his high position because he is a relative of a lord, or is a firm supporter of the Minister of the day. There is no room for the anxious inquirer in a Church which rejoices in the Athanasian Creed, and which regards all Free-Church life as schism. With its pomp and wealth and power, with its well-paid clergy, in time past on the side of the rich against the poor, of abuse and privilege against the rights of the people and the progress of the nation, the Church has left the masses whom it was paid to teach and save little better than heathen. You ask, What has it to do with the religion of Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter’s son? What is it but an institution to give an air of respectability to life, to confer a prestige on the church-goer, and to lend an additional charm to a State ceremony? Is it not there emphatically that, as a rule—to which there are splendid exceptions— ‘The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed;’ that is, if they need something more than a musical performance or a conventional observance? ‘Do you mean to say,’ said the actress to a clergyman’s wife, ‘that you can follow the psalms of the day, and ask God to crush your enemies and make them perish for ever?’ ‘Oh,’ said the lady, ‘I always repeat them all. You know, one does not believe exactly all one says. All you have to do is to give a general assent.’ This was what the actress could not do. Her Bible was a constant difficulty. She could believe it was the Word of God, but not all of it. Its contradictions puzzled and perplexed her. Give it up, said her worldly friends. Be happy in Agnosticism. Leave off thinking about the hereafter and a God. Believe what you see and hear. Life is short; it has not too much of joy in it. Be happy while you may. In her distress she consulted a clergyman of the class more common now than they were then, who reject the term Protestant, and whose aim is the revival of what they call the Church Primitive and Apostolic. ‘You must be baptized,’ he said. ‘But I have been.’ ‘Where?’ ‘In a chapel.’ ‘A mere form,’ was the reply. ‘Our Church teaches that man is made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven, in and by holy baptism.’ ‘I cannot see that.’ ‘Then you are shut out, unless you are baptized, from the sacrament in which the body and blood of Christ are given to every one who receives the sacramental bread and wine.’ ‘How do you prove that?’ ‘Prove it: I don’t want to prove it. I fear you are in grievous error. Your duty and that of everyone is to obey the Book of God: a book not to be dealt with upon the same rules which are applicable to the works of man.’