This quotation may suffice, though many others, even from the biography of Lord George Bentinck, might have been offered. These ideas are perhaps best summarised in the Preface to _Lothair_. Disraeli really believed in the sacredness of the Syrian soil and air, the peculiar genius of the Semite for communion with God, as of the Hellene for communion with nature and origination of art; in the special religious revelation vouchsafed to Semites alone and consummated in Christianity, which he ever held was the fulfilment of Judaism. The dogma of the Atonement he received literally. It was a divine mystery enacted by a prince of Israel. Disraeli’s sense of mystery was, let me repeat, literal, and never explained through emblems. There was nothing of Gothic symbolism in his nature. From these convictions flowed his sanguine confidence in himself and his mission; in destiny, which he has himself said may be but the exertion of our own will. From these flowed his sympathy with the heroic, his turn for the adventurous; his disrelish, too, of modern rationalism, modern materialism,[96] and even of modern metaphysics.[97] From these flowed his faith in the revelations of conscience--“I worship in a Church where I believe God dwells, and dwells for my guidance and my good; my conscience;”[98] in a word, from these flowed his bias towards a natural Theocracy. But, as I have already said, he recognised that the English Church had alone, as the depository of these _racial_ ideas, attuned them to the _national_ refrain of England, embodied them in living Western flesh. Just as for him Government meant organised authority, and Party organised opinion, so the Church meant organised belief; nor did he ever cease to point out that if the national Church were disestablished, if that form of Protestant religion, resting on popular sympathies and popular privileges, which had grown with the growth of England and had leavened her life, her civil society, her public education, and even her pastimes, were divorced from the principle of authority, not only might the competition of sects cause a bigoted intolerance, but the State itself would certainly be the loser. I will choose another most pertinent passage from his speech on the Irish Church Bill, delivered in March, 1869. He had discussed “disendowment,” and he opposed it with all his might, as the plunder of the Church in English history had always gone into the coffers of the land, although it was a trust for the poor.