Certainly not. The Church of Rome, having been formerly the one State Church allied for many centuries with the monarchy and the aristocracy, has preserved in these days of nominal equality an almost unshaken social preponderance. Quite independently of the odium attached to Jews, which is as much a question of race as of religion, the Church of Rome has been able, in France, to produce a general impression that a gentleman must be a Roman Catholic, and that a Protestant, though he may follow his religion even more faithfully than most Catholics follow theirs, is not likely to be “_un homme du meilleur monde_.” [Sidenote: The Word “Protestant” in French and English.] If an English boy were told to translate “He is a Protestant” into French, he would probably write “Il est Protestant,” and the translation would be accepted as correct. It is technically but not socially accurate. The French word has a _nuance_ of social inferiority that the English fails to convey, and when used by a genuine French Catholic it implies in addition a _nuance_ of reprobation. Is there any English word that would carry these meanings with it? Certainly there is. The word “dissenter” carries them quite perfectly. [Sidenote: Mr. Voysey.] [Sidenote: Social Weakness of Law.] I remember that Mr. Voysey, the English freethinking clergyman, warned the dissenters some years ago against the idea, illusory according to him, that by disestablishing the Church of England they would attain to social equality. “You will do nothing of the kind,” he said, in substance if not in words; “Anglicanism will still be the fashionable religion, and you will be just as unfashionable and inferior as you are at present.” Nor is it probable that any mere legislative enactment would procure the abolition of the term “dissenter,” any more than of what is implied by it. [Sidenote: The Example of France.] France may afford to English nonconformists an excellent opportunity of comparing legal equality with that social inequality which the justice of the law is unfortunately impotent to redress. [Sidenote: Isolation of Protestants in France.] The French Protestants form a little world apart, which (except, perhaps, in the most Protestant districts, and they are of small extent) appears to be outside the current of the national life. Just as, in England, you may live in the upper classes for a lifetime without having once been inside a dissenter’s house, or seen a dissenter eat, so in France aristocratic people go from the cradle to the grave without having seen the inside of an “evangelical” home. I am not speaking of real religious bigotry, of that evil-spirited intolerance which hates the Protestant as a schismatic, and would revive the old horrible penalties against him if it could; I am speaking only of the mild modern objection to people who are under the ban of a social prejudice. [Sidenote: Disadvantage of belonging to the Inferior Sects.] [Sidenote: Dissenters in England.]