The Factory Acts, by their obvious necessity and their equally obvious indefensibility from the Liberal standpoint, knocked the bottom out of Liberalism and made a consistent Liberal philosophy impossible for the future. But only new and growing movements require a philosophy. When a movement has been going long enough to accumulate a fair number of catch-words and a collection of common likes and dislikes, it can make enormous use of these and even win great electoral triumphs on the strength of them long after they have become completely separated from the doctrines from which they originally sprang, and indeed long after these doctrines have become so obsolete as to be universally incredible. An almost exact parallel may be drawn between the recent history of Liberalism and the recent history of Nonconformity. English Nonconformity was founded on the doctrines of Calvin as English Liberalism was on those of Lock and Adam Smith. Where are the doctrines of Calvin now? I do not suppose there is one chapel in London--perhaps in England--where the doctrine of Reprobation is taught in all its infamous completeness. The ordinary London Nonconformist minister at any rate is the mildest and vaguest of theologians, and talks like the member of an Ethical Society about little but “Truth and Righteousness.” So far from preaching Calvinism with its iron and inflexible logic and its uncompromising cry of “Come out and be ye separate!” he is the first to tell you that the age of dogma is gone by and that modern religion must be “undenominational.” Yet, in spite of the complete disappearance of its intellectual basis, Dissent remains powerful enough to thwart the execution of great reforms and wreck the careers of great statesmen. And if you ask what (if not a common theology) holds the Nonconformists together and makes them so potent a force, the answer will be a common stock of prejudices--a prejudice against Catholic ritual, a prejudice against horse-racing, a prejudice against established churches, a prejudice against public houses and music halls, a prejudice in favour of Sunday observance. All these (except in the case of church establishment where the prejudice is the result of a political accident erected into a religious dogma) are natural consequences of the Calvinist theology, but in that theology the modern Dissenter does not believe. Nevertheless, the foundation gone, the prejudice remains, and may be found strong enough among other things to destroy the value of one of the most beneficent reforms which the last thirty years have seen.