In general, I believe controversy is but of little use, and has little religious effect. In every age it has taken but a small part in the triumph of great moral truths. They establish themselves, especially at their first appearing, by direct and dogmatic exposition. We have in the gospels the most remarkable and august example. From their earliest day, neither motive or occasion of controversy was wanting with Jew or pagan. Yet we scarcely meet with it in the preaching either of Jesus Christ or of the apostles. They lay down their rule of faith, their precepts; they knock without ceasing at the doors of the hearts which they desire to enter. They do not trouble themselves to argue with their adversaries. Controversy arises later, and when it does, it soon disfigures the truth, for it distributes it in fragments among parties, sects, men; and each holds fast, with the intractable blindness of self-love, to the fragment which has fallen to his lot, in which he wishes to see, and that others should see, truth in her entirety. {101} Let them keep clear of controversy; let them attend little to each other, much to themselves and their task. Catholicism and Protestantism will then dwell peaceably, not only within its new state, but together. I know that this peace will not be that spiritual unity which has been so talked of. Spiritual unity, beautiful in itself, is in this world chimerical; and from chimerical it becomes tyrannical. As finite and free beings, that is to say, incomplete and fallible, unity escapes us, and we constantly miss it. Harmony in liberty is the only unity to which men here below can pretend. Or, rather, it is for them the best, the only mode of elevation towards that true unity which all violence, all constraint,--that is, every invasion of spiritual by material order,--throws back and obscures, under the pretext of attaining it. Harmony in liberty is the spirit of Christianity. It is charity united with zeal. It is also the object of philosophy, for it is the true, the moral sense of the principle of toleration and equal protection of the rites of worship; a principle which impiety has violated by trying to set it up as the standard of indifference and contempt for religion, but which allies itself wondrously with zeal and faith, for on _their_ right it is itself founded. The alliance must be ratified. I say _must_ in concluding, as I did when beginning. Peace between religious creeds is now imposed on all alike by our social condition. Harmony in liberty is their legal condition, their charter. Let them yield to it in spirit as in act; let them love it while obeying it. I fear not the fate of a false prophet, when I predict that religion will be thereby as great a gainer as society. {102}