We know the kind of man whom this system delights to honour. He was described for us five and thirty years ago by a master hand. 'Mistiness is the mother of wisdom. A man who can set down half a dozen general propositions which escape from destroying one another only by being diluted into truisms; who can hold the balance between opposites so skilfully as to do without fulcrum or beam; who never enunciates a truth without guarding himself against being supposed to exclude the contradictory,--who holds that scripture is the only authority, yet that the Church is to be deferred to, that faith only justifies, yet that it does not justify without works, that grace does not depend upon the sacraments, yet is not given without them, that bishops are a divine ordinance, yet that those who have them not are in the same religious condition as those who have,--this is your safe man and the hope of the Church; this is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to guide it through the channel of no meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No.'[4] The writer then thought that such a type could not endure, and that the Church must become more real. On the contrary, her reality is more phantom-like now than it was then. She is the sovereign pattern and exemplar of management, of the triumph of the political method in spiritual things, and of the subordination of ideas to the _status quo_. It is true that all other organised priesthoods are also bodies which move within formularies even more inelastic than those of the Establishment. But then they have not the same immense social power, nor the same temptations to make all sacrifices to preserve it. They affect the intellectual temper of large numbers of people, but the people whom they affect are not so strongly identified with the greater organs of the national life. The State Church is bound up in the minds of the most powerful classes with a given ordering of social arrangements, and the consequence of this is that the teachers of the Church have reflected back upon thorn a sense of responsibility for these arrangements, which obscures their spirituality, clogs their intellectual energy and mental openness, and turns them into a political army of obstruction to new ideas. They feel themselves to a certain extent discharged from the necessity of recognising the tremendous conflict in the region of belief that goes on around them, just as if they were purely civil administrators, concerned only with the maintenance of the present order. None of this is true of the private Churches. Their teachers and members regard belief as something wholly independent of the civil ordering of things. However little enlightened in some respects, however hostile to certain of the ideas by which it is sought to replace their own, they are at least representatives of the momentous principle of our individual responsibility for the truth of our opinions.