It is allowed by the majority of the people that the State should teach the life of prudence, and schools are established under local School Boards to teach every child, so that he may earn his living. Further, it is allowed that the State should control the forces which, for good or evil, may rouse the people, and thus licensing boards are established to limit the sale of strong drink. The same principle is involved in an Established Church. If the State educates the citizens, and admits its responsibility for the formation of their characters, a line can hardly be drawn at a point which would exclude it from giving the people the means which are the best security for happiness and for morality. The principle of Establishment does not--as its opponents often think--assert that a sect has truth; it asserts that the nation has truth, or is seeking it. The truth abides in the best thought of the whole nation, and the Church is established to express that truth. The clergy have no special rights, they are servants appointed to do the will of the nation. Truth abides not in ‘the Church’ of the bishops and clergy nor in a book, it abides in the people. Once when it was proposed in the House of Commons to refer a matter of doctrine to the bishops, ‘No, by the faith I bear to God,’ said Mr. Wentworth, with the approval of the House, ‘we will pass nothing before we understand what it is, for that were to make you Popes.’ It is the people, therefore, which by its Parliament has settled, and may again settle, the limits of teaching and ritual. The clergy are its servants paid out of funds set apart for this special purpose. Lord Palmerston put it shortly when he said, ‘The property of the Church belongs to the State.’ The nation, in old language, is holy. The body of people called English is set apart for a special service, its laws are laws of God, its work is worship, and every one of its members owes a duty to God. The memory of such a fact was kept alive in Israel where every town’s meeting was a congregation, every parliament a solemn assembly, every law the Word of God, and every workman was inspired by the Spirit of God. The Jewish nation has been preserved in the Jewish Church. That the English nation is holy must also be kept alive. The nation, that is, must be a Church and its citizens organised for worship. ‘The spirit of nationality,’ says Burke, ‘is at once the bond and the safeguard of nations; it is something above laws and beyond thrones, the impalpable element, the inner life of states.’ In his own language Burke asserts the holiness of nations, and it is to protect this impalpable element that it becomes so important for nations to identify their secular and religious aspects, to be at once nations and churches with duties to men and to God.