There is certainly a great difference between the Broad Church in America and the Broad Church in England; there are no Thirty-Nine Articles in this country; there is no National Church. The Broad Churchman here is still a Churchman, but the system is much more elastic and much more intellectual. The Church is to him also a divine institution, but not a final establishment; and it becomes divine by virtue of its helpfulness in imparting the divine life and its power of human service. The sacraments have become symbols, venerable from their antiquity, but more venerable from their use. The Broad Churchman is an orthodox believer, but he accepts only the simplest creeds, and he interprets them in accordance with the rational principles of thought, and with his fundamental conception of Christianity, holding not to the written letter, but to the real meaning of the Confession. This meaning is, he maintains, easily reconcilable with the idea that all revelation is made to a living mind,--whether that of a race or an individual,--and that the Bible is merely the record of it. No _book_, in his estimation, can be inspired. This, coupled with a belief in the unlimited progress of the natural conscience, brings the system within the category of modern arrangements. The idea that man is _developed_ into the divine life, not _converted_ to it, seems to be the heart of the system. The writings of F. D. Maurice are full of it. He said that he did not know what the Broad Church was, and disclaimed any position in it; yet he is its reputed father, and certainly held its cardinal doctrine. This was the soul of his teaching; this dictated his likes and his dislikes; this animated his dissent from the Evangelicals on the one hand and the Rationalists on the other; this made him cling to the "Articles"; this made him love the Church. I cannot better convey my notion of the Broad Churchman's credence than by quoting some passages from Maurice: I think that the _ground-work of this thought_ and this humanity _is laid bare_ in the Thirty-nine Articles; _that for that ground-work_ [namely, the living God, the living Word] all our different schools are trying to produce feeble and crumbling substitutes; that we must recur to it if we would pass the narrow dimensions of Calvinism, Anglicanism, Romanism; if we would learn what a message we have for Jews, Mahometans, Brahmins, Buddhists, for all the nations of the earth, as well as our poor people at home. I cannot doubt that this belief [the confession of a God, who was, and is, and is to come] is latent in every man now; that we are all living, moving, having our being in this God, and that He does reveal Himself to His creatures gradually, before He is revealed in His fulness of glory.