A Nonconformist newspaper, it is true, reproaching the Church with what is, in our opinion, her greatest praise, namely, that on points of doctrinal theology she is 'a Church that does not know her own mind,' roundly asserts, as we have already mentioned, that 'no man in his senses can deny that the Church of England was meant to be a thoroughly Protestant and Evangelical, and it may be said Calvinistic Church.' But not only does the whole course of Church-history disprove such an assertion, and show that this is what the Puritans always wanted to make the Church, and what the Church would never be made, but we can disprove it, too, out of the mouths of the very Puritans themselves. At the Savoy Conference the Puritans urged that 'our first reformers out of their great wisdom did at that time (of the Reformation) so compose the Liturgy, as to win upon the Papists, and to draw them into their Church communion _by varying as little as they could from the Romish forms before in use_;' and this they alleged as their great plea for purging the Liturgy. And the Bishops resisted, and upheld the proceeding of the reformers as the essential policy of the Church of England; as indeed it was, and till this day has continued to be. No; the Church of England did not give her energies to inventing a new church-order for herself and fighting for it; to singling out two or three speculative dogmas as the essence of Christianity, and fighting for them. She set herself to carry forward, and as much as possible on the old lines, the old practical work and proper design of the Christian Church; and this is what left her mind comparatively open, as we have seen, for the admission of philosophy and criticism, as they slowly developed themselves outside the Church and filtered into her; an admission which confessedly proves just now of capital importance. This openness of mind the Puritans have not shared with the Church, and how _should_ they have shared it? They are founded on the negation of that idea of development which plays so important a part in the life of the Church; on the assumption that there is a divinely appointed church-order fixed once for all in the Bible, and that they have adopted it; that there is a doctrinal scheme of faith, justification, and imputed righteousness, which is the test of a standing or falling church and the essence of the gospel, and that they have extracted it. These are assumptions which, as they make union impossible, so also make growth impossible. The Church makes church-order a matter of ecclesiastical constitution, is founded on moral practice, and though she develops speculative dogma, does not allow that this or that dogma is the essence of Christianity.