The Bishop of Winchester believes in apostolical succession;--therefore there must be Dissenters. Mr. Liddon asserts the real presence;--therefore there must be Dissenters. Mr. Mackonochie is a ritualist;--therefore there must be Dissenters. But the Bishop of Winchester cannot, and does not, exclude from the ministry of the Church of England those who do not believe in apostolical succession; and surely not even that acute and accomplished personage is such a magician, that he can make a Puritan believe in apostolical succession merely by believing in it himself! In the same way, eloquent as is Mr. Liddon, and devoted as is Mr. Mackonochie, their gifts cannot yield them the art of so swaying a brother clergyman's spirit as to make him admit the real presence against his conviction, or practise ritualism against his will; and official, material control over him, or power of stipulating what he shall admit or practise, they have absolutely none. But can anything more tend to make the Church what the Puritans reproach it with being,--a mere lump of sacerdotalism and ritualism,--than if the Puritans, who are free to come into it with their disregard of sacerdotalism and ritualism and so to leaven it, refuse to come in, and leave it wholly to the sacerdotalists and ritualists? What can be harder upon the laity of the national Church, what so inconsiderate of the national good and advantage, as to leave us at the mercy of one single element in the Church, and deny us just the elements fit to mix with this element and to improve it? The current doctrines of apostolical succession and the real presence seem to us unsound and unedifying. To be sure, so does the current doctrine of imputed righteousness. For us, sacerdotalism and solifidianism stand both on the same footing; they are, both of them, erroneous human developments. But as in the ideas and practice of sacerdotalists or ritualists there is much which seems to us of value, and of great use to the Church, so, too, in the ideas and practice of Nonconformists there is very much which we value. To take points only that are beyond controversy: they have cultivated the gift of preaching much more than the clergy, and their union with the Church would renovate and immensely amend Church preaching. They would certainly bring with them, if they came back into the Church, some use of what they call _free prayer_; to which, if at present they give far too much place, it is yet to be regretted that the Church gives no place at all. Lastly, if the body of British Protestant Dissenters is in the main, as it undoubtedly is, the Church of the Philistines, nevertheless there could come nothing but health and strength from blending this body with the Establishment, of which the very weakness and danger is that it tends, as we have formerly said, to be an appendage to the Barbarians.