For my part, so far as the best of the Nonconformist ministers are concerned, of whom I know something, I disbelieve Mr. Winterbotham's hideous confession. I imagine they are very little pleased with him for making it. I do not believe that they, at any rate, live in the ulcerated condition he describes, fretting with watchful jealousy. I believe they have other things to think of. But why? Because they are men of genius and character, who react against the harmful influences of the position in which they find themselves placed, and surmount its obvious dangers. But their genius and character might serve them still better if they were placed in a less trying position. And the rank and file of their ministers and people do yield to the influences of their position. Of these, Mr. Winterbotham's picture is perfectly true. They are more and more jealous for their separate organisation, pleased with the bustle and self-importance which its magnitude brings them, irritably alive to whatever reduces or effaces it; bent, in short, on affirming their ordinary selves. However much the chiefs may feel the truth of modern ideas, may grow moderate, may perceive the effects of religious separatism upon worship and doctrine, they will probably avail little or nothing; the head will be overpowered and out-clamoured by the tail. The Wesleyans, who used always to refuse to call themselves Dissenters, whose best men still shrink from the name, the Wesleyans, a wing of the Church, founded for godliness, the Wesleyans more and more, with their very growth as a separate denomination, feel the secular ambition of being great as a denomination, of being effaced by nobody, of giving contentment to this self-importance, of indulging this ordinary self; and I should not wonder if within twenty years they were keen political Dissenters. A triumph of Puritanism is abundantly possible; we have never denied it. What we, whose greatest care is neither for the Church nor for Puritanism, but for human perfection, what we labour to show is, that the triumph of Puritanism will be the triumph of our ordinary self, not the triumph of Christianity; and that the type of Hebraism it will establish is one in which neither general human perfection, nor yet Hebraism itself, can truly find their account.