But those who speak in the Puritans' name say that we charge upon Puritanism, as a sectarian peculiarity, doctrine which is not only the inevitable result of an honest interpretation of the writings of St. Paul, but which is, besides, the creed held in common by Puritans and by all the churches in Christendom, with one insignificant exception. Nay, they even declare 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.' To saddle Puritanism in special with the doctrines we have called Puritan is, they say, a piece of unfairness which has its motive in mere ill-will to Puritanism, a device which can injure nobody but its author. Now, we have tried to show that the Puritans are quite wrong in imagining their doctrine to be the inevitable result of an honest interpretation of St. Paul's writings. That they are wrong we think is certain; but so far are we from being moved, in anything that we do or say in this matter, by ill-will to Puritanism and the Puritans, that it is, on the contrary, just because of our hearty respect for them, and from our strong sense of their value, that we speak as we do. Certainly we consider them to be in the main, at present, an obstacle to progress and to true civilisation. But this is because their worth is, in our opinion, such that not only must one for their own sakes wish to see it turned to more advantage, but others, from whom they are now separated, would greatly gain by conjunction with them, and our whole collective force of growth and progress be thereby immeasurably increased. In short, our one feeling when we regard them, is a feeling, not of ill-will, but of regret at waste of power; our one desire is a desire of comprehension. But the waste of power must continue, and the comprehension is impossible, so long as Puritanism imagines itself to possess, in its two or three signal doctrines, what it calls _the gospel_; so long as it constitutes itself separately on the plea of setting forth purely _the gospel_, which it thus imagines itself to have seized; so long as it judges others as not holding _the gospel_, or as holding additions to it and variations from it. This fatal self-righteousness, grounded on a false conceit of knowledge, makes comprehension impossible; because it takes for granted the possession of the truth, and the power of deciding how others violate it; and this is a position of superiority, and suits conquest rather than comprehension.