Protestantism it is that has created him into this child and heir of liberty; Protestantism it is that has invested him with these unbounded privileges of private judgment, giving him in one moment the sublime powers of a Pope within his own conscience; but Protestantism it is that has introduced him to the most dreadful of responsibilities. I repeat that the twin maxims, the columns of Hercules through which Protestantism entered the great sea of human activities, were originally but two aspects of one law: to deny the Papal control over men's conscience being to affirm man's self-control, was, therefore, to affirm man's universal right to toleration, which again implied a corresponding _duty_ of toleration. Under this bi-fronted law, generated by Protestantism, but in its turn regulating Protestantism, _Phil._ undertakes to develope all the principles that belong to a Protestant church. The _seasonableness_ of such an investigation--its critical application to an evil now spreading like a fever through Europe--he perceives fully, and in the following terms he expresses this perception:-- 'That we stand on the brink of a great theological crisis, that the problem must soon be solved, how far orthodox Christianity is possible for those who are not behind their age in scholarship and science; this is a solemn fact, which may be ignored by the partisans of short-sighted bigotry, but which is felt by all, and confessed by most of those who are capable of appreciating its reality and importance. The deep Sibylline vaticinations of Coleridge's philosophical mind, the practical working of Arnold's religious sentimentalism, and the open acknowledgment of many divines who are living examples of the spirit of the age, have all, in different ways, foretold the advent of a Church of the Future.' This is from the preface, p. ix., where the phrase, _Church of the Future_, points to the Prussian minister's (Bunsen's) _Kirche der Zukunft;_ but in the body of the work, and not far from its close, (p. 114,) he recurs to this crisis, and more circumstantially.