The practical outcome of this great Protestant movement, in the midst of which we live, cannot fail to a reasonable eye to appear in the highest degree satisfactory. Never was the life of the Christian Church at once more intensely earnest and more expansively distributive than at the present moment. On the one hand, the Roman Church, wisely taught by the experience of the past, though obstinately cleaving to that stout conservatism of doctrine and ritual inherent in the very bones of all sacerdotal religions, has been, in the main, studious to avoid those causes of offence from which the great rupture proceeded. On the other hand, the Protestant Churches, shaken free from the distracting influence of sacerdotal assumption and secular ambition, have found themselves in a condition to permeate all classes of society with a moral virtue, of whose regenerative action Plato and Socrates, in their best hours, could not have dreamed. Some people, while gladly admitting the immense amount of social good that is done by the various sections of the Protestant Church, never cease to sigh for a lost ecclesiastical unity, and to lament the unseemly strifes that arise among those that should be possessed by one spirit and strive together for a common end. But the persons who speak thus are either sentimental weaklings, being Protestants, or are Romanists and sacerdotalists in their heart. Variety is the law of nature in the moral no less than in the physical world; and the absorption of all sects into one results in a stagnation which will never be found amongst moral beings, unless when produced by weakness of vital force from within, or unnatural suppression from above. The two dominant types of church polity recognised in this country since the Reformation--the Episcopal and the Presbyterian--of which the one boasts a more aristocratic intellectual culture, and the other a more fervid and forcible popular action, may well be allowed to exist together on a mutual understanding of giving and taking whatever is best in each, and thus, in apostolic language, provoking one another to love and to good works. Competition is for the public benefit as much in churches as in trades. Dissent from any dominant body, even though it may proceed from the exaggerated importance given to a secondary matter, will always produce the good result that the dominant body will thereby be stirred to greater activity and greater watchfulness; so that, in this view, we may lay it down as one of the great lessons of history that the best form of church government is a strong establishment qualified by a strong dissent. As to the proposals which have in recent times been made for the formal separation of Church and State, they bear on their face more of a political than of a religious significance. Impartial history offers no countenance to the notion that Established Churches, when well flanked by dissent, and in an age when the spiritual