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organisation, the Opposition, criticising, arresting, modifying the course of the dominant party, supplies that force of friction without which movement is impossible, so the attitude of the Nonconformist Churches does supply a stimulus, not wholly devoid of good effect, to the zeal, the learning, and even the spiritual tone of the established religion. But surely the Christian religion supplies something more, something far other than this mere balance of forces, to the life of a Christian country? Should it not rather supply the solvent of common faith and hope to all the conflicting interests of our common life? Should it not rather be the meeting-point for all sorts and conditions of men? Should not its outward organisation, so far as so spiritual an influence can be organised at all, be such as to secure the greatest amount of the advantages it affords to the greatest number of the community? And is not education, Education a common Christian object.symbolising as it does, and inducing as it does, that idea of human dignity, that desire for mental and moral cultivation which has its root in the common belief of all Christians, one of those "advantages" which should command the concurrence and secure the co-operation of every good Christian citizen, be his opinions what they may? Is it not one for the furtherance of which Catholic and Protestant, Churchman and Dissenter, may well endeavour to combine, or the State at least may well endeavour to induce them to do so? Of course that lofty view of the identity of Church and State in which the two words are regarded only as two names for one and the same body viewed in different relations, which finds such noble expression in Hooker, and which has fascinated so many of our greatest statesmen and divines, requires many—alas, how many!—qualifications to make it even intelligible to the politicians of to-day. Yet surely it represents the true idea of Church and State—the true standard at which we should aim—the true ground-plan of the Christian nation, demanding the utmost expansion of the
