that govern the planet
and the spheres that surround it.

The divinity-student was not quite up to the idea of the commonwealth,
as our young friend the Marylander, for instance, understood it. He
could not get rid of that notion of private property in truth, with the
right to fence it in, and put up a sign-board, thus:

ALL TRESPASSERS ARE WARNED OFF THESE
GROUNDS!

He took the young Marylander to task for going to the Church of the
Galileans, where he had several times accompanied Iris of late.

I am a Churchman,--the young man said,--by education and habit. I love
my old Church for many reasons, but most of all because I think it
has educated me out of its own forms into the spirit of its highest
teachings. I think I belong to the "Broad Church," if any of you can
tell what that means.

I had the rashness to attempt to answer the question myself.--Some
say the Broad Church means the collective mass of good people of all
denominations. Others say that such a definition is nonsense; that
a church is an organization, and the scattered good folks are no
organization at all. They think that men will eventually come together
on the basis of one or two or more common articles of belief, and form
a great unity. Do they see what this amounts to? It means an equal
division of intellect! It is mental agrarianism! a thing that never
was and never will be until national and individual idiosyncrasies have
ceased to exist. The man of thirty-nine beliefs holds the man of one
belief a pauper; he is not going to give up thirty-eight of them for
the sake of fraternizing with the other in the temple which bears on
its front, "Deo erexit Voltaire." A church is a garden, I have heard it
said, and the illustration was neatly handled. Yes, and there is no such
thing as a broad garden. It must be fenced in, and whatever is fenced in
is narrow. You cannot have arctic and tropical plants growing together
in it, except by the forcing system, which is a mighty narrow piece of
business. You can't make a village or a parish or a family think alike,
yet you suppose that you can make a world pinch its beliefs or pad
them to a single pattern! Why, the very life of an ecclesiastical
organization is a life of induction, a state of perpetually disturbed
equilibrium kept up by another charged body in the neighborhood. If the
two bodies touch and share their respective charges, down goes the index
of the