Pamphlets, Poems, Books,
these _are_ the real working effective Church of a modern country. Nay
not only our preaching, but even our worship, is not it too
accomplished by means of Printed Books? The noble sentiment which a
gifted soul has clothed for us in melodious words, which brings melody
into our hearts,--is not this essentially, if we will understand it,
of the nature of worship? There are many, in all countries, who, in
this confused time, have no other method of worship. He who, in any
way, shows us better than we knew before that a lily of the fields is
beautiful, does he not show it us as an effluence of the Fountain of
all Beauty; as the _handwriting_, made visible there, of the great
Maker of the Universe? He has sung for us, made us sing with him, a
little verse of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How much more he who
sings, who says, or in any way brings home to our heart the noble
doings, feelings, darings and endurances of a brother man! He has
verily touched our hearts as with a live coal _from the altar_.
Perhaps there is no worship more authentic.

Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an 'apocalypse of Nature,'
a revealing of the 'open secret.' It may well enough be named, in
Fichte's style; a 'continuous revelation' of the Godlike in the
Terrestrial and Common. The Godlike does ever, in very truth, endure
there; is brought out, now in this dialect, now in that, with various
degrees of clearness: all true gifted Singers and Speakers are,
consciously or unconsciously, doing so. The dark stormful indignation
of a Byron, so wayward and perverse, may have touches of it; nay the
withered mockery of a French sceptic,--his mockery of the False, a
love and worship of the True. How much more the sphere-harmony of a
Shakspeare, of a Goethe; the cathedral-music of a Milton! They are
something too, those humble genuine lark-notes of a Burns,--skylark,
starting from the humble furrow, far overhead into the blue depths,
and singing to us so genuinely there! For all true singing is of the
nature of worship; as indeed all true _working_ may be said to
be,--whereof such _singing_ is but the record, and fit melodious
representation, to us. Fragments of a real 'Church Liturgy' and 'Body
of Homilies,' strangely disguised from the common eye, are to be found
weltering in that huge froth-ocean of Printed Speech we loosely call
Literature! Books are our Church too.

Or turning now to the Government of men. Witenagem