towards a double legislative chamber,
and ourselves, till at any rate quite recently, to a double system of
jurisprudence, law and equity, was not arrived at without having passed
through the stages of reason and reflection. There are a variety of
delicate, almost intangible, questions which belong rather to conscience
than to law, and for which a Church is a fitter tribunal--at any rate
for many ages hence--than a parliament or law court. There is room,
therefore, for both a State and a Church, each of which should be
influenced by the action of the other.

I do not say that I personally should like to see the Church of Rome as
at present constituted in the position which I should be glad to see
attained by an ideal Church. If it were in that position I would attack
it to the utmost of my power; but I have little hesitation in thinking
that the world with a very possible feasible Church, would be better
than the world with no Church at all; and, if so, I have still less
hesitation in concluding, for the reasons already given, that it is to
Rome we must turn as the source from which the Church of the future is
to be evolved, if it is to come at all.

For the new, if it is to strike deep root and be permanent, must grow
out of the old, without too violent a transition. Some violence there
will always be, even in the kindliest birth; but the less the better,
and a leap greater than the one from Judaism to Christianity is not
desirable, even if it were possible. As a free-thinker, therefore, but
also as one who wishes to take a practical view of the manner in which
things will, and ought to go, I neither expect to see the religions of
the world come once for all to an end with the belief in
Christianity--which to me is tantamount to saying with Rome--nor am I at
all sure that such a consummation is more desirable than likely to come
about. The ultimate fight will, I believe, be between Rome and
Pantheism; and the sooner the two contending parties can be ranged into
their opposite camps by the extinction of all intermediate creeds, the
sooner will an issue of some sort be arrived at. This will not happen in
our time, but we should work towards it.

When it arrives, what is to happen? Is Pantheism to absorb Rome, and, if
so, what sort of a religious formula is to be the result? or is Rome so
to modify her dogmas that the Pantheist can join her without doing too
much violence to his convictions? We who are outside the Churc