ssed the threshold of manhood
that they will search no more. They virtually swear that they will to
the end of their days believe what they believe then, before they have
had time either to think or to know the thoughts of others. They take
oath, in other words, to lead mutilated lives. If they cannot keep this
solemn promise, they have at least every inducement that ordinary human
motives can supply, to conceal their breach of it. The same system which
begins by making mental indolence a virtue and intellectual narrowness a
part of sanctity, ends by putting a premium on something too like
hypocrisy. Consider the seriousness of fastening up in these bonds some
thousands of the most instructed and intelligent classes in the country,
the very men who would otherwise be best fitted from position and
opportunities for aiding a little in the long, difficult, and plainly
inevitable work of transforming opinion. Consider the waste of
intelligence, and what is assuredly not less grave, the positive
dead-weight and thick obstruction, by which an official hierarchy so
organised must paralyse mental independence in a community.

We know the kind of man whom this system delights to honour. He was
described for us five and thirty years ago by a master hand. 'Mistiness
is the mother of wisdom. A man who can set down half a dozen general
propositions which escape from destroying one another only by being
diluted into truisms; who can hold the balance between opposites so
skilfully as to do without fulcrum or beam; who never enunciates a truth
without guarding himself against being supposed to exclude the
contradictory,--who holds that scripture is the only authority, yet that
the Church is to be deferred to, that faith only justifies, yet that it
does not justify without works, that grace does not depend upon the
sacraments, yet is not given without them, that bishops are a divine
ordinance, yet that those who have them not are in the same religious
condition as those who have,--this is your safe man and the hope of the
Church; this is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but
sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to guide it through
the channel of no meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and
No.'[4] The writer then thought that such a type could not endure, and
that the Church must become more real. On the contrary, her reality is
more phantom-like now than it was then. She is the sovereign pattern and