exemplar of management, of the triumph of the political method in
spiritual things, and of the subordination of ideas to the _status quo_.

It is true that all other organised priesthoods are also bodies which
move within formularies even more inelastic than those of the
Establishment. But then they have not the same immense social power, nor
the same temptations to make all sacrifices to preserve it. They affect
the intellectual temper of large numbers of people, but the people whom
they affect are not so strongly identified with the greater organs of
the national life. The State Church is bound up in the minds of the most
powerful classes with a given ordering of social arrangements, and the
consequence of this is that the teachers of the Church have reflected
back upon thorn a sense of responsibility for these arrangements, which
obscures their spirituality, clogs their intellectual energy and mental
openness, and turns them into a political army of obstruction to new
ideas. They feel themselves to a certain extent discharged from the
necessity of recognising the tremendous conflict in the region of belief
that goes on around them, just as if they were purely civil
administrators, concerned only with the maintenance of the present
order. None of this is true of the private Churches. Their teachers and
members regard belief as something wholly independent of the civil
ordering of things. However little enlightened in some respects, however
hostile to certain of the ideas by which it is sought to replace their
own, they are at least representatives of the momentous principle of our
individual responsibility for the truth of our opinions. They may bring
their judgments to conclusions that are less in accord with modern
tendencies than those of one or two schools that still see their way to
subscribing Anglican articles and administering Anglican rites. At any
rate, they admit that the use of his judgment is a duty incumbent on the
individual, and a duty to be discharged without reference to any
external considerations whatever, political or otherwise. This is an
elevating, an exhilarating principle, however deficiencies of culture
may have narrowed the sphere of its operations. It is because a State
Church is by its very conception hostile to such a principle, that we
are justified in counting it apart from the private Churches with all
their faults, and placing it among the agencies that weaken the vigour
of a nationa