dden end. But the success of
the voluntary system here is overthrowing this assumption. Shall I
believe that Christianity deprived of State support must fall, when I
see it without State support not only standing, but advancing with the
settler into the remotest West? Will the laity of Europe long remain
under their illusion in face of this great fact? Already the State
Churches of Europe are placed in imminent peril by the controversies
which, since religious life has reawakened among us, rend them from
within, and by their manifest inability to satisfy the craving of
society for new assurance of its faith. I cannot much blame the
High-Church bishop who goes to Lord Palmerston to ask for intervention
in company with Lord Clanricarde and Mr. Spence. You express surprise
that the son of Wilberforce is not with you; but Wilberforce was not,
like his son, a bishop of the State Church. Never in the whole course of
history has the old order of things yielded without a murmur to the new.
You share the fate of all innovators: your innovations are not received
with favor by the powers which they threaten ultimately to sweep away.

To come from our aristocracy and landed gentry to our middle class. We
subdivide the middle class into upper and lower. The upper middle class,
comprising the wealthier tradesmen, forms a sort of minor aristocracy in
itself, with a good deal of aristocratic feeling towards those beneath
it. It is not well educated, for it will not go to the common schools,
and it has few good private schools of its own; consequently, it does
not think deeply on great political questions. It is at present very
wealthy; and wealth, as you know, does not always produce high moral
sentiment. It is not above a desire to be on the genteel side. It is not
free from the worship of Aristocracy. That worship is rooted in the
lower part of our common nature. Is fibres extend beyond the soil of
England, beyond the soil of Europe. America has been much belied, if she
is entirely free from this evil, if there are not here also men careful
of class-distinctions, of a place in fashionable society, of factitious
rank which parodies the aristocracy of the Old World. There is in the
Anglo-Saxon character a strange mixture of independence and servility.
In that long course of concessions by which your politicians
strove--happily for the world and for yourselves they strove in vain--to
conciliate the slave owning aristocracy of the South,