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
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