the Broad Church means the collective mass of good people of all
denominations. Others say that such a definition is nonsense; that a
church is an organization, and the scattered good folks are no
organization at all. They think that men will eventually come together
on the basis of one or two or more common articles of belief, and form
a great unity. Do they see what this amounts to? It means an equal
division of intellect! It is mental agrarianism! a thing that never was
and never will be, until national and individual idiosyncrasies have
ceased to exist. The man of thirty-nine beliefs holds the man of one
belief a pauper; he is not going to give up thirty-eight of them for
the sake of fraternizing with the other in the temple which bears on
its front, "_Deo erexit Voltaire_." A church is a garden, I have heard
it said, and the illustration was neatly handled. Yes, and there is no
such thing as a _broad_ garden. It must be fenced in, and whatever is
fenced in is narrow. You cannot have arctic and tropical plants growing
together in it, except by the forcing system, which is a mighty narrow
piece of business. You can't make a village or a parish or a family
think alike, yet you suppose that you can make a world pinch its
beliefs or pad them to a single pattern! Why, the very life of an
ecclesiastical organization is a life of _induction_, a state of
perpetually disturbed equilibrium kept up by another charged body in
the neighborhood. If the two bodies touch and share their respective
charges, down goes the index of the electrometer!

Do you know that every man has a religious belief peculiar to himself?
Smith is always a Smithite. He takes in exactly Smith's-worth of
knowledge, Smith's-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity. And Brown
has from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to excommunicate him,
to anonymous-article him, because he did not take in Brown's-worth of
knowledge, truth, beauty, divinity. He cannot do it, any more than a