nt, remain in his church to redress the balance and do his
utmost to change and broaden it.

But perhaps the Church will not endure a broad-minded man in its body,
speaking and reforming, and will expel him?

Be expelled--well and good! That is altogether different. Let them expel
you, struggling valiantly and resolved to return so soon as they release
you, to hammer at the door. But withdrawing--sulking--going off in a
serene huff to live by yourself spiritually and materially in your own
way--that is voluntary damnation, the denial of the Brotherhood of
Man. Be a rebel or a revolutionary to your heart's content, but a mere
seceder never.

For otherwise it is manifest that we shall have to pay for each step
of moral and intellectual progress with a fresh start, with a conflict
between the new organization and the old from which it sprang, a
perpetually-recurring parricide. There will be a series of religious
institutions in developing order, each containing the remnant too dull
or too hypocritical to secede at the time of stress that began the new
body. Something of the sort has indeed happened to both the Catholic
and the English Protestant churches. We have the intellectual and
moral guidance of the people falling more and more into the hands of an
informal Church of morally impassioned leaders, writers, speakers, and
the like, while the beautiful cathedrals in which their predecessors
sheltered fall more and more into the hands of an uninspiring,
retrogressive but conforming clergy.

Now this was all very well for the Individualist Liberal of the Early
Victorian period, but Individualist Liberalism was a mere destructive
phase in the process of renewing the old Catholic order, a clearing up
of the site. We Socialists want a Church through which we can feel and
think collectively, as much as we want a State that we can serve and be
served by. Whether as members or external critics we have to do our best
to get rid of obsolete doctrinal and ceremonial barriers, so that
the churches may merge again in a universal Church, and that Church
comprehend again the whole growing and amplifying spiritual life of the
race.

I do not know if I make my meaning perfectly clear here. By conformity I
do not mean silent conformity. It is a man's primary duty to convey his
individual difference to the minds of his fellow men. It is because I
want that difference to tell to the utmost that I suggest he should
not leave the assembl