millions and a quarter of
persons, or forty-two per cent. of the whole population, were not
present at service. Many of these people do not believe some of the
doctrines preached; they have thought seriously, but cannot sympathize
with what they are compelled to hear. If we break down all subscription
and include them in the great National Church, we will approach the
Scriptural ideal. Unless this be done they will fall into Dissenting
hands, and die outside the Church of Christ. There are several proofs of
the Scriptural indorsement of Nationalism; Christ's lament over
Jerusalem declares that he had offered Multitudinism to the inhabitants
nationally, while the three thousand souls converted on the day of
Pentecost cannot be supposed to have been individual converts, but
merely a mass of persons brought in as a body. Some of the converts of
the apostolic age did not believe in the resurrection, which fact
implies that the early Churches took collective names from the
localities where they were situated, and that doubt of the resurrection
should now be no bar to communion in the National Church. Even
heathenism in its best form proceeded on the Multitudinist principle,
for all were included as believers in the faith of the times. The
approval of reason and conscience, and not verbal adherence to human
interpretation of Scripture, should be the great test of membership.
Advice is administered by the essayist to the Church of which he is a
clergyman, in this language: "A national church may also find itself in
this position; which, perhaps, is our own. Its ministers may become
isolated between two other parties,--between those, on the one hand, who
draw fanatical inferences from formularies and principles which they
themselves are not able or are unwilling to repudiate; and on the other,
those who have been tempted, in impatience of old fetters, to follow
free thought heedlessly wherever it may lead them. If our own churchmen
expect to discourage and repress a fanatical Christianity without a
frank appeal to reason, and a frank criticism of Scripture, they will
find themselves without any effectual arms for that combat; or if they
attempt to check inquiry by the repetition of old forms and
denunciations, they will be equally powerless, and run the especial risk
of turning into bitterness the sincerity of those who should be their
best allies, as friends of truth. They should avail themselves of the
aid of all reasonable p