language which
properly applies only to complete perfection, and is a far-off echo of
the human soul's prophecy of it. Religion itself, I need hardly say,
supplies them in abundance with this grand language. And very freely do
they use it; yet it is really the severest possible criticism of such an
incomplete perfection as alone we have yet reached through our religious
organizations.

The impulse of the English race towards moral development and
self-conquest has nowhere so powerfully manifested itself as in
Puritanism. Nowhere has Puritanism found so adequate an expression as in
the religious organization of the Independents.[402] The modern
Independents have a newspaper, the _Nonnconformist_, written with great
sincerity and ability. The motto, the standard, the profession of faith
which this organ of theirs carries aloft, is: "The Dissidence of Dissent
and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion."[403] There is
sweetness and light, and an ideal of complete harmonious human
perfection! One need not go to culture and poetry to find language to
judge it. Religion, with its instinct for perfection, supplies language
to judge it, language, too, which is in our mouths every day. "Finally,
be of one mind, united in feeling,"[404] says St. Peter. There is an
ideal which judges the Puritan ideal: "The Dissidence of Dissent and the
Protestantism of the Protestant religion!" And religious organizations
like this are what people believe in, rest in, would give their lives
for! Such, I say, is the wonderful virtue of even the beginnings of
perfection, of having conquered even the plain faults of our animality,
that the religious organization which has helped us to do it can seem to
us something precious, salutary, and to be propagated, even when it
wears such a brand of imperfection on its forehead as this. And men have
got such a habit of giving to the language of religion a special
application, of making it a mere jargon, that for the condemnation which
religion itself passes on the shortcomings of their religious
organizations they have no ear; they are sure to cheat themselves and to
explain this condemnation away. They can only be reached by the
criticism which culture, like poetry, speaking a language not to be
sophisticated, and resolutely testing these organizations by the ideal
of a human perfection complete on all sides, applies to them.

But men of culture and poetry, it will be said, are again and again
faili