In the religious as in the economic sphere one must not look for perfect conditions.  Setting up for oneself in a new sect is like founding Utopias in Paraguay, an evasion of the essential question; our real business is to take what we have, live in and by it, use it and do our best to better such faults as are manifest to us, in the direction of a wider and nobler organization.  If you do not agree with the church in which you find yourself, your best course is to become a reformer in that church, to declare it a detached forgetful part of the greater church that ought to be, just as your State is a detached unawakened part of the World State.  You take it at what it is and try and broaden it towards reunion.  It is only when secession is absolutely unavoidable that it is right to secede.

This is particularly true of state churches such as is the Church of England.  These are bodies constituted by the national law and amenable to the collective will.  I do not think a man should consider himself excluded from them because they have articles of religion to which he cannot subscribe and creeds he will not say.  A national state church has no right to be thus limited and exclusive.  Rather then let any man, just to the very limit that is possible for his intellectual or moral temperament, 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.