Page:Culture and Anarchy, Third edition, 1882, Matthew Arnold.djvu/35

Rh propose to cure it by bringing Puritanism more into contact with the main current of national life. Here we are fully at one with the Dean of Westminster; and, indeed, he and we were trained in the same school to mark the narrowness of Puritanism, and to wish to cure it. But he and others seem disposed simply to give to the present Anglican Establishment a character the most latitudinarian, as it is called, possible; availing themselves for this purpose of the diversity of tendencies and doctrines which does undoubtedly exist already in the Anglican formularies; and then they would say to the Puritans: 'Come all of you into this liberally conceived Anglican Establishment.' But to say this is hardly, perhaps, to take sufficient account of the course of history, or of the strength of men's feelings in what concerns religion, or of the gravity which may have come to attach to points of religious order and discipline merely. When Mr, White talks of 'sweeping away the whole complicated iniquity of Government Church patronage,’ he uses language which has been forced upon him by his position, but which is devoid of all real solidity. But when he talks of the religious communities 'which have for three hundred years contended for the power of the congregation in the management of their own affairs,’