Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/11

Rh doing his part to convert the kingdoms of the world into the kingdom of Christ; while others are labouring with all their power, political and ecclesiastical, to retard that conversion, though they may arrogate the name of Christian to themselves alone. I mean the spirit of faith in God and man, of charity between man and man, of hope for the future of humanity. I mean the spirit of progress of which Christian hope is the life, and which, look where you will, is confined to the nations of Christendom. I mean the spirit of Christianity, not the mere form, dogmatic, ceremonial, or ecclesiastical. Such Christianity may be a nullity in sectarian theology. It is the great reality of history.

In Europe Christianity is paralysed by the divisions of the national Churches, each with a state creed imposed by political power and maintained by the state clergy, who are legally bound over against conviction, so that till State and Church shall have been separated the divisions of Christendom are hopeless. The Church in the Old World is unable to do or attempt what it was intended to do for man. But two centuries ago, England, then in her noblest mood—for never, in spite of her trade, her victories, and her empire, has she been so noble as she was in the days of Hampden, Falkland, Milton, and Cromwell—sent forth a religious colony, which founded the great community of the New World. It was well chosen for its high purpose that germ of English religion, law, and freedom. It was well chosen, and so was the place where it was planted—a vast expanse divided by no strong natural boundaries, and commercially united in all directions by the courses of great rivers, so that national divisions, with the political enmities and religious schisms which they entail,