I think I belong to the "Broad Church," if any of you can
tell what that means.
I had the rashness to attempt to answer the question myself.--Some say
the Broad Church means the collective mass of good people of all
denominations. Others say that such a definition is nonsense; that a
church is an organization, and the scattered good folks are no
organization at all. They think that men will eventually come together
on the basis of one or two or more common articles of belief, and form
a great unity. Do they see what this amounts to? It means an equal
division of intellect! It is mental agrarianism! a thing that never was
and never will be, until national and individual idiosyncrasies have
ceased to exist. The man of thirty-nine beliefs holds the man of one
belief a pauper; he is not going to give up thirty-eight of them for
the sake of fraternizing with the other in the temple which bears on
its front, "_Deo erexit Voltaire_." A church is a garden, I have heard
it said, and the illustration was neatly handled. Yes, and there is no
such thing as a _broad_ garden.
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