Nonconformist

But a lover of perfection who looks to inward ripeness for the true springs of conduct will surely think that a Shakespeare has done more for the inward ripeness of our statesmen than Dr. Watts and has therefore done more to moralize and ennoble them.

So an establishment which has produced Hooker, Barrow, Butler has done more to moralize and ennoble English statesmen and their conduct than communities which have produced the Nonconformist divines.

The fruitful men of English Puritanism and Nonconformity are men who are trained within the pale of the establishment, Milton, Baxter, Wesley.

A generation or two outside the establishment and Puritanism produces men of national mark no more.

With the same doctrine and discipline, men of national mark are produced in Scotland, but in an establishment.

But it points out that our passing generation of boys and young men is, meantime, sacrificed.

Puritanism was necessary to develop the moral fiber of the English race.

Nonconformity to break the yoke of ecclesiastical domination over men's minds and to prepare the way for freedom of thought in the distant future.

If the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they previously took some trouble to make it lucid.

It has been left for the modern mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine without even stating it.

For these reasons, and for many more, I for one have come to believe in going back to fundamentals.

Such is the general idea of this book.

It was so strong in the original reformed Church of England that one cannot help doubting whether any settlement which suppressed it could have been really permanent and whether it would not have kept appearing again and again and causing dissension.

Well then, if culture is the disinterested endeavor after man's perfection, will it not make us wish to cure the provincialism of the Nonconformist? Not by making churchmen provincial along with them, but by letting their popular church discipline formerly found in the national church and still found in the affections and practice of a good part of the nation appear in the national church once more, and thus to bring Nonconformists into contact again as their greater fathers were with the mainstream of national life.

Why should not a Presbyterian or Congregational church based on this considerable and important, though not essential, principle of the congregation's power in the church management be established with equal rank for its chiefs, with the chiefs of Episcopacy, and with admissibility of its ministers under a revised system of patronage and preferment to benefices side by side with the Episcopal Church as the Calvinist and Lutheran churches are established side by side in France and Germany? Such a Congregational church would unite the main bodies of Protestants who are now separatists, and separation would cease to be the law of their religious order.

Then through this concession on a really considerable point of difference, that endless splitting into hole and corner churches on quite inconsiderable points of difference which must prevail so long as separatism is the first law of a Nonconformist religious existence would be checked.

Culture would then find a place among English followers of the popular authority of elders as it has long found it among the followers of episcopal jurisdiction, and this we should gain by merely recognizing, regularizing, and restoring an element which appeared once in the reformed national church and which is considerable and national enough to have a sound claim to appear there still.

So far, then, is culture from making us unjust to the Nonconformists because it forbids us to worship their fetishes, that it even leads us to propose to do more for them than they themselves venture to claim.

It leads us also to respect what is solid and respectable in their convictions while their latitudinarian friends make light of it.

Not that the forms in which the human spirit tries to express the inexpressible or the forms by which man tries to worship have or can have, as has been said, for the follower of perfection anything necessary or eternal.

But obviously, when you're accompanying, you don't necessarily...

I'm not saying I wasn't in tune with what we were doing, I was, but I had, I had feelings inside of me that wanted to do something else with music, that kind of somehow- This thing that had come, this extempore thing from the Nonconformist tradition, that there was something inside of me that I wanted to express.

I'm not sure that I would've described it as that at the time, probably not.

But looking back, that's why it happened.

But a lover of perfection who looks to inward ripeness for the true springs of conduct will surely think that a Shakespeare has done more for the inward ripeness of our statesmen than Dr. Watts and has therefore done more to moralize and ennoble them.

So an establishment which has produced Hooker, Barrow, Butler has done more to moralize and ennoble English statesmen and their conduct than communities which have produced the Nonconformist divines.

The fruitful men of English Puritanism and Nonconformity are men who are trained within the pale of the establishment, Milton, Baxter, Wesley.

A generation or two outside the establishment and Puritanism produces men of national mark no more.

With the same doctrine and discipline, men of national mark are produced in Scotland, but in an establishment.

The planters of Christianity had their roots in deep and rich grounds of human life and achievement, both Jewish and also Greek, and had thus a comparatively firm and wide basis amidst all the vehement inspiration of their mighty movement and change.

By their strong inspiration, they carried men off the old basis of life and culture, whether Jewish or Greek, and generations arose who had their roots in neither world and were in contact therefore with no full and great stream of human life.

Christianity might have lost herself if it had not been for some such change as that of the fourth century in a multitude of hole and corner churches like the churches of English Nonconformity after its founders departed, churches without great men and without furtherance for the higher life of humanity.

If the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they previously took some trouble to make it lucid.

It has been left for the modern mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine without even stating it.

For these reasons and for many more, I for one have come to believe in going back to fundamentals.

Such is the general idea of this book.