BULLER.
And you are wise and good.
NORTH.
Many thousands—and hundreds of thousands, wiser and better. I can easily suppose a Mind—strong in thought, warm in feeling, of an imagination susceptible and creative—by magnanimity, study, and experience of the world, disengaged from all sectarian tenets—yet holding the absolute conviction of religion—and contemplating, with reverence and tenderness, many different ways of expression which this inmost spiritual disposition has produced or put on—having a firmest holding on to Christianity as pure, holy, august, divine, true, beyond all other modes of religion upon the Earth—partly from intuition of its essential fitness to our nature—partly from intense gratitude—partly, perhaps, from the original entwining of it with his own faculties, thoughts, feelings, history, being. Well, he looks with affectionate admiration upon the Scottish, with affectionate admiration on the English Church—old affection agreeing with new affection—and I can imagine in him as much generosity required to love his own Church—the Presbyterian—as yours the Episcopalian—and that, Latitudinarian as he may be called, he loves them both. For myself, you know how I love England—all that belongs to her—all that makes her what she is—scarcely more—surely not less—Scotland. The ground of the Scottish Form is the overbearing consciousness, that religion is immediately between man and his Maker. All hallowing of things outward is to that consciousness a placing of such earthly things as interpositions and separating intermediates in that interval unavoidable between the Finite and the Infinite, but which should remain blank and clear for the immediate communications of the Worshipper and the Worshipped.
BULLER.
I believe, sir, you are a Presbyterian?
NORTH.
He that worships in spirit and in truth cannot endure—cannot imagine, that anything but his own sin shall stand betwixt him and God.
BULLER.
That, until it be in some way or another extinguished, shall and must.