We have already averred that this article is not intended to promote any levelling assault upon any existing dignity. Nor do we think it is expedient that a flat table-land of social equality should be created in this old country. Let public services be rewarded not only by gratitude and esteem, but by dignities and honours coincident with the life of the grantees. Honorary decorations, too, might be more extensively conferred, and would surely be worn with as much gratification by the deserving plebeian as the blue or red ribbon by the noblest aristocrat of the bluest blood. Let sculpture, painting, and architecture do their best to perpetuate the memory of 'national celebrities.' Let us construct a Walhalla of worthies in which Englishmen shall deem it the highest attainable honour to be reckoned. And as Pericles nobly said to the Athenians,—'I shall begin with our forefathers, for it is fair and right that the honours of commemoration should be accorded to them. For the same people constantly dwelling in this land did by their valour hand it down in freedom to posterity. Well worthy of praise were they, and still more worthy are our own fathers; for they, in addition to their inheritance, won by the sweat of their brow the imperial position we now hold, and transmitted it to us of the present generation.' So let us recall and commemorate every unselfish public life, all genius dedicated to the nation's good, and all those quasi inspirations of the native mind which set a mark upon their age, and tinge the thought of successive generations. Nor let us shrink and shiver as we see the irresistible advance of the democratic wave. The most timid may take courage by studying the attempted legislation of the Commonwealth. To that period may be traced the source of nearly all our best laws and largest reforms. The reactionary powers blighted the attempted work of enlightened men, and it has only come to maturity within living memory, or is even now ripening. Let us never forget that it is our first duty to educate the democracy, to purify its morals, and so to modify the distribution of public honours that merit and its reward may never be severed. Exalted rank derived from birth alone must be permitted to die out by flux of time, and meritorious industry must be warmly cherished.
'The smoke ascends
To heaven, as lightly from the cottage hearth
As from the haughty palace. He whose soul
Ponders this true equality may walk
The fields of earth with gratitude and hope.'[36]
Art. V.—The Genius of Nonconformity and the Progress of Society.
Archbishop Laud, in his conference with Fisher, the Jesuit, when he was Bishop of St. David's, sets forth the ample basis and justification of Nonconformity. It is impossible that the platform can be laid for our principles and action more broadly and firmly than by this highest of High Churchmen in the following admirable and explicit words:—
'Another Church may separate from Rome if Rome will separate from Christ. And so far as it separates from them and the faith, so far may another church sever from it.... The Protestants did not get that name by protesting against the Church of Rome, but by protesting (and that when nothing else would serve) against her errors and superstitions. Do you but remove them from the Church of Rome, and our protestation is ended, and the separation too. The Protestants did not depart, for departure is voluntary; so was not theirs. I say, not theirs, taking their whole body and cause together.... The cause of schism is yours, for you thrust us out from you because we called for truth and the redress of abuses. For a schism must needs be theirs whose the cause of it is. The woe was full out of the mouth of Christ, ever against him that gives the offence, not against him that takes it, ever.... It was ill done of those, whoever they were, that made the first separation. But then A. C. must not understand me of actual only, but of causal separation. For, as I said before, the schism is theirs whose the cause of it is. And he makes the separation, that gives the first just cause of it; not he that makes an actual separation upon a just cause preceding.'—(Works, vol. ii. sec. 21.)