If you do not agree with the church in
which you find yourself, your best course is to become a reformer IN
that church, to declare it a detached forgetful part of the greater
church that ought to be, just as your State is a detached unawakened
part of the World State. You take it at what it is and try and broaden
it towards reunion. It is only when secession is absolutely unavoidable
that it is right to secede.
This is particularly true of state churches such as is the Church of
England. These are bodies constituted by the national law and amenable
to the collective will. I do not think a man should consider himself
excluded from them because they have articles of religion to which he
cannot subscribe and creeds he will not say. A national state church has
no right to be thus limited and exclusive. Rather then let any man, just
to the very limit that is possible for his intellectual or moral
temperament, remain in his church to redress the balance and do his
utmost to change and broaden it.
But perhaps the Church will not endure a broad-minded man in its body,
speaking and reforming, and will expel him?
Be expelled--well and good! That is altogether different.
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