In their ability or inability to do this resides the human answer to the question whose discussion we pursue.
The syllogism in which this answer is embodied may be thus constructed:
The church which is best adapted, by internal structure and external operations, to control and harmonize American society, will be the church of the future in our country.
The Protestant Episcopal Church is best adapted, by internal structure and external operations, to control and harmonize American society.
_Ergo_, the Protestant Episcopal Church will be the church of the future in our country.
The major premise of this syllogism is evidently sound. If the minor is reliable in fact as well as form, the conclusion is unmistakable. Our inquiry is thus reduced to this:
Whether the Protestant Episcopal Church is best adapted, by its internal structure and external operations, to control and harmonize American society?
The answer to this inquiry will unfold our own view of the matter now in issue, and will, we trust, set forth some of the principal _criteria_ by which the church of the future may, at this day, be humanly discerned.
1. The "church of the future" is a "church of the people."
The American nation is now, and always must remain, in the strictest sense, "_a people./i>" The order of our political and civil institutions, the vast area of our territory and the unlimited susceptibility of its development, the achievements of art and mechanism by which alone that development can be secured, all necessitate, in the future, as in the present, a nation of working-men, homogeneous in principles, in intelligence, and in toil. Classes of society, except so far as based upon the accidents of personal friendship, cultivation, or locality, are practically now, and must hereafter become more and more, unknown. The distinctions by which its divisions in the Old World were created and maintained, lost the last hold upon America when slavery went down in the fierce tempest of the recent war. The proud prerogatives of race and birth are henceforth without value. Every man must receive himself from the hands of his Creator just as that Creator made him, and carve out for himself a destiny, limited only by his individual ambition, and by his fidelity to the end for which his life and independence were bestowed upon him.