At the end of the first quarter of the century, say about 1825-30, two
characteristic forms of Church of England Christianity were popularly
recognised. One inherited the traditions of a learned and sober
Anglicanism, claiming as the authorities for its theology the great line
of English divines from Hooker to Waterland, finding its patterns of
devotion in Bishop Wilson, Bishop Horne, and the "Whole Duty of Man,"
but not forgetful of Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor, and Ken,--preaching,
without passion or excitement, scholarlike, careful, wise, often
vigorously reasoned discourses on the capital points of faith and
morals, and exhibiting in its adherents, who were many and important,
all the varieties of a great and far-descended school, which claimed for
itself rightful possession of the ground which it held. There was
nothing effeminate about it, as there was nothing fanatical; there was
nothing extreme or foolish about it; it was a manly school, distrustful
of high-wrought feelings and professions, cultivating self-command and
shy of display, and setting up as its mark, in contrast to what seemed
to it sentimental weakness, a reasonable and serious idea of duty. The
divinity which it propounded, though it rested on learning, was rather
that of strong common sense than of the schools of erudition. Its better
members were highly cultivated, benevolent men, intolerant of
irregularities both of doctrine and life, whose lives were governed by
an unostentatious but solid and unfaltering piety, ready to burst forth
on occasion into fervid devotion. Its worse members were jobbers and
hunters after preferment, pluralists who built fortunes and endowed
families out of the Church, or country gentlemen in orders, who rode to
hounds and shot and danced and farmed, and often did worse things. Its
average was what naturally in England would be the average, in a state
of things in which great religious institutions have been for a long
time settled and unmolested--kindly, helpful, respectable, sociable
persons of good sense and character, workers rather in a fashion of