independent growth of his own thoughts and reading. Resolute, through
good report and evil report, rough but very generous, stern both against
Popery and Puritanism, he had become a power in the Midlands and the
North, and first Coventry, then Leeds, were the centres of a new
influence. He was the apostle of the Church to the great middle class.

These were the orthodox Churchmen, whom their rivals, and not their
rivals only,[10] denounced as dry, unspiritual, formal, unevangelical,
self-righteous; teachers of mere morality at their best, allies and
servants of the world at their worst. In the party which at this time
had come to be looked upon popularly as best entitled to be the
_religious_ party, whether they were admired as Evangelicals, or abused
as Calvinists, or laughed at as the Saints, were inheritors not of
Anglican traditions, but of those which had grown up among the zealous
clergymen and laymen who had sympathised with the great Methodist
revival, and whose theology and life had been profoundly affected by it.
It was the second or third generation of those whose religious ideas had
been formed and governed by the influence of teachers like Hervey,
Romaine, Cecil, Venn, Fletcher, Newton, and Thomas Scott. The fathers of
the Evangelical school were men of naturally strong and vigorous
understandings, robust and rugged, and sometimes eccentric, but quite
able to cope with the controversialists, like Bishop Tomline, who
attacked them. These High Church controversialists were too half-hearted
and too shallow, and understood their own principles too imperfectly, to
be a match for antagonists who were in deadly earnest, and put them to
shame by their zeal and courage. But Newton and Romaine and the Milners
were too limited and narrow in their compass of ideas to found a
powerful theology. They undoubtedly often quickened conscience. But
their system was a one-sided and unnatural one, indeed in the hands of
some of its expounders threatening morality and soundness of