and not be afraid to assert the claims of these convictions on men's
reason and imagination as well as on their associations and feelings.
The same dangers and necessities acted differently on different minds;
but among those who were awakened by them to the presence of a great
crisis were the first movers in what came to be known as the Tractarian
movement. The stir around them, the perils which seemed to threaten,
were a call to them to examine afresh the meaning of their familiar
words and professions.

For the Church, as it had been in the quiet days of the eighteenth
century, was scarcely adapted to the needs of more stirring times. The
idea of clerical life had certainly sunk, both in fact and in the
popular estimate of it. The disproportion between the purposes for which
the Church with its ministry was founded and the actual tone of feeling
among those responsible for its service had become too great. Men were
afraid of principles; the one thing they most shrank from was the
suspicion of enthusiasm. Bishop Lavington wrote a book to hold up to
scorn the enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists; and what would have
seemed reasonable and natural in matters of religion and worship in the
age of Cranmer, in the age of Hooker, in the age of Andrewes, or in the
age of Ken, seemed extravagant in the age which reflected the spirit of
Tillotson and Secker, and even Porteus. The typical clergyman in English
pictures of the manners of the day, in the _Vicar of Wakefield,_ in Miss
Austen's novels, in Crabbe's _Parish Register,_ is represented, often
quite unsuspiciously, as a kindly and respectable person, but certainly
not alive to the greatness of his calling. He was often much, very much,
to the society round him. When communication was so difficult and
infrequent, he filled a place in the country life of England which no
one else could fill. He was often the patriarch of his parish, its
ruler, its doctor, its lawyer, its magistrate, as well as its teacher,