for instance, were being worked in a sense hostile to revealed
religion, and were therefore influences threatening the moral
welfare of mankind.



CHAPTER VIII: RELIGIOUS CHARACTER



Of all the things with which men are concerned, religion was that
which had the strongest hold upon his thoughts and feelings. He had
desired, when quitting the university, to become a clergyman, and it
was only his father's opposition that made him abandon the idea.
Never thereafter did he cease to take the warmest and most constant
interest in all the ecclesiastical controversies that distracted the
Established Church. He was turned out of his seat for Oxford
University by the country clergy, who form the bulk of the voters.
He incurred the bitter displeasure of four fifths of the Anglican
communion by disestablishing the Protestant Episcopal Church in
Ireland, and from 1868 to the end of his life found nearly all the
clerical force of the English establishment arrayed against him,
while his warmest support came from the Nonconformists of England
and the Presbyterians of Scotland. Yet nothing affected his
devotion to the church in which he had been brought up, nor to the
body of Anglo-Catholic doctrine he had imbibed as an undergraduate.
After an attack of influenza which had left him very weak in the
spring of 1891, he endangered his life by attending a meeting on
behalf of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, for which he had spoken
fifty years before. His theological opinions tinged his views upon