abuse which was poured upon it, he appeals with proper indignation to the laity of Durham, to look and see whether their own clergy deserved this abuse. The Bishop of Lichfield is all the more depressing because he will hope against hope. "I am not," he says, in 1832, "one of those, even in these days of change and innovation, who despair of the safety of the Established Church. But that it is a crisis—perhaps even a fiery ordeal for our Church-I will not deny. It may possibly prove little less so than it was at those marked and trying periods of her history-the Rebellion, the Revolution. Four years must elapse now before we meet again on a similar occasion, and I feel that a more than common uncertainty hangs over such a prospect. If we are spared thus to meet once more in this life, it may be under altered circumstances. But whether the outward state of our Zion be prosperous or adverse, may we ever recollect that our vows of allegiance to her, in and through her Divine Head, are upon us, and that we have to be followers of her as she is of Christ, whether it be through famine, through fire, the sword, or the cross. Her altars we cannot desert, her people we cannot abandon."

The fury of the attack fell upon the bishops, chiefly owing to their opposition to the Reform Bill. Some of them were burnt in effigy; the Bishop of Bristol's palace was burnt to the ground by an infuriated mob; the Bishop of London was warned that it was dangerous for him to preach in a London church, and actually gave up his engagement in consequence; the Bishop of Lichfield was in danger of his life after he had been preaching in London; and the Archbishop of Canterbury was mobbed in his own cathedral city.1 The inferior clergy were only less the objects of attack because they were less prominent.

But all this while there was a quiet stream of attachment to the Church, which, to the surprise of many, suddenly swelled into a mighty torrent, carrying all opposition before it. When the fate of the Established Church seemed trembling in the balance, a little band of her devoted sons made an appeal to the nation, the result of which cannot better be described than in the words of one who took a

1 See Memoir of Bishop Blomfield, p. 169; Life of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, vol. i. (by Canon Ashwell), p. 61, etc.

leading part in it. "From every part of England,” he writes, "and every town and city, there arose a united, a strong, an emphatic declaration of warm and zealous and devoted loyalty to the Church of England. The national feeling, long pent up, depressed, despondent, had at length obtained freedom to pour forth; and the effect was amazing. The Church suddenly came to life. The journals daily were filled with reports of meetings, in which sentiments long unknown to the columns of newspapers were expressed. . . . The Church, to its astonishment, found itself the object of warm, popular affection and universal devotion. Its enemies were silenced." 1

We are thus brought face to face with two curious paradoxes: first, a growing improvement in the Church side by side with a growing odium against the Church; and then an overwhelming and unexpected demonstration of attachment to the Church, quite bearing down all this odium, and rendering it harmless. How are we to account for the phenomena ?

A closer investigation will show us, first, that the undoubted improvements in the Church were really the work of one or the other of two classes of Churchmen, which, both together, only constituted a small minority among her members; and, secondly, that all this odium against the Church was more apparent than real, or, at any rate, that it only existed among a small but noisy body in certain great centres, and did not reflect the general feeling throughout the country, which, when at last called forth, showed itself most strongly in favour of the National Church.

To make good these two points, we must try to throw ourselves back in thought, into the state of affairs in which the Church found herself at the beginning of the century. She was in a position for which, if one may use so homely a phrase, she had never bargained. From the accession of George III. to the close of the eighteenth century, she was in a most prosperous, peaceful, and, to tell the truth, sleepy state. The men who were ordained in the early years of the nineteenth century expected that they were to go on just as

"The Oxford Movement of 1833," by Sir William Palmer, in the Centemporary Review for May, 1883.

CHURCH UNPREPARED FOR NEW EMERGENCIES. 15

their fathers and grandfathers had done. But that was not to be. A change had come over the spirit of the dream. There was a general and "sudden increase of the vital energy of the species. Humanity assumed a higher mood; a deep agitation, as if from a fresh discharge out of celestial space into the solid body of our planet, shook the soul of the world, and left it troubled and excited." At any rate, to narrow the matter a little, it had that effect upon the Church, and her officers were brought face to face with the most tremendous difficulties, the most violent changes, when they were not in the least prepared for the emergency. There were only two classes that could at all cope with it, and that because they both had a strong lever to wield, which the easy-going mass had not. The one was the Evangelical party, the other that of the distinctly High Churchmen, both of whom had to do with the improvements which ultimately occurred; but both together were far outnumbered by the many who were neither one thing nor the other; some inclining to the high and dry, some to the low and slow; some whose creed consisted mainly in a sort of general amiability; some who were mere worldlings; some, alas! who were absolutely immoral. The vast majority both of clerical and lay Churchmen fell under one or other of these last heads, not of the two first; and it is a great mistake to suppose that they were either unpopular on the one hand, or at all a potent spiritual force on the other. These facts are brought out quite as strongly, though perhaps unconsciously, by their eulogists as by their detractors. Take, for example, Mr. J. A. Froude's graphic description of the Church in the times immediately preceding the Oxford Movement. "As the laity were, so were the clergy. They were gentlemen of superior culture, manners, and character. The pastor in 'The Excursion' is a favourable but not an exceptional specimen of a large class among them. Others were country gentlemen of the best kind, continually in contact with the people, but associating on equal terms with the squires and the aristocracy. . . . The average English incumbent of sixty years ago [this was written in 1881] was a man of private fortune, the younger brother of the

1 Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and other Essays, by David Masson: "Wordsworth," p. 19.

landlord perhaps, and holding the family living; or, it might be, the landlord himself, his advowson being part of the estate. His professional duties were his services on Sundays, funerals and weddings on week-days, and visits when needed among the sick people. In other respects he lived like his neighbours, distinguished from them only by a black coat and white neckcloth, and greater watchfulness over his words and actions. He farmed his own glebe, kept horses, shot and hunted moderately, and mixed in general society. He was generally a magistrate; he attended public meetings, and his education enabled him to take a leading part in county business. His wife and daughters looked after the poor, taught in the Sunday school;" and so forth. I have no doubt that this picture is drawn from the life; indeed, I am old enough to remember many specimens of the class. And the account is fully borne out by others. Mr. Jerram, for instance, a good Evangelical, thus describes the Surrey clergy of a few years earlier (1810): "Most of them were branches of the aristocracy and gentry with which Surrey abounds; they were, with one or two exceptions, very respectable characters; they regularly discharged their clerical functions; preached against vice and profligacy; taught the necessity of attending to all the decencies and services of religion, and of rectifying what was deficient in morality; and the duty of carefully avoiding infidelity on the one hand, and enthusiasm on the other. They mixed freely with the gentry around them, associated with them in their amusements, and generally formed a goodly number at their balls and assemblies. Races never lacked their presence, nor any scene of gaiety wanted the sanction of their attendance. Yet on all these occasions they maintained that decency of deportment which made them careful not to transgress the bounds of moderation, and to avoid the imputation of dishonouring their profession by those moral delinquencies which disgraced not a few of the clergy in other places."

A precisely similar account is given in a thoughtful article

1 See article in Good Words, by J. A. Froude, 1881. Republished in Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series: "The Oxford Counter-Refor

mation."

2 Memoirs of the Rev. Charles Jerram, p. 262.

which appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1887, nor does it at all differ from that given by Sir William Palmer, a leader of the early Oxford Movement, in his generous defence of the old times.

Now, it is not denied that such men did much good. They had many advantages, in being in touch with the laity, which are lacking in the more exclusively professional characters of their successors. But in times of a great upheaval, when the population was increasing with unexampled rapidity; when first principles were being discussed on all sides; when the godless notions imported from France on the one hand, and the wildest fanaticism emanating from the extreme left of Methodism on the other, were rampant; when constant supervision and a distinct and definite faith were absolutely necessary to produce any permanent effect,-they had not the Tоυ στ from which they could move the world. One can perfectly well understand how, in an age when everything was to be reformed, an outcry would be raised against a Church which was manned by such officers; but one can also perfectly well understand how, when serious danger threatened the Church, its friends, who under such a régime would be numerous, should rally round it. The real spiritual force of the Church, however, belonged not to the class just described, but to the two classes which will form the subjects of the next two chapters.

But before closing this sketch of the general state of the Church, it may be well to say all that need be said separately about those four dioceses which lay in the principality of Wales. It appears to me to have been perfectly well understood all through the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries that these dioceses were as integral a part of the Church of England as London or Yorkshire. This should be remembered when complaints-and perfectly just complaints-are made of Englishmen unacquainted with the Welsh language being appointed to ecclesiastical dignities in the principality over the heads of the native clergy. The fact is, the dioceses of St. David's, Llandaff, Bangor, and St.

"The Country Parson as he was and as he is," in Blackwood's Magazine for September, 1887. The whole of this most interesting and suggestive article deserves to be carefully studied.

C