amuel Francis Wood, in a letter which came into my
hands on his death, "I have an idea. The mass of the Fathers (Justin,
Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Clement, Tertullian, Origen, Lactantius,
Sulpicius, Ambrose, Nazianzen), hold that, though Satan fell from the
beginning, the Angels fell before the deluge, falling in love with
the daughters of men. This has lately come across me as a remarkable
solution of a notion which I cannot help holding. Daniel speaks as if
each nation had its guardian Angel. I cannot but think that there are
beings with a great deal of good in them, yet with great defects, who
are the animating principles of certain institutions, etc., etc....
Take England, with many high virtues, and yet a low Catholicism. It
seems to me that John Bull is a Spirit neither of heaven nor hell....
Has not the Christian Church, in its parts, surrendered itself to one
or other of these simulations of the truth? ...How are we to avoid
Scylla and Charybdis and go straight on to the very image of Christ?"
etc., etc.

I am aware that what I have been saying will, with many men, be doing
credit to my imagination at the expense of my judgment--"Hippoclides
doesn't care;" I am not setting myself up as a pattern of good sense
or of anything else: I am but vindicating myself from the charge of
dishonesty.--There is indeed another view of the economy brought out,
in the course of the same dissertation on the subject, in my History
of the Arians, which has afforded matter for the latter imputation;
but I reserve it for the concluding portion of my reply.

While I was engaged in writing my work upon the Arians, great events
were happening at home and abroad, which brought out into form and
passionate expression the various beliefs which had so gradually been
winning their way into my mind. Shortly before, there had been a
revolution in France; the Bourbons had been dismissed: and I believed
that it was unchristian for nations to cast off their governors, and,
much more, sovereigns who had the divine right of inheritance. Again,
the great Reform agitation was going on around me as I wrote. The
Whigs had come into power; Lord Grey had told the Bishops to set
their house in order, and some of the prelates had been insulted and
threatened in the streets of London. The vital question was how were
we to keep the Church from being liberalised? there was such apathy
on the subject in some quarters, such imbecile alarm in others; the
true p