in some quarters been itself condemned as intrinsically
pernicious,--as if leading to lying and equivocation, when applied, as I
have applied it in my remarks upon it in my History of the Arians, to
matters of conduct. My answer to this imputation I postpone to the
concluding pages of my Volume.

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 held 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 liberalized? there was such apathy on the subject in
some quarters, such imbecile alarm in others; the true principles of
Churchmanship seemed so radically decayed, and there was such
distraction in the councils of the Clergy. Blomfield, the Bishop of
London of the day, an active and open-hearted man, had been for years
engaged in diluting the high orthodoxy of the Church by the introduction
of members of the Evangelical body into places of influence and trust.
He had deeply offended men who agreed in opinion with myself, by an
off-hand saying (as it was reported) to the effect that belief in the
Apostolical succession had gone out with the Non-jurors. "We can count
you," he said to some of the gravest and most venerated persons of the
old school. And the Evangelical party itself, with their late successes,
seemed to have lost that simplicity and unworldliness which I admired so
much in Milner and Scott. It was not that I did not venerate such men as
Ryder, the then Bishop of Lichfield, and others of similar sentiments,
who were not yet promoted out of the ranks of the Clergy, but I thought
little of the Evangelicals as a class. I thought they played into the
hands of the Liberals. With the Establishment thus divided and
threatened, thus ignorant of its true strength, I compared that fresh
vigorous Power of which I was reading in the first centuries. In her
triu