up the new
life of truth and goodness: it was nervously afraid of departing from
the consecrated phrases of its school, and in the perpetual iteration of
them it lost hold of the meaning they may once have had. It too often
found its guarantee for faithfulness in jealous suspicions, and in
fierce bigotries, and at length it presented all the characteristics of
an exhausted teaching and a spent enthusiasm. Claiming to be exclusively
spiritual, fervent, unworldly, the sole announcer of the free grace of
God amid self-righteousness and sin, it had come, in fact, to be on very
easy terms with the world. Yet it kept its hold on numbers of
spiritually-minded persons, for in truth there seemed to be nothing
better for those who saw in the affections the main field of religion.
But even of these good men, the monotonous language sounded to all but
themselves inconceivably hollow and wearisome; and in the hands of the
average teachers of the school, the idea of religion was becoming poor
and thin and unreal.

But besides these two great parties, each of them claiming to represent
the authentic and unchanging mind of the Church, there were independent
thinkers who took their place with neither and criticised both. Paley
had still his disciples at Cambridge, or if not disciples, yet
representatives of his masculine but not very profound and reverent way
of thinking; and a critical school, represented by names afterwards
famous, Connop Thirlwall and Julius Hare, strongly influenced by German
speculation, both in theology and history, began to attract attention.
And at Cambridge was growing, slowly and out of sight, a mind and an
influence which were to be at once the counterpart and the rival of the
Oxford movement, its ally for a short moment, and then its earnest and
often bitter enemy. In spite of the dominant teaching identified with
the name of Mr. Simeon, Frederic Maurice, with John Sterling and other
members of the Apostles' Club, was feeling for something truer and
nobler than the conventionalities of the religious world.[12] In Oxford,
mostly in a different way, more dry, more dialectical, and, perhaps it
may be said, more sober, definite, and ambitious of clearness, the same
spirit was at work. There was a certain drift towards Dissent among the
warmer spirits. Under the leading of Whately, questions were asked about
what was supposed to be beyond dispute with both Churchmen and
Evangelicals. Current phrases, the keynotes