ity had long been in suspense. As it was, other feelings came
in, which tended rather to widen than to diminish the breach between men
of strong and earnest opinions on different sides. In some men of warm
religious feeling the Revolution excited a fervent spirit of Radicalism.
However much they deplored the excesses and horrors which had taken
place in France, they did not cease to contemplate with passionate hope
the tumultuous upheaval of all old institutions, trusting that out of
the ruins of the past a new and better future would derive its birth.
The great majority of Englishmen, on the other hand, startled and
terrified with what they saw, became fixed in a resolute determination
that they would endure no sort of tampering with the English
Constitution in Church or State. Whatever changes might be made for
better or for worse, they would in any case have no change now.
Conservatism became in their eyes a sort of religious principle from
which they could not deviate without peril of treason to their faith.
This was an exceedingly common feeling; among none more so than with
that general bulk of steady sober-minded people of the middle classes
without whose consent changes, in which they would feel strongly
interested, could never be carried out. The extreme end of the last
century was not a time when Church legislation, for however excellent an
object, was likely to be carried out, or even thought of.

To return to the beginning of the period under review. 'Divine right,'
'Passive obedience,' 'Non-resistance,' are phrases which long ago have
lost life, and which sound over the gulf of time like faint and shadowy
echoes of controversies which belong to an already distant past. Even in
the middle of the century it must have been difficult to realise the
vehemence with which the semi-religious, semi-political, doctrines
contained in those terms had been disputed and maintained in the
generation preceding. Yet round those doctrines, in defence or in
opposition, some of the best and most honourable principles of human
nature used to be gathered--a high-minded love of liberty on the one
hand, a no less lofty spirit of self-sacrifice and loyalty on the other.

The open or half-concealed Jacobitism which, for many years after the
Revolution, prevailed in perhaps the majority of eighteenth-century
parsonages could scarcely fail of influencing the English Church at
large, both in its general action, and in its relation to t