Lost in these entrancing recollections of Anglicanism as it once was, but will never be again, I have wandered far from my theme.  I began by saying that all one has read, all one has heard, all one has been able to collect by study or by conversation, points to the close of the eighteenth century as the low-water mark of English religion and morality.  The first thirty years of the nineteenth century witnessed a great revival, due chiefly to the Evangelical movement, and not only, as in the previous century, on lines outside the Establishment, but in the very heart and core of the Church of England.  That movement, though little countenanced by ecclesiastical authority, changed the whole tone of religious thought and life in England.  It recalled men to serious ideas of faith and duty; it curbed profligacy, it made decency fashionable, it revived the external usages of piety, and it prepared the way for that later movement which, issuing from Oxford in 1833, has transfigured the Church of England.

“I do not mean to say,” wrote Mr. Gladstone in 1879, “that the founders of the Oxford School announced, or even that they knew, to how large an extent they were to be pupils and continuators of the Evangelical work, besides being something else....  Their distinctive speech was of Church and priesthood, of Sacraments and services, as the vesture under the varied folds of which the Form of the Divine Redeemer was to be exhibited to the world in a way capable of, and suited for, transmission by a collective body from generation to generation.  It may well have happened that, in straining to secure for their ideas what they thought their due place, some at least may have forgotten or disparaged that personal and experimental life of the human soul with God which profits by all ordinances but is tied to none, dwelling ever, through all its varying moods, in the inner courts of the sanctuary whereof the walls are not built with hands.  The only matter, however, with which I am now concerned is to record the fact that the pith and life of the Evangelical teaching, as it consists in the reintroduction of Christ our Lord to be the woof and warp of preaching, was the great gift of the movement to the teaching Church, and has now penetrated and possessed it on a scale so general that it may be considered as pervading the whole mass.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[6] Lord Holland’s Memoirs of the Whig Party, ii. p. 123.

[7] The property of Colonel Davies-Evans of Highmead.

[8] Written in 1897.

VII.

SOCIAL EQUALIZATION.

It was a characteristic saying of Talleyrand that no one could conceive how pleasant life was capable of being who had not belonged to the French aristocracy before the Revolution.  There were, no doubt, in the case of that great man’s congeners some legal and constitutional prerogatives which rendered their condition supremely enviable; but so far as splendour, stateliness, and exclusive privilege are elements of a pleasant life, he might have extended his remark to England.  Similar conditions of social existence here and in France were similarly and simultaneously transformed by the same tremendous upheaval which marked the final disappearance of the feudal spirit and the birth of the modern world.