and ineffective.  But stronger and far-seeing minds perceived the need of a broad and intelligible basis on which to maintain the cause of the Church.  For the air was full of new ideas; the temper of the time was bold and enterprising.  It was felt by men who looked forward, that to hold their own they must have something more to show than custom or alleged expediency—­they must sound the depths of their own convictions, and not be afraid to assert the claims of these convictions on men’s reason and imagination as well as on their associations and feelings.  The same dangers and necessities acted differently on different minds; but among those who were awakened by them to the presence of a great crisis were the first movers in what came to be known as the Tractarian movement.  The stir around them, the perils which seemed to threaten, were a call to them to examine afresh the meaning of their familiar words and professions.

For the Church, as it had been in the quiet days of the eighteenth century, was scarcely adapted to the needs of more stirring times.  The idea of clerical life had certainly sunk, both in fact and in the popular estimate of it.  The disproportion between the purposes for which the Church with its ministry was founded and the actual tone of feeling among those responsible for its service had become too great.  Men were afraid of principles; the one thing they most shrank from was the suspicion of enthusiasm.  Bishop Lavington wrote a book to hold up to scorn the enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists; and what would have seemed reasonable and natural in matters of religion and worship in the age of Cranmer, in the age of Hooker, in the age of Andrewes, or in the age of Ken, seemed extravagant in the age which reflected the spirit of Tillotson and Secker, and even Porteus.  The typical clergyman in English pictures of the manners of the day, in the Vicar of Wakefield, in Miss Austen’s novels, in Crabbe’s Parish Register, is represented, often quite unsuspiciously, as a kindly and respectable person, but certainly not alive to the greatness of his calling.  He was often much, very much, to the society round him.  When communication was so difficult and infrequent, he filled a place in the country life of England which no one else could fill.  He was often the patriarch of his parish, its ruler, its doctor, its lawyer, its magistrate, as well as its teacher, before whom vice trembled and rebellion dared not show itself.  The idea of the priest was not quite forgotten; but there was much—­much even of what was good and useful—­to obscure it.  The beauty of the English Church in this time was its family life of purity and simplicity; its blot was quiet worldliness.  It has sometimes been the fashion in later days of strife and disquiet to regret that unpretending estimate of clerical duty and those easy-going days; as it has sometimes been the fashion to regret the pomp and dignity with which well-born or scholarly