demands to be made on them, so that these demands were not too strict.  Yet Evangelical religion had not been unfruitful, especially in public results.  It had led Howard and Elizabeth Fry to assail the brutalities of the prisons.  It had led Clarkson and Wilberforce to overthrow the slave trade, and ultimately slavery itself.  It had created great Missionary Societies.  It had given motive and impetus to countless philanthropic schemes.  What it failed in was the education and development of character; and this was the result of the increasing meagreness of its writing and preaching.  There were still Evangelical preachers of force and eloquence—­Robert Hall, Edward Irving, Chalmers, Jay of Bath—­but they were not Churchmen.  The circle of themes dwelt on by this school in the Church was a contracted one, and no one had found the way of enlarging it.  It shrank, in its fear of mere moralising, in its horror of the idea of merit or of the value of good works, from coming into contact with the manifold realities of the spirit of man:  it never seemed to get beyond the “first beginnings” of Christian teaching, the call to repent, the assurance of forgiveness:  it had nothing to say to the long and varied process of building 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