Nothing more dogmatic than this could safely be put forward as representing his theology; but, though not dogmatic, his mind was intensely ecclesiastical.  His contempt for individual whims and fancies, his love of corporate action and collective control, operated as powerfully in the religious as in the social sphere.  He admired and clave to the Church of England because it was not, like Miss Cobbe’s new religion and the British College of Health, the product of an individual fancy, setting out to make all things new on a plan of its own.  The Church of England, whether it could theologically be called “Catholic” or not, was certainly “the continuous and historical Church of this country.”  In 1869 he praised his friend Temple, afterwards Archbishop, for “showing his strong Church feeling, and sense of the value and greatness of the historic development of Christianity, of which the Church is the expression.”  It was the National organ for promoting Righteousness and Perfection by means of Culture and for diffusing Sweetness and Light.  In the last year of his life he wrote to Mr. Lionel Tollemache:  “I consider myself, to adopt your very good expression, a Liberal Anglican; and I think the times are in favour of our being allowed so to call ourselves.”

As regards differences of opinion inside the Church, he saw no harm in them.  He held that the Church must maintain Episcopacy as a matter of historical development, and as “its link with the past—­its share in the beauty and the poetry and the charm for the imagination,” which belong to Catholicism.  This being so, the “latitudinarianism of the Broad Churchmen” who wished to entice the Dissenters into the Church was “quite illusory” so long as opposition to Episcopacy was one of the main tenets of Nonconformity.  But he thought that the Church was likely before long to get rid of the Athanasian Creed and the Thirty-nine Articles; and he urged that, as no one could enforce belief in such doctrines as the Real Presence, Apostolic Succession, and Priestly Absolution, Churchmen who rejected these could quite comfortably remain in the Church, side by side with others who accepted them.

The Church, then, as historically descended and legally established, ought to be maintained, honoured, and frequented; and, so far, his practice accorded with his belief.  He had indeed no more sympathy with hysterical devotions than with fanatical faiths.  He saw with amused eye the gestures and behaviour of the “Energumens” during the celebration of Holy Communion in a Ritualistic church—­“the floor of the church strewn with what seem to be the dying and the dead, progress to the altar almost barred by forms suddenly dropping as if they were shot in battle, the delighted adoption of vehement rites, till yesterday unknown, adopted and practised now with all that absence of tact, measure, and correct perception in things of form and manner, all that slowness to see when they are making themselves ridiculous, which belongs to the people of our English race.”