rinciples of Churchmanship seemed so radically decayed, and
there was such distraction in the councils of the clergy. The Bishop
of London of the day, an active and open-hearted man, had been for
years engaged in diluting the high orthodoxy of the Church by the
introduction of the Evangelical body into places of influence and
trust. He had deeply offended men who agreed with myself, by an
off-hand saying (as it was reported) to the effect that belief in the
apostolical succession had gone out with the non-jurors. "We can
count you," he said to some of the gravest and most venerated persons
of the old school. And the Evangelical party itself seemed, with
their late successes, to have lost that simplicity and unworldliness
which I admired so much in Milner and Scott. It was not that I did
not venerate such men as the then Bishop of Lichfield, and others of
similar sentiments, who were not yet promoted out of the ranks of
the clergy, but I thought little of them as a class. I thought they
played into the hands of the Liberals. With the Establishment thus
divided and threatened, thus ignorant of its true strength, I
compared that fresh vigorous power of which I was reading in the
first centuries. In her triumphant zeal on behalf of that Primeval
Mystery, to which I had had so great a devotion from my youth, I
recognised the movement of my Spiritual Mother. "Incessu patuit Dea."
The self-conquest of her ascetics, the patience of her martyrs, the
irresistible determination of her bishops, the joyous swing of her
advance, both exalted and abashed me. I said to myself, "Look on this
picture and on that;" I felt affection for my own Church, but not
tenderness; I felt dismay at her prospects, anger and scorn at her
do-nothing perplexity. I thought that if Liberalism once got a
footing within her, it was sure of the victory in the event. I saw
that Reformation principles were powerless to rescue her. As to
leaving her, the thought never crossed my imagination; still I ever
kept before me that there was something greater than the Established
Church, and that that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic, set up
from the beginning, of which she was but the local presence and
organ. She was nothing, unless she was this. She must be dealt with
strongly, or she would be lost. There was need of a second
Reformation.

At this time I was disengaged from college duties, and my health had
suffered from the labour involved in the composition o