g or unreasonable that it should have been so, for it
is impossible to deny that these changes have profoundly altered large
portions of the beliefs that were once regarded as essential. One main
object of a religion was believed to have been to furnish what may be
called a theory of the universe--to explain its origin, its destiny, and
the strange contradictions and imperfections it presents. The Jewish
theory was a very clear and definite one, but it is certainly not that
of modern science.

Yet few things are more remarkable than the facility with which these
successive changes have gradually found their places within the
Established Church, and how little that Church has been shaken by this
fact. Even the Darwinian theory, though it has not yet passed into the
circle of fully established truth, is in its main lines constantly
mentioned with approbation by the clergy of the Church. The theory of
evolution largely pervades their teaching. The doctrine that the Bible
was never intended to teach science or scientific facts, and also the
main facts and conclusions of modern Biblical criticism, have been
largely accepted among the most educated clergy. Very few of them would
now deny the antiquity of the world, the antiquity of man, or the
antiquity of death, or would maintain that the Mosaic cosmogony was a
true and literal account of the origin of the globe and of man, or would
very strenuously argue either for the Mosaic authorship or the
infallibility of the Pentateuch.

And while changes of this kind have been going on in one direction,
another great movement has been taking place in an opposite one. The
Church of England was essentially a Protestant Church; though, being
constructed more than most other Churches under political influences, by
successive stages of progress, and with a view to including large and
varying sections of opinion in its fold, it retained, more than other
Churches, formularies and tenets derived from the Church it superseded.
The earnest Protestant and Puritan party which dominated in Scotland
and in the Continental Reformation, and which refused all compromise
with Rome, had not become powerful in English public opinion till some
time after the framework of the Church was established. The spirit of
compromise and conservatism which already characterised the English
people; the great part which kings and lawyers played in the formation
of the Church; their desire to maintain in England a si