r disruption severing men from their old religious
observances. Such a transition has silently taken place in England
among great numbers of educated men, and in some measure under the
influence of the clergy. Nor has it, I think, weakened the Church. The
standard of duty among such men has not sunk, but has in most
departments perceptibly risen: their zeal has not diminished, though it
flows rather in philanthropic than in purely ecclesiastical channels.
The conviction that the special dogmas which divided other Protestant
bodies from the Establishment rested on no substantial basis and have no
real importance tells in favour of the larger and the more liberal
Church, and the comprehensiveness which allows highly accentuated
sacerdotalism and latitudinarianism in the same Church is in the eyes of
many of them rather an element of strength than of weakness.

Few men have watched the religious tendencies of the time with a keener
eye than Cardinal Newman, and no man hated with a more intense hatred
the latitudinarian tendencies which he witnessed. His judgment of their
effect on the Establishment is very remarkable. In a letter to his
friend Isaac Williams he says: 'Everything I hear makes me fear that
latitudinarian opinions are spreading furiously in the Church of
England. I grieve deeply at it. The Anglican Church has been a most
useful breakwater against Scepticism. The time might come when you, as
well as I, might expect that it would be said above, "Why cumbereth it
the ground?" but at present it upholds far more truth in England than
any other form of religion would, and than the Catholic Roman Church
could. But what I fear is that it is _tending_ to a powerful
Establishment teaching direct error, and more powerful than it has ever
been; thrice powerful because it does teach error.'[60]

It is, however, of course, evident that the latitude of opinion which
may be reasonably claimed by the clergy of a Church encumbered with many
articles and doctrinal formularies is not unlimited, and each man must
for himself draw the line. The fact, too, that the Church is an
Established Church imposes some special obligations on its ministers. It
is their first duty to celebrate public worship in such a form that all
members of the Church of England may be able to join in it. Whatever
interpretations may be placed upon the ceremonies of the Church, those
ceremonies, at least, should be substantially the same. A stranger who
ent