old friend of mine. Returning to his
parish after his autumn holiday, and noticing a woman at her cottage
door with a baby in her arms, he asked, "Has that child been baptised?"
"Well, sir," replied the curtsying mother, "I shouldn't like to say as
much as that; but your young man came and _did what he could_."

Lost in these entrancing recollections of Anglicanism as it once was,
but will never be again, I have wandered far from my theme. I began by
saying that all one has read, all one has heard, all one has been able
to collect by study or by conversation, points to the close of the
eighteenth century as the low-water mark of English religion and
morality. The first thirty years of the nineteenth century witnessed a
great revival, due chiefly to the Evangelical movement, and not only,
as in the previous century, on lines outside the Establishment, but in
the very heart and core of the Church of England. That movement, though
little countenanced by ecclesiastical authority, changed the whole tone
of religious thought and life in England. It recalled men to serious
ideas of faith and duty; it curbed profligacy, it made decency
fashionable, it revived the external usages of piety, and it prepared
the way for that later movement which, issuing from Oxford in 1833, has
transfigured the Church of England.

"I do not mean to say," wrote Mr. Gladstone in 1879, "that the founders
of the Oxford School announced, or even that they knew, to how large an
extent they were to be pupils and continuators of the Evangelical work,
besides being something else.... Their distinctive speech was of Church
and priesthood, of Sacraments and services, as the vesture under the
varied folds of which the Form of the Divine Redeemer was to be
exhibited to the world in a way capable of, and suited for, transmission
by a collective body from generation to generation. It may well have
happened that, in straining to secure for their ideas what they thought
their due place, some at least may have forgotten or disparaged that
personal and experimental life of the human soul with God which profits
by all ordinances but is tied to none, dwelling ever, through all its
varying moods, in the inner courts of the sanctuary whereof the walls
are not built with hands. The only matter, however, with which I am now
concerned is to record the fact that the pith and life of the
Evangelical teaching, as it consists in the reintroduction of Christ our
Lord to be th