omething about the nature of the church and its office,
and noting the many symptoms of revival and reform within her
borders, I dreamed that she was capable of recovering lost ground,
and of bringing back the nation to unity in her communion. A
notable projection from the ivory gate,

'Sed falsa ad coelum mittunt insomnia manes.'[108]

From these points of view the effort seems contemptible. But I
think that there is more to be said. The land was overspread with a
thick curtain of prejudice. The foundations of the historic church
of England, except in the minds of a few divines, were obscured.
The evangelical movement, with all its virtues and merits, had the
vice of individualising religion in degree perhaps unexampled, and
of rendering the language of holy scripture about Mount Sion and
the kingdom of heaven little better than a jargon.... To meet the
demands of the coming time, it was a matter of vital necessity to
cut a way through all this darkness to a clearer and more solid
position. Immense progress has been made in that direction during
my lifetime, and I am inclined to hope that my book imparted a
certain amount of stimulus to the public mind, and made some small
contribution to the needful process in its earliest stage.

In the early pages of this very book, Mr. Gladstone says, that the union
of church and state is to the church of secondary though great
importance; _her_ foundations are on the holy hills and her condition
would be no pitiable one, should she once more occupy the position that
she held before the reign of Constantine.[109] Faint echo of the
unforgotten lines in which Dante cries out to Constantine what woes his
fatal dower to the papacy had brought down on religion and mankind.[110]
In these sentences lay a germ that events were speedily to draw towards
maturity, a foreshadowing of the supreme principle that neither Oxford
nor any other place had yet taught him, 'the value of liberty as an
essential condition of excellence in human things.'

WRITES _CHURCH PRINCIPLES_

This revelation only turned his zeal for religion as the paramount issue
of the time and of all times into another channel. Feeling the
overwhelming strength of the tide that was running against his view of
what he counted vital aspects of the church as a national institution,
he next flew to the new task