Catholic
countries of the Continent as well. It was in order to include the
privilege of reference to these aspects of our subject that this chapter
was given a double title. Yet in no country has the nineteenth century
so favourably altered the position of the Roman Catholic Church as in
England. In no country has a Church which has been esteemed to be
Protestant been so much influenced by Catholic ideas. This again is a
reason for including our reference to the reaction here.

According to Pfleiderer, a new movement in philosophy may be said to
have begun in Great Britain in the year 1825, with the publication of
Coleridge's _Aids to Reflection_. In Coleridge's _Confessions of an
Enquiring Spirit_, published six years after his death in 1834, we have
a suggestion of the biblical-critical movement which was beginning to
shape itself in Germany. In the same years we have evidence in the works
of Erskine and the early writings of Campbell, that in Scotland
theologians were thinking on Schleiermacher's lines. In those same years
books of more or less marked rationalistic tendency were put forth by
the Oriel School. Finally, with Pusey's _Assize Sermon_, in 1833, Newman
felt that the movement later to be called Tractarian had begun. We shall
not be wrong, therefore, in saying that the decade following 1825 saw
the beginnings in Britain of more formal reflexion upon all the aspects
of the theme with which we are concerned.

What went before that, however, in the way of liberal religious
thinking, though informal in its nature, should not be ignored. It was
the work of the poets of the end of the eighteenth and of the beginning
of the nineteenth centuries. The culmination of the great revolt against
the traditional in state and society and against the conventional in
religion, had been voiced in Britain largely by the poets. So vigorous
was this utterance and so effective, that some have spoken of the
contribution of the English poets to the theological reconstruction. It
is certain that the utterances of the poets tended greatly to the
dissemination of the new ideas. There was in Great Britain no such unity
as we have observed among the Germans, either of the movement as a whole
or in its various parts. There was a consecution nothing less than
marvellous in the work of the philosophers from Kant to Hegel. There was
a theological sequence from Schleiermacher to Ritschl. There was an
unceasing critical advance from the days