orced into channels which led
nowhither, as in France and southern Germany; nor were men who might
otherwise have pursued it dazzled and drawn away from it by the
multitude of splendid prizes for plausibility, for sophistry, or for
silence displayed before the ecclesiastical vision in England. In the
frugal homes of North German and Dutch professors and pastors high
thinking on these great subjects went steadily on, and the "liberty of
teaching," which is the glory of the northern Continental universities,
while it did not secure honest thinkers against vexations, did at least
protect them against the persecutions which in other countries would
have thwarted their studies and starved their families.(477)

(477) As to the influence of Kant on honest thought in Germany, see
Pfleiderer, as above, chap. i.

In England the admission of the new current of thought was apparently
impossible. The traditional system of biblical interpretation seemed
established on British soil forever. It was knit into the whole fabric
of thought and observance; it was protected by the most justly esteemed
hierarchy the world has ever seen; it was intrenched behind the bishops'
palaces, the cathedral stalls, the professors' chairs, the country
parsonages--all these, as a rule, the seats of high endeavour and
beautiful culture. The older thought held a controlling voice in the
senate of the nation; it was dear to the hearts of all classes; it was
superbly endowed; every strong thinker seemed to hold a brief, or to be
in receipt of a retaining fee for it. As to preferment in the Church,
there was a cynical aphorism current, "He may hold anything who will
hold his tongue."(478)

(478) For an eloquent and at the same time profound statement of the
evils flowing from the "moral terrorism" and "intellectual tyrrany"
at Oxford at the period referred to, see quotation in Pfleiderer,
Development of Theology, p. 371.

For the alloy of interested motives among English Church dignitiaries,
see the pungent criticism of Bishop Hampden by Canon Liddon, in his Life
of Pusey, vol. i, p. 363.

Yet, while there was inevitably much alloy of worldly wisdom in the
opposition to the new thought, no just thinker can deny far higher
motives to many, perhaps to most, of the ecclesiastics who were resolute
against it. The evangelical movement incarnate in the Wesleys had not
spent its strength; the movement begun by Pusey, Newman, Keble, and
their c