as a righteous leader
in a noble effort to cut the Church loose from fatal entanglements with
an outworn system of interpretation; Wilberforce, as the remembrance
of his eloquence and of his personal charm dies away, and as the
revelations of his indiscreet biographers lay bare his modes of
procedure, is seen to have left, on the whole, the most disappointing
record made by any Anglican prelate during the nineteenth century.

But there was a far brighter page in the history of the Church of
England; for the second of the three who linked their names with that of
Colenso in the struggle was Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster.
His action during this whole persecution was an honour not only to the
Anglican Church but to humanity. For his own manhood and the exercise
of his own intellectual freedom he had cheerfully given up the high
preferment in the Church which had been easily within his grasp. To
him truth and justice were more than the decrees of a Convocation of
Canterbury or of a Pan-Anglican Synod; in this as in other matters he
braved the storm, never yielded to theological prejudice, from first to
last held out a brotherly hand to the persecuted bishop, and at the most
critical moment opened to him the pulpit of Westminster Abbey.(486)

(486) For interesting testimony to Stanley's character, from a quarter
from whence it would have been least expected, see a reminiscence of
Lord Shaftesbury in the Life of Frances Power Cobbe, London and New
York, 1894. The late Bishop of Massachusetts, Phillips Brooks, whose
death was a bereavement to his country and to the Church universal, once
gave the present writer a vivid description of a scene witnessed by him
in the Convocation of Canterbury, when Stanley virtually withstood alone
the obstinate traditionalism of the whole body in the matter of the
Athanasian Creed. It is to be hoped that this account may be brought to
light among the letters written by Brooks at that time. See also Dean
Church's Life and Letters, p. 294, for a very important testimony.

The third of the high ecclesiastics of the Church of England whose
names were linked in this contest was Thirlwall. He was undoubtedly
the foremost man in the Church of his time--the greatest ecclesiastical
statesman, the profoundest historical scholar, the theologian of
clearest vision in regard to the relations between the Church and his
epoch. Alone among his brother bishops at this period, he stood "f