Evangelical lines, the lower
middle class might find within the Church the mental food which it now
seeks in Nonconformist chapels, and might gain in breadth and dignity by
belonging once more to a great historic body.

The Church of England, then, can justify its existence as English
Christianity, and in no other way. It began its separate career with a
series of (doubtless) illogical compromises, in the belief that there is
an underlying unity, though not uniformity, in the religion as well as
in the character of the English people, which would be strong enough to
hold a national Church together. The dissenters from the Reformation
settlement were numerically insignificant, and their existence was not
regarded as a peril to the Church, for it was recognised that in a free
country absolute agreement cannot be secured. The Roman Catholics, after
some futile persecution, were allowed to remain loyal to their old
allegiance in spiritual matters, while the Independents and similar
bodies were anarchical on principle, and upheld the 'dissidence of
Dissent' as a thing desirable in itself. But the defection of the
Wesleyan Methodists was another matter. This was a blow to the Church of
England as irreparable as the loss of Northern Europe to the Papacy. It
finally upset the balance of parties in the Church, by detaching from it
the larger number of the Evangelicals, particularly in the tradesman
class. It gave a great stimulus to Nonconformity, which now became for
the first time an important factor in the national life. Till the
Wesleyan secession, the Nonconformists in England had been a feeble
folk. From a return made to the Crown in 1700, it appeared that the
Dissenters numbered about one in twenty of the population. Now they are
as numerous as the Anglicans. Their prestige has also been largely
augmented by their dominating position in the United States, where the
Episcopal Church, long viewed with disfavour as tainted with British
sympathies, has never recovered its lost ground, and is a comparatively
small, though wealthy and influential sect. Within the Anglican
communion, the inevitable religious revival of the nineteenth century
began on Evangelical lines, but soon took a form determined by other
influences than those which covered England with the ostentatiously
hideous chapels of the Wesleyans. The extent of the revival has indeed
been much exaggerated by the numerous apologists of the Catholic
movement. The undou