the aid of a good Providence, keep it from making
any serious inroads upon the clergy. Besides, it is too cold a principle
to prevail with the multitude." But as regarded what was called
Evangelical Religion or Puritanism, there was more to cause alarm. I
observed upon its organization; but on the other hand it had no
intellectual basis; no internal idea, no principle of unity, no
theology. "Its adherents," I said, "are already separating from each
other; they will melt away like a snow-drift. It has no straightforward
view on any one point, on which it professes to teach, and to hide its
poverty, it has dressed itself out in a maze of words. We have no dread
of it at all; we only fear what it may lead to. It does not stand on
intrenched ground, or make any pretence to a position; it does but
occupy the space between contending powers, Catholic Truth and
Rationalism. Then indeed will be the stern encounter, when two real and
living principles, simple, entire, and consistent, one in the Church,
the other out of it, at length rush upon each other, contending not for
names and words, or half-views, but for elementary notions and
distinctive moral characters."

Whether the ideas of the coming age upon religion were true or false, at
least they would be real. "In the present day," I said, "mistiness is
the mother of wisdom. A man who can set down a half-a-dozen general
propositions, which escape from destroying one another only by being
diluted into truisms, who can hold the balance between opposites so
skilfully as to do without fulcrum or beam, who never enunciates a truth
without guarding himself against being supposed to exclude the
contradictory,--who holds that Scripture is the only authority, yet that
the Church is to be deferred to, that faith only justifies, yet that it
does not justify without works, that grace does not depend on the
sacraments, yet is not given without them, that bishops are a divine
ordinance, yet those who have them not are in the same religious
condition as those who have,--this is your safe man and the hope of the
Church; this is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but
sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to guide it through
the channel of no-meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and
No."

This state of things, however, I said, could not last, if men were to
read and think. They "will not keep in that very attitude which you call
sound Church-of-Englandis