of many a sermon, were
fearlessly taken to pieces. Men were challenged to examine the meaning
of their words. They were cautioned or ridiculed as the case might be,
on the score of "confusion of thought" and "inaccuracy of mind"; they
were convicted of great logical sins, _ignoratio elenchi,_ or
_undistributed middle terms;_ and bold theories began to make their
appearance about religious principles and teaching, which did not easily
accommodate themselves to popular conceptions. In very different ways
and degrees, Davison, Copleston, Whately, Hawkins, Milman, and not
least, a brilliant naturalised Spaniard who sowed the seeds of doubt
around him, Blanco White, had broken through a number of accepted
opinions, and had presented some startling ideas to men who had thought
that all religious questions lay between the orthodoxy of Lambeth and
the orthodoxy of Clapham and Islington. And thus the foundation was
laid, at least, at Oxford of what was then called the Liberal School of
Theology. Its theories and paradoxes, then commonly associated with the
"_Noetic_" character of one college, Oriel, were thought startling and
venturesome when discussed in steady-going common-rooms and country
parsonages; but they were still cautious and old-fashioned compared
with what was to come after them. The distance is indeed great between
those early disturbers of lecture-rooms and University pulpits, and
their successors.

While this was going on within the Church, there was a great movement of
thought going on in the country. It was the time when Bentham's
utilitarianism had at length made its way into prominence and
importance. It had gained a hold on a number of powerful minds in
society and political life. It was threatening to become the dominant
and popular philosophy. It began, in some ways beneficially, to affect
and even control legislation. It made desperate attempts to take
possession of the whole province of morals. It forced those who saw
through its mischief, who hated and feared it, to seek a reason, and a
solid and strong one, for the faith which was in them as to the reality
of conscience and the mysterious distinction between right and wrong.
And it entered into a close alliance with science, which was beginning
to assert its claims, since then risen so high, to a new and undefined
supremacy, not only in the general concerns of the world, but specially
in education. It was the day of Holland House. It was the time when