leader. However, he never took any
active part in general politics, reserving his strength for those
ecclesiastical questions which seemed to lie within his peculiar
province.[17] Here he had two leading ideas: one, that the Church of
England must at all hazards continue to be an Established Church, in
alliance with, or subjection to, the State (for his Erastianism was
unqualified), and recognising the Crown as her head; the other, that
she must be a comprehensive Church, finding room in her bosom for
every sort or description of Christian, however much or little he
believed of the dogmas contained in the Thirty-nine Articles and the
Prayer-Book, to which she is bound by statute. The former view cut him
off from the Nonconformists and the Radicals; the latter exposed him
to the fire not only of those who, like the High Churchmen and the
Evangelicals, attach the utmost importance to these dogmas, but of
those also among the laity who hold that a man ought under no
circumstances to sign any test or use any form of prayer which does
not express his own convictions. Stanley would, of course, have
greatly preferred that the laws which regulate the Church of England
should be so relaxed as to require little or no assent to any
doctrinal propositions from her ministers. He strove for this; and he
continued to hope that this might be ultimately won. But he conceived
that in the meantime it was a less evil that men should be technically
bound by subscriptions they objected to than that the National Church
should be narrowed by the exclusion of those whose belief fell short
of her dogmatic standards. It was remarkable that not only did he
maintain this unpopular view of his with unshaken courage on every
occasion, pleading the cause of every supposed heretic against hostile
majorities with a complete forgetfulness of his own peace and ease,
but that no one ever thought of attributing the course he took to any
selfish or sinister motive. It was generally believed that his own
opinions were what nine-tenths of the Church of England would call
unorthodox. But the honesty and uprightness of his character were so
patent that nobody supposed that this fact made any difference, or
that it was for the sake of keeping his own place that he fought the
cause of others.

What his theological opinions were it might have puzzled Stanley
himself to explain. His mind was not fitted to grasp abstract
propositions. His historical imagination and