esiastical policy.
His aim was to widen the bounds of the Church of England, so far as
the law could, without evasion, be stretched for that purpose. He bore
a leading part in obtaining an Act of Parliament which introduced a
new and less strict form of clerical subscription. He realised that
the Church of England can maintain her position as a State Church
only by adapting herself to the movements of opinion, and accordingly
he voted for the Divorce Bill of 1859, and for the Burials Bill, which
relieved Dissenters from a grievance that exposed the Established
Church to odium. The Irish Church Disestablishment Bill of 1869 threw
upon him, at the critical moment when it went from the House of
Commons, where it had passed by a large majority, to the House of
Lords, where a still larger majority was hostile, a duty delicate in
itself, and such as seldom falls to the lot of a prelate. The Queen
wrote to him suggesting that he should endeavour to effect a
compromise between Mr. Gladstone, then head of the Liberal Ministry,
and the leading Tory peers who were opposing the Bill. He conducted
the negotiation with tact and judgment, and succeeded in securing good
pecuniary terms for the Protestant Episcopal Establishment. Though he
had joined in the Letter of the Bishops which conveyed their strong
disapproval of the book called _Essays and Reviews_ (whose supposed
heretical tendencies roused such a storm in 1861), and had thereby
displeased his friends, Temple (afterwards archbishop), Jowett, and
Stanley,[20] he joined in the judgment of the Privy Council which in
1863 dismissed the charges against the impugned Essayists. Despite his
advocacy of the Bill which in 1874 provided a new procedure to be used
against clergymen transgressing the ritual prescribed by law, he
discouraged prosecutions, and did his utmost to keep Ritualists as
well as moderate Rationalists within the pale of the Church of
England. He did not succeed--no one could have succeeded, even though
he had spoken with the tongues of men and of angels--in stilling
ecclesiastical strife. The controversies of his days still rage,
though in a slightly different form. But in refusing to yield to the
pressure of any section, in regarding the opinion of the laity rather
than that of the clergy, in keeping close to the law yet giving it the
widest possible interpretation, he laid down the lines on which the
Anglican Established Church can best be defended and upheld. That