mprovement of this
life; it would all go on, if what we experience now was our only scene
and destiny. This perpetual antithesis haunted him, when he knew it, or
when he did not. Against it the Church ought to be the perpetual
protest, and the fearless challenge, as it was in the days of the New
Testament. But the English Church had drunk in, he held, too deeply the
temper, ideas, and laws of an ambitious and advancing civilisation; so
much so as to be unfaithful to its special charge and mission. The
prophet had ceased to rebuke, warn, and suffer; he had thrown in his
lot with those who had ceased to be cruel and inhuman, but who thought
only of making their dwelling-place as secure and happy as they could.
The Church had become respectable, comfortable, sensible, temperate,
liberal; jealous about the forms of its creeds, equally jealous of its
secular rights, interested in the discussion of subordinate questions,
and becoming more and more tolerant of differences; ready for works of
benevolence and large charity, in sympathy with the agricultural poor,
open-handed in its gifts; a willing fellow-worker with society in
kindly deeds, and its accomplice in secularity. All this was admirable,
but it was not the life of the New Testament, and it was _that_ which
filled his thoughts. The English Church had exchanged religion for
civilisation, the first century for the nineteenth, the New Testament
as it is written, for a counterfeit of it interpreted by Paley or Mr.
Simeon; and it seemed to have betrayed its trust.

Form after form was tried by him, the Christianity of Evangelicalism,
the Christianity of Whately, the Christianity of Hawkins, the
Christianity of Keble and Pusey; it was all very well, but it was not
the Christianity of the New Testament and of the first ages. He wrote
the _Church of the Fathers_ to show they were not merely evidences of
religion, but really living men; that they could and did live as they
taught, and what was there like the New Testament or even the first
ages now? Alas! there was nothing completely like them; but of all
unlike things, the Church of England with its "smug parsons," and
pony-carriages for their wives and daughters, seemed to him the most
unlike: more unlike than the great unreformed Roman Church, with its
strange, unscriptural doctrines and its undeniable crimes, and its
alliance, wherever it could, with the world. But at least the Roman
Church had not only preserved, but maint