cted people, render them worthy of the deepest respect. It would
have been an ungracious task ruthlessly to lay bare and to descant upon
their weaknesses. That was done mercilessly by their contemporaries and
those of the next generation. There is more need now to redress the
balance by giving due weight to their many excellences.

It seems all the more necessary to bring out into full prominence their
claims upon the admiration of posterity, because they have scarcely done
justice to themselves in the writings they have left behind them. They
were not, as they have been represented, a set of amiable and
well-meaning but weak and illiterate fanatics. But their forte no doubt
lay more in preaching and in practical work than in writing.

Again, the stream of theological thought has to a great extent drifted
into a different current from that in which it ran in their day, and
this change may have prevented many good men from sympathising with them
as they deserved. The Evangelicals of the last century represented one
side, but only one side, of our Church's teaching. With the spirituality
and fervency of her liturgy and the 'Gospel' character of all her
formularies, they were far more in harmony than the so-called 'orthodox'
of their day. But they did not, to say the least of it, bring into
prominence what are now called, and what would have been called in the
seventeenth century, the 'Catholic' features of the English Church. They
simply regarded her as one of many 'Protestant' communions. Distinctive
Church principles, in the technical sense of the term, formed no part of
their teaching. Daily services, frequent communions, the due observance
of her Fasts and Festivals, all that is implied in the terms 'the
aestheticism and symbolism of worship,' found no place in their course.
The consequence was that while they formed a compact and influential
body which still remained _within_ the pale of the Church, they also
revived very largely, though unintentionally, the Dissenting interest,
which was at least in as drooping a condition as the Church of England
before the Evangelical school arose. But every English Churchman has
reason to be deeply grateful to them for what they did, however much he
may be of opinion that their work required supplementing by others no
less earnest, but of a different tone of thought.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 708: More true than the assertion which follows--'and Count
Zinzendorf rocked the cradle