uted in force and purpose by a widespread
deficiency in warmth of feeling and earnestness of conviction. Hot party
feeling is no doubt a mischief; but exemption from it is dearly bought
by the levelling influences of indifference, or of the lukewarmness
which approaches to it. The Church of the eighteenth century, and of the
Georgian period in general, was by no means deficient in estimable
clergymen who lived and died amid the well-earned respect of
parishioners and neighbours. But the tendencies of the time were in
favour of a decent, unexacting orthodoxy, neither too High, nor too
Broad, nor too Low, nor too strict. It may be well imagined that this
feeling among the clergy should also find outward expression in the
general character of the churches where they ministered, and of the
services in which they officiated. A traveller interested in modes of
worship might have passed through county after county, from one parish
church to another, and would have found, as compared with the present
time, a singular lack of variety. No doubt he would see carelessness and
neglect contrasting in too many places with a more comely order in
others. He would very rarely notice any disposition to develop ritual,
to vary forms, and to make use of whatever elasticity the laws of the
Church would permit, in order to make the externals of worship a more
forcible expression of one or another school of thought.

Our forefathers in the eighteenth century were almost always content to
maintain in tolerable, or scarcely tolerable repair, at the lowest
modicum of expense, the existing fabrics of their churches. It has been
truly remarked, that 'to this apathy we are much indebted; for, after
all, they took care that the buildings should not fall to the ground; if
they had done more, they would probably have done worse.'[838] For
ecclesiastical architecture was then, as is well known, at its lowest
ebb. 'Public taste,' wrote Warburton to Hurd in 1749, 'is the most
wretched imaginable.'[839] He was speaking, at the time, of poetry. But
poetry and art are closely connected; and it is next to impossible that
depth of feeling and grandeur of conception should be found in the one,
at a date when there is a marked deficiency of them in the other. There
were, however, special reasons for the decline of church architecture.
It had become, for very want of exercise, an almost forgotten art. In
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the work of building