a new and undefined supremacy, not only in the general concerns of the world, but specially in education.  It was the day of Holland House.  It was the time when a Society of which Lord Brougham was the soul, and which comprised a great number of important political and important scientific names, was definitely formed for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.  Their labours are hardly remembered now in the great changes for which they paved the way; but the Society was the means of getting written and of publishing at a cheap rate a number of original and excellent books on science, biography, and history.  It was the time of the Library of Useful Knowledge, and its companion, the Library of Entertaining Knowledge; of the Penny Magazine, and its Church rival, the Saturday Magazine, of the Penny Cyclopaedia, and Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia, and Murray’s Family Library:  popular series, which contained much of the work of the ablest men of the day, and which, though for the most part superseded now, were full of interest then.  Another creation of this epoch, and an unmistakable indication of its tendencies, was the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which met for the first time at Oxford in June 1832, not without a good deal of jealousy and misgiving, partly unreasonable, partly not unfounded, among men in whose hearts the cause and fortunes of religion were supreme.

Thus the time was ripe for great collisions of principles and aims; for the decomposition of elements which had been hitherto united; for sifting them out of their old combinations, and regrouping them according to their more natural affinities.  It was a time for the formation and development of unexpected novelties in teaching and practical effort.  There was a great historic Church party, imperfectly conscious of its position and responsibilities;[13] there was an active but declining pietistic school, resting on a feeble intellectual basis and narrow and meagre interpretations of Scripture, and strong only in its circle of philanthropic work; there was, confronting both, a rising body of inquisitive and, in some ways, menacing thought.  To men deeply interested in religion, the ground seemed confused and treacherous.  There was room, and there was a call, for new effort; but to find the resources for it, it seemed necessary to cut down deep below the level of what even good men accepted as the adequate expression of Christianity, and its fit application to the conditions of the nineteenth century.  It came to pass that there were men who had the heart to make this attempt.  As was said at starting, the actual movement began in the conviction that a great and sudden danger to the Church was at hand, and that an unusual effort must be made to meet it.  But if the occasion was in a measure accidental, there was nothing haphazard or tentative in the line chosen to encounter the danger.  From the first it was deliberately and distinctly taken.  The choice of it was the result of convictions which had been forming before the occasion came which called on them.  The religious ideas which governed the minds of those who led the movement had been traced, in outline at least, firmly and without faltering.