bishops, furnished with ample leisure and splendid revenues, presided in unapproachable state over their clergy and held their own among the great county families.  Most things have a side for which something can be said; and we may truthfully and thankfully recall that among the clergy of those days there were not a few but many instances, not only of gentle manners, and warm benevolence, and cultivated intelligence, but of simple piety and holy life.[4] But the fortunes of the Church are not safe in the hands of a clergy, of which a great part take their obligations easily.  It was slumbering and sleeping when the visitation of days of change and trouble came upon it.

Against this state of things the Oxford movement was a determined revolt; but, as has been said, it was not the only one, nor the first.  A profound discontent at the state of religion in England had taken possession of many powerful and serious minds in the generation which was rising into manhood at the close of the first quarter of the century; and others besides the leaders of the movement were feeling their way to firmer ground.  Other writers of very different principles, and with different objects, had become alive, among other things, to the importance of true ideas about the Church, impatient at the ignorance and shallowness of the current views of it, and alarmed at the dangers which menaced it.  Two Oxford teachers who commanded much attention by their force and boldness—­Dr. Whately and Dr. Arnold—­had developed their theories about the nature, constitution, and functions of the Church.  They were dissatisfied with the general stagnation of religious opinion, on this as on other subjects.  They agreed in resenting the unintelligent shortsightedness which relegated such a matter to a third or fourth rank in the scale of religious teaching.  They agreed also in seizing the spiritual aspect of the Church, and in raising the idea of it above the level of the poor and worldly conceptions on the assumption of which questions relating to it were popularly discussed.  But in their fundamental principles they were far apart.  I assume, on the authority of Cardinal Newman, what was widely believed in Oxford, and never apparently denied, that the volume entitled Letters of an Episcopalian,[5] 1826, was, in some sense at least, the work of Dr. Whately.  In it is sketched forth the conception of an organised body, introduced into the world by Christ Himself, endowed with definite spiritual powers and with no other, and, whether connected with the State or not, having an independent existence and inalienable claims, with its own objects and laws, with its own moral standard and spirit and character.  From this book Cardinal Newman tells us that he learnt his theory of the Church, though it was, after all, but the theory received from the first appearance of Christian history; and he records also the deep impression which it made on others.  Dr. Arnold’s view was a much simpler one.  He divided the world