into Christians and non-Christians:  Christians were all who professed to believe in Christ as a Divine Person and to worship Him,[6] and the brotherhood, the “Societas” of Christians, was all that was meant by “the Church” in the New Testament.  It mattered, of course, to the conscience of each Christian what he had made up his mind to believe, but to no one else.  Church organisation was, according to circumstances, partly inevitable or expedient, partly mischievous, but in no case of divine authority.  Teaching, ministering the word, was a thing of divine appointment, but not so the mode of exercising it, either as to persons, forms, or methods.  Sacraments there were, signs and pledges of divine love and help, in every action of life, in every sight of nature, and eminently two most touching ones, recommended to Christians by the Redeemer Himself; but except as a matter of mere order, one man might deal with these as lawfully as another.  Church history there was, fruitful in interest, instruction, and warning; for it was the record of the long struggle of the true idea of the Church against the false, and of the fatal disappearance of the true before the forces of blindness and wickedness.[7] Dr. Arnold’s was a passionate attempt to place the true idea in the light.  Of the difficulties of his theory he made light account.  There was the vivid central truth which glowed through his soul and quickened all his thoughts.  He became its champion and militant apostle.  These doctrines, combined with his strong political liberalism, made the Midlands hot for Dr. Arnold.  But he liked the fighting, as he thought, against the narrow and frightened orthodoxy round him.  And he was in the thick of this fighting when another set of ideas about the Church—­the ideas on which alone it seemed to a number of earnest and anxious minds that the cause of the Church could be maintained—­the ideas which were the beginning of the Oxford movement, crossed his path.  It was the old orthodox tradition of the Church, with fresh life put into it, which he flattered himself that he had so triumphantly demolished.  This intrusion of a despised rival to his own teaching about the Church—­teaching in which he believed with deep and fervent conviction—­profoundly irritated him; all the more that it came from men who had been among his friends, and who, he thought, should have known better.[8]

But neither Dr. Whately’s nor Dr. Arnold’s attempts to put the old subject of the Church in a new light gained much hold on the public mind.  One was too abstract; the other too unhistorical and revolutionary.  Both in Oxford and in the country were men whose hearts burned within them for something less speculative and vague, something more reverent and less individual, more in sympathy with the inherited spirit of the Church.  It did not need much searching to find in the facts and history of the Church ample evidence of principles distinct and inspiring, which, however long latent, or overlaid by superficial accretions,