and hunters after preferment, pluralists who built fortunes and endowed families out of the Church, or country gentlemen in orders, who rode to hounds and shot and danced and farmed, and often did worse things.  Its average was what naturally in England would be the average, in a state of things in which great religious institutions have been for a long time settled and unmolested—­kindly, helpful, respectable, sociable persons of good sense and character, workers rather in a fashion of routine which no one thought of breaking, sometimes keeping up their University learning, and apt to employ it in odd and not very profitable inquiries; apt, too, to value themselves on their cheerfulness and quick wit; but often dull and dogmatic and quarrelsome, often insufferably pompous.  The custom of daily service and even of fasting was kept up more widely than is commonly supposed.  The Eucharist, though sparingly administered, and though it had been profaned by the operation of the Test Acts, was approached by religious people with deep reverence.  But besides the better, and the worse, and the average members of this, which called itself the Church party, there stood out a number of men of active and original minds, who, starting from the traditions of the party, were in advance of it in thought and knowledge, or in the desire to carry principles into action.  At the Universities learning was still represented by distinguished names.  At Oxford, Dr. Routh was still living and at work, and Van Mildert was not forgotten.  Bishop Lloyd, if he had lived, would have played a considerable part; and a young man of vast industry and great Oriental learning, Mr. Pusey, was coming on the scene.  Davison, in an age which had gone mad about the study of prophecy, had taught a more intelligent and sober way of regarding it; and Mr. John Miller’s Bampton Lectures, now probably only remembered by a striking sentence, quoted in a note to the Christian Year,[9] had impressed his readers with a deeper sense of the uses of Scripture.  Cambridge, besides scholars like Bishop Kaye, and accomplished writers like Mr. Le Bas and Mr. Lyall, could boast of Mr. Hugh James Rose, the most eminent person of his generation as a divine.  But the influence of this learned theology was at the time not equal to its value.  Sound requires atmosphere; and there was as yet no atmosphere in the public mind in which the voice of this theology could be heard.  The person who first gave body and force to Church theology, not to be mistaken or ignored, was Dr. Hook.  His massive and thorough Churchmanship was the independent growth of his own thoughts and reading.  Resolute, through good report and evil report, rough but very generous, stern both against Popery and Puritanism, he had become a power in the Midlands and the North, and first Coventry, then Leeds, were the centres of a new influence.  He was the apostle of the Church to the great middle class.