From ‘THE EVANGELICAL SUCCESSION,’ IN ‘ESSAYS IN ECCLESIASTICAL BIOGRAPHY,’ by the Right Honourable Sir JAMES STEPHEN, K.C.B. London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1849.[313]
[By the kind permission of Herbert Stephen, Esq., and of Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co.]
‘… In obedience to the general law of human affairs, arrived the day of reaction. A new race of students had grown up at Oxford. They were men of unsullied, and even severe virtue; animated by a devotion which, if not very fervent, was at least genuine and grave; conversant with classical literature, and not without pretensions, more or less considerable, to an acquaintance with Christian antiquity. As they paced thoughtfully along those tall avenues, to which, a hundred years before, Whitfield and the Wesleys had been accustomed to retire for meditation, they recoiled, with a mixture of aversion and contempt, from the image of the crowded assemblages, and the dramatic exercises, in which the successors of those great men in the Church of England were performing so conspicuous a part. They revolved, not without indignation, the intellectual barrenness with which that Church had been stricken, from the time when her most popular teachers had not merely been satisfied to tread the narrow circle of the “Evangelical” theology, but had exulted in that bondage as indicating their possession of a purer light than had visited the other ministers of the Gospel. They invoked, with an occasional sigh, but not without many a bitter smile, the reappearance amongst us of a piety more profound and masculine, more meek and contemplative. They believed that such a change in the religious character of their age and country was a divine command, and that a commission had been given to themselves to carry it into effect.
‘… It came to pass, in the Oxonian as in other leagues, that the head moved forward by the impulse of the tail. Step by step in their progress, “the Church,” whom they worshipped, changed her attitude and her aspect. She soon disclaimed her Elizabethan or statutory origin, and then made vehement efforts to escape from her Elizabethan or statutory ceremonial. She assumed the title, and laid claim to the character, of the Primitive Church, or the Church of the Fathers, and at length arrogated to herself the prerogatives of that Catholic or universal Church, which “lifts her mitred front in courts and palaces,” whether at Rome, at Moscow, or at Lambeth, but whose presence is never vouchsafed to any who cannot trace back from Apostolic hands an Episcopal succession.