It is a trite saying just now that there is a great crisis in Church affairs; but I think it must be allowed to be not less true than trite, even after making all allowance for the magnitude with which the time present always invests things present. In secular and material warfare it may be that sometimes an underrating difficulties, a blindness to the peril, is the very cause and means of safety or success. But in assaults like the present, where the battle-field is the Law and Order of the Church, where the contest is carried on not with sword or spear, but with the keen weapons of intellectual and moral contention, where very much turns and must turn upon the enlistment of public opinion upon this side or that; where prejudice, and ridicule, and sneer, and scoff, appealing constantly to the irreverence and perverseness of the evil side of human nature, backed up in large measure, as might be expected, by a licentious and unbelieving press, adapting itself to a licentious and unbelieving age; where these things are the daily engines of assault, there would seem to be no safety in shutting our eyes to the danger, merely hoping that all “will come some strange way right at last.” Especially when the assault is made upon doctrine, either directly or indirectly, (for if it be upon ceremonial representing doctrine it is indirectly upon doctrine itself,) when it takes the form of assault upon the integrity of the Prayer Book, and the Catholic _status_ of the Church of England in connection with it, we must be wise, and wary, and far-seeing to the utmost of our vision, if we would duly organize our defence and fight _well_ the battle for God’s Church and Gods Truth. We must indeed try not to exaggerate anything, but we must also endeavour not to underrate any real danger which exists, and especially not suffer our citadel to be undermined, whilst we are merely regarding a plausible or fair surface.
There seems, too, to be a peculiar and apt propriety in this term crisis, as applied to the present aspect of Church affairs. It is not merely that there is a great _danger_, but a danger coming to a head, which, if happily now overcome, will again subside. Johnson gives as the first sense of crisis, “The point in which the disease kills or changes to the better;” and, as the second, “The point of time at which any affair comes to the height,” according to the exact use of the word by Dryden:—