Transcribed from the 1870 Tinsley Brothers edition by DavidPrice, .
by
J. EWING RITCHIE,
author of “british senators,” “the night side of london,” etc.
“’TisNature’s law
That none, the meanest of created things,
Of form created the most vile and brute,
The dullest or most noxious, should exist
Divorced from good.”Wordsworth.
LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND.
1870.
p. ivlondon:
savill, edwardsand co., chandos street,
covent garden.
p. vto
SAMUEL MORLEY, Esq., M.P.
to whose unexampled activity andmunificence
(by no means confined within his owndenomination)
much of the religious life of london isdue,
this volume is respectfullydedicated
by
THE AUTHOR.
Man is undoubtedly a religious animal. In England at anyrate the remark holds good. No one who ignores thereligious element in our history can rightly understand whatEngland was, or how she came to be what she is. The fulleris our knowledge, the wider our field of investigation, the moreminute our inquiry, the stronger must be the conviction in allminds that religion has been for good or bad the great movingpower, and, in spite of the teachings of Secularism or ofPositivism, it is clear that as much as ever the questions whichare daily and hourly coming to the front have in them more orless of a religious element. It is not often foreignersperceive this. Take Louis Blanc as an illustration. As much as any foreigner he has mastered our habits andways—all that we call our inner life; yet, to him, theEnglish pulpit is a piece of wood—nothing more. According to him, the oracles are dumb, the sacred fire hasceased to burn, the veil of the temple is rent in twain; churchattendance, he tells us, in England, besides custom, has littleto recommend it. There is beauty in desolation—inlife changing into death—
“Before Decay’s effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers;”
p. viiibut not even of this beauty can theChurch of England boast. Dr. Döllinger—a morethoughtful, a more learned, a more laborious writer—is notmore flattering. The Church of England, he tells us, is“the Church only of a fragment of the nation,” of“the rich, cultivated, and fashionableclasses.” It teaches “the religion ofdeportment, of gentility, of clerical reserve.” “In its stiff and narrow organization, and all want ofpastoral elasticity, it feels itself powerless against themasse