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admired and applauded, and whose praises ought always to accompany those of the great men formed under his care.'
I turn to his character as a divine. And here, little as there is of his theology, I cannot conceive a more interesting representative and standard of the old Anglican position than the Dean. He embodied, at the very moment that the counter-floods ran highest, that Via Media of the English Church, which alone of all Viae Mediae has had strength and sinew enough to form a principle, to arouse an enthusiasm, and to mould a character of its own. He reproduces, at a parallel crisis, the spirit of the Anglican Reformation—that Reformation which, whatever be its failings, had the courage and self-possession to set a limit to the wild rush of Revolution with a 'thus far shalt thou go and no further.' Aldrich came to the front just as that mighty Catholic reaction—which, springing out of the very heart of Rome, had seemed by the magnetic power of its passionate zeal to drain the Reformation of its old religious fervour and purity, and had driven it back, in the high fury of faith, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic—burst in upon and challenged the Protestantism of England. The old vigorous Puritanism had fallen back exhausted by the Rebellion, and was, in its weakness, intriguing for toleration with the Jesuit councillors of a Catholic king. The Church rose to the crisis. 'Many of the Clergy,' says even Burnet, 'now made good amends for past errors. They examined all the points of Popery with a solidity of judgment, a clearness of argument, a depth of learning, and a vivacity of writing far beyond anything which had before that time appeared in our language.' Among the chiefs of this movement, he classes the Christ
