Page:Distinguished Churchmen.djvu/49

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THE BISHOP OF LANDAFF
27

parishes, and from that cause has needed additional churches.” In concluding a series of able articles on the subject of “The Diocese of St David's in the Nineteenth Century,” which appeared in the St David's Diocesan Gazette, Archdeacon Bevan says:—“We feel justified in putting forth a modest claim that the Church has made healthy progress during the latter half of the nineteenth century…. We submit that it has been neither spasmodic nor superficial; but quiet, steady and equable in the various departments of Church work, and that it has been carried on in the face of much discouragement from the attempts of political opponents to displace her from her position as a National Church and cripple her activity in the future. We deny that these attacks prompted the activity which we have described; and affirm, on the contrary, that the motive power has come from within rather than from without, having as its mainspring a higher conception of the Church and her mission than prevailed in the preceding (the eighteenth) century. In these features we discern grounds for believing that the Divine blessing has attended her efforts, and in humble reliance on a continuance of that blessing we enter with hope and confidence on the new century.”