more calm and candid, as the storms and passions of three hundred years subside, they will see that in their haste and illusions they have wounded Him whom they professed to honour, and have destroyed His work whom they have desired to serve.
For the last thirty years there has been an awakening in the mind of England, such as, for three hundred years, has never been before. There is a sense of loss and of privation, an honest acknowledgment of the evil done by the so-called reformers; a desire to restore what has been broken down; a painful consciousness of division, contention, and uncertainty; a conviction that these things are contrary to the will and commandment of our Divine Master: an aspiration after unity, a hunger for truth, a longing after the return of the Divine Presence which once dwelt in the old churches of England. Besides this, there is a consciousness that the Church of Christ cannot be cribbed up within four seas; that it fills the world, and that the insular Christianity of England, even if it were perfectly united in itself, could not live long when disunited from the Christian world. The spread of the British Empire, and the spread of Anglicanism to the colonies, has still more powerfully awakened this aspiration for a higher unity. Wheresoever the insular religion of England goes, it finds a Church and a Faith before it, which contains islands and continents, and the whole world, in its unbroken unity. The colonies of Great Britain are acting powerfully, both in politics and religion, on the mother country. They both give and receive an influence which will deeply modify and assimilate
