Page:Two Years of Church Progress.djvu/14

 offence and defence, and the great National Loss; in France, commercial experiments and financial dangers; in America, the bursting of the bubble of democracy—the foundering in the deep seas, by its own unwieldiness, of that tall menacing galleon which had so long hovered round the shores of the Old World.

If we are asked whether we think the account sums up with, profit or loss to the Church, we have no hesitation in replying, with profit. Indeed, of all the items of the balance-sheet which we have recapitulated, the only one which, upon the face of it, seems detrimental, is that of 'Essays and Reviews.' We grant to the fullest the dangerous character of that pernicious volume; we recognise to the utmost the signal run which it has had among sensation readers, cumulating in its reprint in the feuilletons of Australian newspapers; but we reckon on the other side, the valuable shock which it has given to that large class of floating respectability, which nothing but such a revelation of ulterior intentions would have strung up to a more manly confession of a faith which was always implicit with them. Estimating at its right weight the frothiness of that popularity which the book has yet attained, we believe that all its success will, in the long run—and not a very long one either—prove most detrimental to that party, self-named of progress, who thought to set up their Koran in the prosy lucubrations of the 'Seven Champions of un-Christendom.' Two years ago, speaking of the Broad Church (so-called) party, we divided it into two classes, as follows:—

We now appeal with confidence to the divergence of thought evolved in the authorship on one side, and reception on the other, of 'Essays and Reviews' in proof of the justness of our antecedent estimate.

The general result of the two years of Church progress within which we confine our present investigation, has been to confirm that tendency towards conservative consolidation, of which, in our former article, we indicated the beginnings. Bright aspirations of universal peace. Catholic consent really in