Untitled - Electric Scotland

196 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. ix.
gelical fervour of the brothers Sumner, the incomparable
energy, versatility, and devotion of Bishop Wilberforce,
and the masterly thoroughness and accuracy of Bishop
Blomfield s constructive talent, were each of them potent
to recall the Church of England into life, and the
redoubtable Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter, already seventy-
eight years old, had lost nothing of the ability, the
pugnacity, and the shrewd and caustic wit, which made
him for half a century the champion of every cause that
he supported, and the sturdiest enemy of liberalism in
whatever form. Tait perhaps lacked the power, even
if he had had the will, to tread in the footsteps of
any
of these leaders. The line he was to follow was a
line of his own, which, whether better or worse than
any of those laid down by others, at least differed
widely from them all. The Evangelical Bishops and
their followers had made it impossible any longer to
describe the Church of England as
"
dead to the spiritual
hunger of human souls," but, with a few notable exceptions,
they had failed to gain
touch with the intellectual and
critical side of the life and conversation of educated men.
Literature, Science, Philosophy, Art, were by them re
garded as things altogether apart from Religion. Their
view of the antagonism between the Church and the world
led them to a strange distrust of the higher forms of human
usefulness and activity.
These belonged to the world, and
the. main business of the religious man was with religion
as a personal matter between himself and his God.
Bishop Blomfield and Bishop Wilberforce had each of
them taken a view of the Church s duties very different
from that of the Evangelical Bishops. It is generally
admitted to have been the capacity and vigour of the
former which, in the years succeeding the Reform Bill,
had saved the Church from the destructive zeal of those