Untitled - Electric Scotland

230 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. x.
with the movement, such as it was, which produced
these disturbances. Mr. Lowder, as he has himself
recounted in a volume of the highest interest, 1 was ap
pointed in 1856 to take charge of a separate mission
district, now the parish of St. Peter s, London Docks. The
work was carried on from the first upon the lines of the
Catholic Revival/ of which Mr. Lowder had become a
warm adherent. But although he encountered the usual
amount of opposition from the disorderly and degraded,
there seems to have been* little if any attempt during his
first three years of progress to enlist against him the
sympathies of Protestants as such. Those who knew
anything about his work must have seen that the evils
with which he was endeavouring to grapple were not of a
kind to make men critical as to the precise means adopted
for the fight He was even assisted from time to time by
such men as Arthur Stanley, Frederick Maurice, and
Thomas Hughes, and had the parish been in his hands as
Rector its history might have been very different.
The Rector was the Rev. Bryan King, a man of
intense earnestness, high courage, and unflinching prin
ciple, but unsuited, in a singular degree, for the charge of
such a parish as St. George s in the East.
He had been appointed to the Rectory in 1842, the very
year in which Bishop Blomfield s famous Charge to the clergy
of London, enjoining the use of the surplice in the pulpit,
and the prayer for the Church Militant, had aroused the
fears and the hostility of the Evangelical party. Mr. King
not only made these changes, as in duty bound, but en
deavoured in many other ways to give a different character
to the slovenly services which had prevailed before his time.
Some of his friends subscribed to the support of a paid
choir, and the Psalms and Canticles, and, before long, the
1
Twenty -one Years in S. George s Mission, pp. 18-40.