Orthodox members of the Church of England their last hope of everlasting
damnation.”

This was a great triumph for the Broad Church party, and it is an
interesting event in the history of the English State-Church. Laymen
decided (overruling the opinion of the Archbishops of Canterbury and
York) what theological doctrines are and are not binding on a clergyman,
and granted within the Church a liberty of opinion which the majority of
the Church’s representatives regarded as pernicious. This liberty was
formally established in 1865 by an Act of Parliament, which altered the
form in which clergymen were required to subscribe the Thirty-nine
Articles. The episode of Essays and Reviews is a landmark in the history
of religious thought in England.

[208]

The liberal views of the Broad Churchmen and their attitude to the Bible
gradually produced some effect upon those who differed most from them;
and nowadays there is probably no one who would not admit, at least,
that such a passage as Genesis, Chapter XIX, might have been composed
without the direct inspiration of the Deity.

During the next few years orthodox public opinion was shocked or
disturbed by the appearance of several remarkable books which
criticized, ignored, or defied authority—Lyell’s Antiquity of Man,
Seeley’s Ecce Homo (which the pious Lord Shaftesbury said was “vomited
from the jaws of hell”), Lecky’s History of Rationalism. And a new poet
of liberty arose who did not fear to sound the loudest notes of defiance
against all that authority held sacred. All the great poets of the
nineteenth century were more or less unorthodox; Wordsworth in the years