who hated as nonconformists, the English Establishment. This was
his most popular work, but he wrote many others in the same temper,
that fill six or seven octavos.] of old, in a spirit of hostility
to his own fellow-churchmen; but, on the contrary, in the tone
of one relying upon support from his clerical brethren, he stands
forward as expositor and champion of views now prevailing amongst
the _elite_ of the English Church. So construed, the book
is, indeed, a most extraordinary one, and exposes a history that
almost shocks one of the strides made in religious speculation.
Opinions change slowly and stealthily. The steps of the changes are
generally continuous; but sometimes it happens that the notice of
such steps, the publication of such changes, is not continuous,
that it comes upon us _per saltum_, and, consequently, with
the stunning effect of an apparent treachery. Every thoughtful man
raises his hands with an involuntary gesture of awe at the revolutions
of so revolutionary an age, when thus summoned to the spectacle
of an English prelate serving a piece of artillery against what
once were fancied to be main outworks of religion, and at a station
sometimes considerably in advance of any occupied by Voltaire.[Footnote:
Let not the reader misunderstand me; I do not mean that the clerical
writer now before us (bishop or not bishop) is more hostile to
religion than Voltaire, or is hostile at all. On the contrary, he
is, perhaps, profoundly religious, and he writes with neither levity
nor insincerity. But this conscientious spirit, and this piety, do
but the more call into relief the audacity of his free-thinking--do
but the more forcibly illustrate the prodigious changes wrought by
time, and by the contagion from secular revolutions, in the spirit
of religious philosophy.]

It is this audacity of speculation, I apprehend, this _etalage_