Hitherto, Churchmen had taken their Church for granted as the mode of ...

Hitherto, Churchmen had taken their Church for granted as the mode of Protestantism established by law.

The Oxford Movement created an Anglican self-consciousness, parallel to the self-consciousness of the Protestant denominations, based on the assurance of apostolic descent, and inevitably, therefore, tending to sympathy, at least, with the one Church whose apostolic origin could not be denied. Apart from these two processes, the crystallization of Anglicanism round the Tractarians and of Nonconformity round the Wesleyans, a larger and more fluid conception of the Church was gathering strength.

The guiding hand was Blomfield of London, who also edited Aeschylus, and was a principal originator of the Sanitary Enquiry of 1839. But he would not allow ladies to attend Geological lectures at King's College, London.

One critic divided the rising generation into fluent Benthamites and muddled Coleridgians. S.T.C. once said to Miss Martineau 'You seem to regard society as an aggregate of individuals? 'Of course I do,' she replied.