There is much history implicit in that encounter, and by 1890 Coleridge ...

There is much history implicit in that encounter, and by 1890

Coleridge had won.

The Oxford divines took little note of Nonconformity.

Their object was to brace and fortify the Church against the coming onslaught of Liberalism and infidelity, and in the thirties, after the Oxford leaders, Newman and Pusey themselves, perhaps the most conspicuous, certainly the most influential, figure in the English Church was one who by his own profession was a Liberal and in the eye of his critics was not much better than an infidel.' But neither Anglicans nor Protestants had any real conception of the forces which were gathering against that stronghold of their common faith, the inerrancy of Holy Scripture; they were only beginning to learn, when they went out of the University or the seminary, how little religion meant to the half-barbarized population of the great towns.

The diffusion of scientific knowledge among the educated, the spread of old-fashioned rationalism downwards through the masses, had created a new problem for the religious teacher.

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