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Religious Thought In England In The Nineteenth Century
Religious Thought In England In The Nineteenth Century Author:John Hunt Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Parr, Gisborne 13 had been the victim of Bishop Horsley's intemperate invective, he wrote,' I must look to him as something more than a mere lucky experimenta... more »list, when I know that his virtues in private life were acknowledged by his neighbours, admired by his congregation, and recognised almost by the unanimous suffrage of his most powerful and most distinguished antagonists.'1 Of Bishop Hoadly, the terror of High Churchmen, he wrote. ' The mild and heavenly temper which breathes through his works had spread its conspicuous influence over the minds of those who do and of those who do not accept his speculative opinions.'2 Of another well abused dignitary of the Church he wrote, ' Archdeacon Blackburn suspected that opportunities might arise when the transition from the Church of England to the Church of Rome would not be difficult to a certain class of ecclesiastics whose stiffness in theology, and whose predilection for a hierarchy, he was not accustomed to treat with much tenderness.' For the Evangelical Clergy Parr had as little affection as for the stiff theologians. He spoke of them contemptuously as believing they were 'taught of God.8 The Holy Spirit, according to some divines, had long ceased to work, and God was not now the Teacher of men. The next name is that of Thomas Gisborne,4 Prebendary of Durham. He was famous as a poet, preacher and moralist. His theology might be called Evangelical, but with a liberal tendency which prevented his identification with any party. He defended those who preach doctrine from the charge that they did not also preach morality.5 He found no form of Ecclesiastical polity in the New Testament, and he advocated a free subscription to the Articles, or better still a revision. Gisborne wrote a treatise called ' The Testimony of...« less