It would
have been an ungracious task ruthlessly to lay bare and to descant upon
their weaknesses. That was done mercilessly by their contemporaries and
those of the next generation. There is more need now to redress the
balance by giving due weight to their many excellences.
It seems all the more necessary to bring out into full prominence their
claims upon the admiration of posterity, because they have scarcely done
justice to themselves in the writings they have left behind them. They
were not, as they have been represented, a set of amiable and
well-meaning but weak and illiterate fanatics. But their forte no doubt
lay more in preaching and in practical work than in writing.
Again, the stream of theological thought has to a great extent drifted
into a different current from that in which it ran in their day, and
this change may have prevented many good men from sympathising with them
as they deserved. The Evangelicals of the last century represented one
side, but only one side, of our Church's teaching. With the spirituality
and fervency of her liturgy and the 'Gospel' character of all her
formularies, they were far more in harmony than the so-called 'orthodox'
of their day.
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