Church Progress; A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Winchester

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1858. Excerpt: ... selves some sleeper who, a century ago, had fallen into a deep trance, and, after his hundred years of slumber, suddenly opened his eyes again to the light of day, and awoke to consciousness in the middle of the nineteenth century. We can imagine his bewilderment. The earth would seem to him a new creation, tenanted by a race of beings very dissimilar to those with whom he had been wont to associate--tillage and produce, and gardens of Paradise, a smiling and a fertile land, instead of the waste and wilderness--tens of thousands where he had known hundreds, populous cities where once stood the insignificant village hamlet--men jostling one another along the crowded thoroughfare of life with all that quickened movement of mind and intellect which characterises a country in its palmy state of highest civilisation. He would stand amazed at the developments of scientific research, the marvels of steam power, the facilities of intercommunication, --north calling to south and east to west--a host of mighty forces at work, with a power of expansion to which no limits can be assigned, and fraught with results of which none can fathom the extent: Look where he will, he sees the mind in action--agriculture, manufactures, machinery, commerce, traffic and transit, in every direction; all departments of in dustrial life exhibiting unmistakeable signs of an age of gigantic enterprise and of activity without a parallel. Now it cannot be dissembled that, in this phase of the world's history, onr duties, my Reverend Brethren, have undergone material changes. No man can stand still in the eddy of a whirlpool, or be quiescent and stationary while all around him is in movement. As well might he strive to stem the tide of the Atlantic in the fierce surging of its waters, or wr..