In fact, the popular Protestant theology, which we have criticised as such a grave perversion of the teaching of St. Paul, has not in the so-called Evangelical party of the Church of England its chief centre and stronghold. This party, which, following in the wake of Wesley and others, so felt in a day of general insensibility the power and comfort of the Christian religion, and which did so much to make others feel them, but which also adopted and promulgated a scientific account so inadequate and so misleading of the religion which attracted it,--this great party has done its work, and is now undergoing that law of transformation and development which obtains in a national Church. The power is passing from it to others, who will make good some of the aspects of religion which the Evangelicals neglected, and who will then, in their turn, from the same cause of the scientific inadequacy of their conception of Christianity, change and pass away. The Evangelical clergy no longer recruits itself with success, no longer lays hold on such promising subjects as formerly. It is losing the future and feels that it is losing it. Its signs of a vigorous life, its gaiety and audacity, are confined to its older members, too powerful to lose their own vigour, but without successors to whom to transmit it. It was impossible not to admire the genuine and rich though somewhat brutal humour of the Dean of Ripon's famous similitude of the two lepers.[2] But from which of the younger members of the Evangelical clergy do such strokes now come? The best of their own younger generation, the soldiers of their own training, are slipping away from them; and he who looks for the source whence popular Puritan theology now derives power and perpetuation, will not fix his eyes on the Evangelical clergy of the Church of England. [Footnote 2: In a letter to the _Times_ respecting Dr. Pusey and Dr. Temple, during the discussion caused by Dr. Temple's appointment to the see of Exeter. Dr. Temple was the total leper, so evidently a leper that all men would instinctively avoid him, and he ceased to be dangerous; Dr. Pusey was the partial leper, less deeply tainted, but on that very account more dangerous, because less likely to terrify people from coming near him. A piece of polemical humour, racy, indeed, but hardly urbane, and still less Christian!]