[Illustration: Dean Stanley.]
[Illustration: "I was sick, and ye visited me."]
We have preferred not to dwell on one department of literature which,
like every other, has received great additions during our
period--that of religious controversy. A large portion of such
literature is in its very nature ephemeral; and some of the disputes
which have engaged the energies even of our greatest masters in
dialectics have not been in themselves of supreme importance; but
many points of doctrine and discipline have been violently canvassed
among professing Christians, and attacks of long-sustained vigour and
virulence have been made on almost every leading article of the
Christian creed by the avowed enemies or the only half-hostile
critics of the Church, which the champions of Scripture truth have
not been backward to repel. Amid all this confusion and strife of
assault and resistance one thing stands out clearly: Christianity and
its progress are more interesting to the national mind than ever
before. It has been well, too, that through all those fifty years a
large-minded and fervent but most unobtrusive and practical piety has
been enthroned in the highest places of the land--a piety which will
escape the condemnation of the King when He shall come in His glory,
and say to many false followers, "I was an hungred, and ye gave Me no
meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no drink; I was a stranger, and
ye took Me not in; naked, and ye clothed Me not; sick, and in prison,
and ye visited Me not."
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