Defenders of their Faith

The diversity of opinions which were held by Anglicans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was, ideally, the ingredients of a unifying comprehensiveness. In fact, it was invariably the cause of unhappy and tense divisions, which gradually became institutionalised in respectable political organisations: the circumspection of churchmen towards “party” was replaced by a conviction that while factiousness was un-Christian, political societies were natural and, indeed, essential expr