For his own
manhood and the exercise of his own intellectual freedom he had
cheerfully given up the high preferment in the Church which had
been easily within his grasp. To him truth and justice were more
than the decrees of a Convocation of Canterbury or of a
Pan-Anglican Synod; in this as in other matters he braved the
storm, never yielded to theological prejudice, from first to last
held out a brotherly hand to the persecuted bishop, and at the most
critical moment opened to him the pulpit of Westminster Abbey.[[356]]
The third of the high ecclesiastics of the Church of England whose
names were linked in this contest was Thirlwall. He was undoubtedly
the foremost man in the Church of his time--the greatest
ecclesiastical statesman, the profoundest historical scholar, the
theologian of clearest vision in regard to the relations between
the Church and his epoch. Alone among his brother bishops at this
period, he stood "four square to all the winds that blew," as
during all his life he stood against all storms of clerical or
popular unreason.
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