Men's souls were blinded, hebetated; and sunk under the influence of Atheism and Materialism, and Hume and Voltaire: the world for the present was as an extinct world, deserted of God, and incapable of well-doing till it changed its heart and spirit.

This, expressed I think with less of indignation and with more of long-drawn querulousness, was always recognizable as the ground-tone:--in which truly a pious young heart, driven into Radicalism and the opposition party, could not but recognize a too sorrowful truth; and ask of the Oracle, with all earnestness, What remedy, then?
The remedy, though Coleridge himself professed to see it as in sunbeams, could not, except by processes unspeakably difficult, be described to you at all.

On the whole, those dead Churches, this dead English Church especially, must be brought to life again.

Why not?
It was not dead; the soul of it, in this parched-up body, was tragically asleep only.
Atheistic Philosophy was true on its side, and Hume and Voltaire could on their own ground speak irrefragably for themselves against any Church: but lift the Church and them into a higher sphere.

Of argument, _they_ died into inanition, the Church revivified itself into pristine florid vigor,--became once more a living ship of the desert, and invincibly bore you over stock and stone.