It must either restore the past, or create a future.

The Oxford movement attempted the former; and of the future she was beginning to speak, when our conversation was interrupted by the presentation of other parties.
Subsequently, in reply to a note from her on some benevolent business, I alluded to that conversation, and expressed a wish that she would finish giving me her views of the religious state of England.

A portion of the letter that she wrote me in reply I insert, as being very characteristic in many respects:-- 'Various causes have been assigned for the decaying state of the English Church; which seems the more strange, because the clergy have improved, morally and intellectually, in the last twenty years.

Then why should their influence be diminished?
I think it is owing to the diffusion of a spirit of free enquiry.
'Doubts have arisen in the minds of many who are unhappily bound by subscription not to doubt; and, in consequence, they are habitually pretending either to believe or to disbelieve.

The state of Denmark cannot but be rotten, when to seem is the first object of the witnesses of truth.
'They may lead better lives, and bring forward abler arguments; but their efforts are paralysed by that unsoundness.