ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter gives an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The nineteenth century was a strongly religious age in England. The English people consider their church establishment as the foundation of their whole constitution, with which, and with every part of which, it holds an indissoluble union. Church and state are ideas inseparable in their minds, and scarcely is the one ever mentioned without mentioning the other. The outbreak of the French Revolution, though at first hailed with joy by some in England, soon aroused dread and dismay among the upper, governing classes. The French Revolution had frightened all classes out of advanced ways of thinking, and society in town and country was Tory in politics and determined to allow no innovations upon the inherited faith. Churchmen feared that the ideas of the Revolution were dangerously hostile to the Christian religion and its institutions.
