ABSTRACT
The bench of bishops was transformed at the end of the 1860s. For a decade until 1865, Lord Palmerston had steadily promoted Low Churchmen. When Archbishop Longley died in 1868, Disraeli, in his first ministry, was prepared to nominate the Low Churchman Ellicott to the primacy. In October 1869, on the death of the High Church Bishop Phillpotts, Gladstone appointed Temple to the vacant see of Exeter. The banner that Rowland Williams dropped was picked up by H. B. Wilson. Already in mid-1869 he had proposed to Benjamin Jowett, who eagerly agreed, a second volume of Essays and Reviews, reviving the original notion of a series of volumes. Wilson undertook two essays on the principles of the Reformation, and Jowett was to write two essays on the Reign of Law and another topic which eventually became the Religions of the World.
