Twenty years after the Apology, Hobart returned to the field. The High Churchman Vindicated (1826) is shorter, sharper, and more confident than its predecessor. By the mid-1820s, Hobart was no longer the rising young controversialist of Trinity Church but the long-tenured Bishop of New York, and the book has the tone of a man defending a settled position rather than establishing one.
The volume is valuable for several reasons. It clarifies, in the space of a hundred pages, what Hobart understood himself to mean by the High Church position; it engages contemporary critics with whose names the modern reader may have only the slightest acquaintance; and it offers, almost in passing, a number of striking summary statements of doctrine that the Apology, with its bulk and its scholarly apparatus, had not made room for. It is the book to read first to understand what Hobart finally thought.
Read alongside the Apology, it gives a fuller picture of the development of Hobart’s ecclesiology over his most productive twenty years.