Green’s Dictionary of Slang

one who belongs to the Anglican congregation of the Church of England (rather than an evangelical, known as a low and slow); also adj.

1831		Satirist (London) 24 Apr. 23/3: A waggish parson — a high and dry one, with the true sectarian smack.
1854		W.J. Conybeare Church Parties 74: Its adherents [of the High Church] are fallen from their high estate, and are contemptuously denominated the high and dry, just as the parallel development of the Low Church is nicknamed ‘low and slow’ [F&H].
1860		Hotten Dict. of Modern Sl. etc. (2nd edn) 154: high and dry an epithet applied to the soi-disant ‘orthodox’ clergy of the last century, for whom, while ill-paid curates did the work, the comforts of the establishment were its greatest charms. [...] Their equally uninteresting opponents deserved the corresponding appellation of ‘low and slow;’ while the so-called ‘Broad Church’ is defined with equal felicity as the ‘broad and shallow’.
1864, 1867, 1870		Hotten Sl. Dict.
1866		Letters by an Odd Boy 163: Why, in my theological opinions, should I be ‘high and dry,’ or ‘low and slow,’ or ‘broad and shallow?’.
1885		Bulletin (Sydney) 17 Jan. 18/2: He was called Sparrow Crane, and he edited a good old high and dry hot Protestant and ultra-Conservative paper, the Constitution.
1890–1904		Farmer & Henley Sl. and Its Analogues.
1908		Sporting Times 25 July 1/3: We invite him to go over to Waterloo Station on Saturday morning and mingle with the high-and-dry division seeing the others off to Thirst Park.