for utterance, and he was free from that dark stain of mental disease which poisoned Rousseau's life. But Fletcher, on the other hand, belongs as distinctly to a mere side current as Rousseau to the main stream of European thought. The quiet vicarage of Madeley was, in fact, a hermitage far less accessible than the Island of St. Pierre to the great forces of social upheaval. There Fletcher could live in a bygone period, studying the theological problems which had been threshed out by the middle of the previous century. Formerly at the centre, they had now been banished to the very outskirts of speculation. A philosophical speculation may first lose its interest either for the intellectual leaders of mankind, or for their followers. When it disappears from the great arena of serious controversy, where the keenest thinkers reason under the healthy stimulus of contact with living men, it may retire to the schools or take refuge in country parsonages. Some minds enjoy a discussion all the more because they have to argue with the dead, and others have not yet discovered that it has ceased to have real vitality. If the pedant is contemptible, we feel at worst pity for men like Fletcher, who are discussing, in all earnestness, matters which to them are still of vital import. In this excellent man's checks to Antinomianism' and 'Scripture scales'-a characteristic title for a process of carefully balancing long chains of rival texts-we find mere relics of what once was thought, but scorn is rebuked by his simplicity. The good man really supposes that the battle is still to be decided by the use of the old-fashioned bows and arrows. We pass by, and feel that there would be a kind of profanity in exposing his weakness.

105. Toplady, his chief antagonist, seems to have been a man of considerable native powers of intellect, guided by a temperament of excessive fervour. His language towards Wesley is abusive and indecorous. He is in too great a passion to argue effectively. His chief work is an historical attempt to vindicate the Church of England from the charge of Arminianism, and he is still an intellectual contemporary of Calvin or Zanchius, and the early Puritan writers whom he quotes in utterunconsciousness that they belong to an antedeluvian epoch. His latest authority is Jonathan Edwards, whose writings represent the blending of the old Calvinism with more recent

philosophical thought. Toplady, however, shows a greater logical insight than his other allies and antagonists, and remonstrates very justly with Priestley, who inherited the ordinary hatred of the rationalist school for Calvinism, whilst abandoning the rationalist dogma of free-will. Priestley previously denied that the Calvinist theory had any relation to the philosophical doctrine of causation. Toplady regards the philosophical doctrine as a perversion of Calvinism; but the mere perception that there is such a philosophical doctrine suffices to distinguish him from most of his fellows. Their arguments are almost entirely confined to a fanciful interpretation of Scripture texts, implying a serene indifference to the very existence of Hume, Gibbon, or Voltaire.

106. The Evangelical school, who sympathised more or less distinctly with Wesley, included many men entitled to our sincere respect. We can admire their energy, though we cannot read their books. Throughout England sturdy sensible men, of the narrowest possible intellectual horizon, but the most vivid conviction of the value of certain teachings, were stirring the masses by addresses suited to indolent imaginations. What, they seemed to have tacitly enquired, is the argument which will induce an ignorant miner or a small tradesman in a country town to give up drinking and cockfighting? The obvious answer was: Tell him that he is going straight to hell-fire to be tortured for all eternity. Preach that consoling truth to him long enough, and vigorously enough, and in a large enough crowd of his fellows, and he may be thrown into a fit of excitement that may form a crisis in his life. Represent God to him by the image most familiar to his imagination, as a severe creditor who won't excuse a farthing of the debt, and Christ as the benefactor who has freely offered to clear the score. Do not rest Christianity upon argument, but tell him dogmatically that every word of the Bible was dictated by God Almighty; and add that every word is as plain as the ABC. The doctrine may not be very refined or philosophical; but it is sufficiently congenial to the vague beliefs implanted in his mind by tradition to give a leverage for your appeals. By such means it was possible to kindle once more the dying embers of the old faith, and it is curious to remark how distinctly this power was recognised as the test

of the truth. When a man like Berridge could throw a congregation into fits, and bring on all the phenomena of epidemic excitement, he took it for a plain proof that God was with him. Clarke or Foster might have preached till doomsday about the inherent and immutable essences of things, the everlasting laws of morality, and the conclusion that whatever is, is right, without producing more than a temporary glow of complacency. The common sense of Sherlock might be taken as sound advice, but could never send a thrill through the imagination. The Evangelicals discovered that, by bringing out once more the old pictures of heaven and hell, and substituting dogmatism for abstract argument, they could still move an audience to frenzy, and permanently raise the warmth of religious feeling.

107. Energy exerted on behalf of a sincere conviction is commendable; and the early Evangelicals were, in their fashion, men of surprising vigour. The number of sermons which they preached was appalling. The example of Wesley and Whitefield was followed by the numerous itinerant preachers, who, with much zeal and little learning, bore the fiery torch throughout the country. Grimshaw, in the wild district familiar to modern readers of Miss Brontë's novels, preached habitually thirty-six sermons a fortnight, twelve in one week, and twenty-four in the alternate week; and his prayers were effectual enough to stop the Haworth races by continuous rain. The sermons were measured out with no grudging hand. Newton remonstrated sensibly with a friend who seems to have been in the habit of talking for two hours so as to be heard 'far beyond the church walls.' Overlong sermons, says Newton, make the congregation think of the pudding which is in danger of being overboiled; and he judiciously limits himself to a single hour. He could not 'wind up his ends' satisfactorily in a shorter time. 'I sometimes preach half an hour,' said one worthy performer, 'before God comes; and when he is come I can do no less than preach half an hour or three-quarters of an hour afterwards." Our more squeamish appetites are apt to be revolted at the thought of the torrents of clumsy exhortation, devoid of all merit Toplady, p. 501.

Grimshaw's Life,' by Newton, pp. 18, 121.

2 Newton's Works, ii. 163.

except that of sincerity and strength of feeling. Of intellectual interest there could be none. Berridge lays it down for 'certain truth' that the cultivation of human science' implied the neglect of the Bible. Immorality and infidelity spread their branches equally with human science,' and when 'human science' reaches its highest pitch, a nation is ready for perpetual bondage. Newton is equally clear as to the bad effects of æsthetic culture. It stimulates our depraved nature.' A cultivated imagination means the possession of a large stock of other people's dreams and fables.' Taste means a disposition for being 'humoured, soothed and flattered,' which involves a dislike to the most important truths, unless concealed under delicate verbiage. People of taste, in fact, did not care to hear the Gospel preached-at least by Methodist preachers-and of course their dislike showed the corruption of their nature. When poor Cowper was seeking distraction from the tortures of a diseased mind in the translation of Homer, Newton looked on with doubtful approval, and preferred to encourage the poet in the composition of hymns which stimulated his terrible religious mania. 'I believe,' says Newton himself, 'my name is up about the country for preaching people mad,' and he adds that there are nearly a dozen people in the neighbourhood more or less 'disordered in their heads, and most of them, I believe, truly gracious people.' Though he is grieved by the thought, he thinks them less to be pitied than the mad people of the world who think themselves in their senses, and take occasion to scoff at the Gospel, as if it was only fit to drive people out of their senses."3

108. The 'world' has pretty well taken Newton and his friends at their word. Cynics have called them madmen and philosophers have called them fools; men of wide sympathy, revolted by their narrow dogmatism, which could see no good in human nature, and no chance of salvation for other sects, have satirised them as unctuous hypocrites; the adherents of the dilettante forms of religious sentimentality, who measure the value of a creed by the prettiness of its external trappings, have been disgusted with their absence of any æsthetic 2 Newton, i. 517.

1 Berridge, p. 238.

See Southey's 'Life of Cowper,' i. 270.

charm; the intellectual cowards, who seek for the best mode of blinding themselves to awkward conclusions, have discovered that the ancient Church can hoodwink its followers more effectually. On all sides, the sect which called itself Evangelical has been ridiculed and despised, and but grudging justice is done, even by later believers, to its influence in awaking slumbering religious feeling. In truth, the chief moral for our purposes is a very plain one. The history of the Evangelical revival illustrates the limits of religious movements which spring up in the absence of any vigorous rivals without a definite philosophical basis. They flourish for a time because they satisfy a real emotional craving; but they have within them the seeds of decay. A form of faith which has no charms for thinkers ends by repelling from itself even the thinkers who have grown up under its influence. In the second generation the abler disciples revolted against the strict dogmatism of their fathers, and sought for some more liberal form of creed, or some more potent intellectual narcotic. The belief generated in the lower or middle social strata was utterly uncongenial to the higher currents of thought, and, thus confined within narrow limits, ossified into a set of barren theories, never vivified by contact with genuine thought.

109. As a whole, the Protestant movement may thus be regarded as a blind protest against the efficacy for the daily wants of life of the old deistic Christianity. The fundamental doctrine preached by all its advocates is the corruption of human nature. The mind of man,' says the typical rationalist Foster, is by nature so strongly attached to virtue that it cannot become totally corrupted at once.' Henry Venn, in the Complete Duty of Man,' a book intended to supersede the old morality of the 'Whole Duty of Man,' and containing the most formal statement of the creed of his sect, lays down the opposite principle. 'There dwells,' he says, ' in the heart of every man, till changed by grace, an aversion to the very author of his being.' The religion of nature, considered by all the theologians of the preceding generation as the basis of, if not identical with, Christianity, was thus, with the new school, the very antithesis of true religion, and Foster's 'Discourses,' i. 387. 2 Complete Duty of Man,' p. 46.

2