All impartial historians of the period place this most remarkable religious impulse in the rank of the very foremost phenomena of the times. The calm and able historian, Earl Stanhope, speaking of it, as "despised at its commencement," continues, "with less immediate importance than wars or political changes, it endures long after not only the result but the memory of these has passed away, and thousands" (his lordship ought to have said millions) "who never heard of Fontenoy or Walpole, continue to follow the precepts, and venerate the name of John Wesley." While the latest, a still more able and equally impartial and quiet historian, Mr. Lecky, says, "Our splendid victories by land and sea must yield in real importance to this religious revolution; it exercised a profound and lasting influence upon the spirit of the Established Church of England, upon the amount and distribution of the moral forces of that nation, and even upon the course of its political history."

Shall we, then, first attempt to obtain some adequate idea of what this Revival effected, by a slight effort to realise what sort of world and state of society it was into which the Revival came? One writer truly remarks, "Never has century risen on christian England so void of soul and faith as that which opened with Queen

Anne, and which reached its misty noon beneath the second George, a dewless night succeeded by a dewless dawn. There was no freshness in the past and no promise in the future; the Puritans were buried, the Methodists were not born." It is unquestionably true that black, bad and corrupt as society was, for the most part, all round, in the eighteenth century, intellectual and spiritual forces broke forth, simultaneously we had almost said, and believing, as we do, in the Providence which governed the rise of both, we may say, consentaneously, which have left far behind all social regenerations which the pen of history has recited before. Of almost all the fruits we enjoy, it may be said the seeds were planted then; even those which, like the printing-press or the gospel, had been planted ages before, were so transplanted as to flourish with a new vigour.

Our eye has been taught to rest on an interesting incident. It was in 1757 John Wesley, travelling and preaching, then about fifty years of age, but still with nearly forty years of work before him, arrived in Glasgow. He saw in the University its library and its pictures; but, had he possessed the vision of a Hebrew seer he might have glanced up from the quadrangle of the college to the humble rooms, up a spiral staircase, of a young workman, over whose

lodging was the sign and information that they were tenanted by a "mathematical instrument maker to the University." This young man, living there upon a poor fare, and eking out a poor subsistence, with many thoughts burdening his mind, was destined to be the founder of the greatest commercial and material revolution the world has known: through him seems to have been fulfilled the wonderfully significant prophecy of Nahum: "The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall jostle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings." This young man was James Watt, who gave to the world the steam engine. A few years after he gave his mighty invention to Birmingham; and the world has never been the same world since. "By that invention," says Emerson, "one man can do the work of two hundred and fifty men ;" and in Manchester alone and in its vicinity there are probably sixty thousand boilers, and the aggregate power of a million horses.

Let not the allusion seem out of place. That age was the seed-time of the present harvest fields; in that time those great religious ideas which have wrought such an astonishing revolution, acquired body and form; and we ought to notice how, when God sets free some new

idea, He also calls into existence the new vehicle for its diffusion. He did not trust the early christian faith to the old Latin races, to the selfish and æsthetic Greek, or to the merely conservative Hebrew; He "hissed," in the graphic language of the old Bible, for a new race, and gave the New Testament to the Teutonic people, who have ever been its chief guardians and expositors; and thus, in all reviews of the development and unfolding of the religious life in the times of which we speak, we have to notice how the material and the spiritual changes have re-acted on each other, while both have brought a change which has indeed "made all things new."

Contrasting the state of society after the rise of the Great Revival with what it was before, the present with the past, it is quite obvious that something has brought about a general decency and decorum of manners, a tenderness and benevolence of sentiment, a religious interest in, and observance of, pious usages, not to speak of a depth of religious life and conviction, and a general purity and nobility of literary taste, which did not exist before. All these must be credited to this great movement. It is not in the nature of steam engines, whether stationary or locomotive, nor in printing presses, or Staffordshire potteries, undirected

by spiritual forces, to raise the morals or to improve the manners of mankind.

If sometimes in the presence of the spectacles of ignorance, crime, irreligion, and corruption in our own day, we are filled with a sense of despair for the prospects of society, it may be well to take a retrospect of what society was in England at the commencement of the last century. When George III. ascended the throne the population of England was not much over five millions; at the commencement of the present century it was nearly eleven millions; but with the intensely crowded population of the present day, the cancerous elements of society, the dangerous, pauperised, and criminal classes are in far less proportion, not merely relatively, but really. It was a small country, and possessed few inhabitants. There are few circumstances which can give us much pleasure in the review. National distress was constantly making itself bitterly felt; it was the age of mobs and riots. The state of the criminal law was cruel in the extreme. Blackstone calculates that for no fewer than one hundred and sixty offences, some of them of the most frivolous description, the judge was bound to pronounce sentence of death. Crime, of course, flourished. During the year 1738 no fewer than fifty-two criminals were hanged at Tyburn.