country from one end to the other, north and south; communicating the impulse of his zeal to many like-minded men, by whose impassioned words and indefatigable labours the work was continued with signal and lasting results.*

If the first throbbings of the coming Revival were felt in Northampton, in America, in 1734, beneath the truly awful words of the great Jonathan Edwards, it was from England it derived its sustenance, and assumed organisation and shape. The Boston Elm, a venerable tree near the centre of Boston Park, or common, whose decayed limbs are still held together by clamps or rivets of iron, while a railing defends it from rude hands, is an object as sacred to the traditions of Methodism in the United States, as is Gwennap Pit to those of Methodism in Western England. There Jesse Lee, the first founder of Methodism in New England, commenced the work in 1790, which has issued in an organisation even more extensive and gigantic than that which is associated with the Conference in England. As the United States have inherited from the mother country their language, their literature, and their principles of law; so also those great agitations of spir

*See a series of papers on " Welsh Preaching and Preachers" in the Sunday at Home, for 1876.

itual life to which we have concisely referred, crossed the Atlantic, and spread themselves with power there.*

It is not within our province to attempt to enumerate all the sects, each with its larger or lesser proportion of spiritual power, religious activity, and general acceptance among the people, to which the Revival gave birth;-such as the large body of the Bible Christians of the West of England; the Primitive Methodists of the North, those who called themselves the New Connection Methodists, or the United Free Church Association. All these, and others, are branches from the great central stem. Neither is it in our province to notice how the same universal agitation of religious feeling, at exactly the same time, gave birth to other forms, not regarded with so much complacency; such as the rugged and faulty faith and following of that curious creature, William Huntington, who, singular to say, found also his best biographer in Robert Southey; or the strangely multifarious works and rationalistic development of Baron Swedenborg, which have, at least, the merit of giving a more spiritual rendering to the Christian system than that which was found in the prevalent Arianism of

* See Chapter XIV., The Revival in the New World.

the period of their publication. Turn wherever we may, it is the same. There was a deeper upheaving of the religious life, and far more widely spread, than perhaps any age of the world since the time of the apostles had known before.

A change passed over the whole of English society. That social state which we find described in the pages of Fielding and Smollett, and less respectable writers, passed away, and passed away, we trust, for ever. The language of impurity indulged with freedom by the dramatists of the period when the Revival arose, and read, and read aloud, by ladies and young girls in drawing-rooms, or by parlour firesides, became shameful and dishonoured. In the course of fifty years, society, if not entirely purged-for when may we hope for that blessedness?-was purified. A sense of religious decorum, and some idea of religious duty, took possession of homes and minds which were not at all impressed, either by the doctrines or the discipline of Methodism. All this arose from the new life which had been created.

It was a fruitful soil upon which the revivalists worked. There was a reverence for the Bible as the word of God, a faith often held very ignorantly, but it pervaded the land. The Book was there in every parish church, and in

every hamlet; it became a kind of nexus of union for true minds when they felt the power of Divine principles. Thus, when, as the Revival strengthened itself, the great Evangelic party—a term which seems to us less open to exception than "the Methodist party," because far more inclusive-met with the members of the Society of Friends, they found that, with some substantial differences, they had principles in common. The Quakers had been long in the land, but excepting in their own personsand they were few in number-they had not given much effect to their principles. Methodism roused the country; Quakerism, with its more quiet thought, gave suggestions, plans, largely supplied money. The great works which these two have since unitedly accomplished of educating the nation, and shaking off the chain of the slave abroad, neither could have accomplished singly; the conscience of the country was prepared by Evangelic sentiment. In taking up and working out the great ideas of the Revival, we have never been indifferent to the share due to members of the Society of Friends. We have already spoken of Elizabeth Fry, to whom many of the princes of Europe in turn paid honour, to whom with singular simplicity they listened as they heard her preach. There are many names on which

we should like a little to dwell; missionaries as arduous and earnest as any we have mentioned, such as Stephen Grellet, Thomas Shillitoe, and Thomas Chalkley. But this would enter into a larger plan than we dare to entertain. Our object now is only to say, how greatly other nations, and the world at large, have benefited by the awakening the conscience, the setting free the mind, the education of the character, by bringing all into immediate contact with. the Word of God and the truth which it unveils.

Situated as we are now, amidst the movements and agitations of uncertain seas of thought, wondering as to the future, with strong adjurations on every hand to renounce the Word of Life, and to trust ourselves to the filmy rationalism of modern speculation; while we feel that for the future, and for those seas over which we look there are no tide-tables, we may, at least, safely affirm this, that the Bible carries us beyond the highest water-mark; that, as societies have constructed themselves out of its principles they have built safely, not only for eternal hope, but for human and social happiness also; and we may safely ask human thought—which, unaided and unenlightened by revelation, has had a pretty fair field for the exercise and display of its power in the history of the world-to show to us a single chapter in