There was nothing resembling this in the work of the English-speaking people.  The contributions were for a long time only sporadic.  The movement had no inclusiveness.  There was no aspect of a solid front in the advance.  In the department of the sciences only was the situation different.  In a way, therefore, it will be necessary in this chapter merely to single out individuals, to note points of conflict, one and another, all along the great line of advance.  Or, to put it differently, it will be possible to pursue a chronological arrangement which would have been bewildering in our study heretofore.  With the one great division between the progressive spirits and the men of the reaction, it will be possible to speak of philosophers, critics and theologians together, among their own contemporaries, and so to follow the century as it advances.

In the closing years of the eighteenth century in England what claimed to be a rational supernaturalism prevailed.  Men sought to combine faith in revealed religion with the empirical philosophy of Locke.  They conceived God and his relation to the world under deistical forms.  The educated often lacked in singular degree all deeper religious feeling.  They were averse to mysticism and spurned enthusiasm.  Utilitarian considerations, which formed the practical side of the empirical philosophy, played a prominent part also in orthodox belief.  The theory of the universe which obtained among the religious is seen at its worst in some of the volumes of the Warburton Lectures, and at its best perhaps in Butler’s Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion.  The character and views of the clergy and of the ruling class among the laity of the Church of England, early in the nineteenth century, are pictured with love and humour in Trollope’s novels.  They form the background in many of George Eliot’s books, where, in more mordant manner, both their strength and weaknesses are shown.  Even the remarks which introduce Dean Church’s Oxford Movement, 1891, in which the churchly element is dealt with in deep affection, give anything but an inspiring view.

The contrast with this would-be rational and unemotional religious respectability of the upper classes was furnished, for masses of the people, in the quickening of the consciousness of sin and grace after the manner of the Methodists.  But the Methodism of the earlier age had as good as no intellectual relations whatsoever.  The Wesleys and Whitefield had indeed influenced a considerable portion of the Anglican communion.  Their pietistic trait, combined, for the most part, with a Calvinism which Wesley abhorred and an old-fashioned low church feeling with which also Wesley had no sympathy, shows itself in the so-called evangelical party which was strong before 1830.  This evangelical movement in the Church of England manifested deep religious feeling, it put forth zealous philanthropic effort, it had among its representatives men and women of