meant a hatred of God. All the Methodists and semiMethodists, Wesley and Whitefield, and Fletcher and Berridge and Toplady, agree in laying down this doctrine as the very foundation of their creed. The correlative doctrine necessarily follows. If nature is corrupt, the divine element must be supernatural. The Evangelists, therefore, trace everywhere the workings of the two antagonist principles-grace and nature. The hand of God was to be seen everywhere. Venn used to take his children to the window during a thunderstorm, and tell them that the lightning was directed by God's will. Newton perhaps, more than any of the others, appears to be impressed by a constant sense of a superintending providence in the most minute events of life—a state of mind perhaps fostered by his early adventures as a slave-trader. Wesley's writings, as we have seen, are full of a doctrine which frequently leads to an unlovely superstition; and sometimes, as in the writings of Berridge, to a grotesque familiarity of address to a Being so constantly and tangibly present. As clearly it implies a vivid sentiment, never to be despised for its ugly clothing, and, as the example of the older Puritans showed, sometimes terribly efficacious.

110. A strong conviction of the evil side of nature may reveal itself in many forms, and is expressed in connection with very different theories by such men as Pascal, Butler, Law, Mandeville, and Voltaire. It is as naturally connected with scepticism as with faith. The special form which it assumed in England is indicative of the peculiarities of the national character and social condition. Wesley and Fletcher denounce the social evils of the country, and agree in supporting the authority of the English Government against America and religion against sceptics. In France the same passionate feeling took the form of a revolutionary assault upon the whole established order in Church and State. The effect of the English Methodist movement in thus diverting a great volume of discontent into the religious, instead of the political, channel is of an importance not easy to calculate; and I have already made some remarks upon its causes. The most marked result of the English agitation in the political field was the abolition of slavery. It is a triumph of which

1 Life, p. 36.

the Evangelicals have good reason to boast; but, however admirable in itself, the chief effect of the measure upon England was the great moral precedent of an appeal to conscience in a political question. Divorced from politics on the one hand, the movement, as we have seen, was divorced from speculation on the other. The old Protestantism had been an intellectual as well as a moral movement. It vindicated freedom of thought, besides attacking the moral evils of ecclesiastical tyranny. The revivers of the old phase of thought could no longer frankly reconcile themselves to reason which destroyed their first principles, nor, whilst retaining the old hatred of priestcraft, frankly oppose themselves to it; and this was, undoubtedly, their fundamental weakness. The moral efficacy of the preaching was necessarily lowered. A belief in the necessity of a miraculous change as the foundation of the religious life of every individual tended to become merely superstitious as the general atmosphere was unfavourable to an intelligent belief in the supernatural. To believe in the literal inspiration of the Bible could no longer be the basis of a vigorous creed, except in ignorant or narrow minds.

The new Puritanism, excluding all the most powerful intellectual elements, was therefore of necessity a faint reflection of the grander Puritanism of the seventeenth century. The morality founded upon it showed the old narrowness without the old intensity. The hatred of the world was too often interpreted into a hatred of all that makes the world beautiful, combined with a hearty appreciation of everything that adds to its material comfort. The tendency which has been the most conspicuous weakness of the creed was the reflection of the tendencies of the English middle classes. Their religious emotions were coloured by the general character of their lives. Protestantism as it has been developed amongst industrial communities, bears traces of its origin; and though it has produced a heroic type of character, it has always been hostile to the æsthetic development of the race, and to the more delicate forms of religious doctrine. The more general causes of this tendency, so far as they are logically connected with the primary data of the creed, would require an investigation beyond my present purpose. It may be assumed briefly that the great moral doctrine of Protestantism, the respon

sibility of the individual to his own conscience, and its consequent depreciation of all external observances, is congenial to this form of compromise with the world. Since, on the Protestant theory, heaven is not to be won by external observances, but by an inward change of heart, there is no ground for that exaltation of the ascetic life which, in corrupt times, and by the help of the vast organisation of the priesthood, becomes a mere sanctification of idleness. The Protestant, ever in the Divine presence, is taught to shudder at the frivolities of the world, and to despise the frivolities of the Church; but there is nothing in his religion which forbids the severest application to any occupation not in itself wicked. I need not, however, enquire how far in this case the creed is influenced chiefly by the moral or by the social conditions. Protestantism divorced from freedom of thought, and without any qualification for enslaving thought, became but a shrivelled and narrow representative of the grand creed of the Reformation.

112. Wesleyanism and Evangelicalism thus illustrate the twofold truth that powerful religious movements often originate in social strata lying far beyond the reach of philosophy, but are doomed to sterility if they cannot assimilate some philosophical element. Between Wesleyanism and the belief of the cultivated classes there could scarcely be said to exist even the relation of contradiction. Wesley could as little appeal to the reason of Hume's scholars as Hume could touch the hearts of Wesley's disciples. A reactionary movement may gain some strength from the theories to which it is opposed; for thought generally progresses by antagonism. But Evangelicalism did not even profess to have any genuine theory to oppose to Hume. It simply set Hume aside as irrelevant. A movement the roots of which are to be sought in the emotional instead of the intellectual nature necessarily takes the form of a reaction. Since the emotions cannot by themselves discover new creeds, they must clothe even a demand for change in the language of older creeds. Thus Wesley fell back upon the early Protestants, as the early Protestants had fallen back upon primitive Christianity; as, in a different sphere, the English political Radicals began by appealing to Hampden and Sidney; and as the literary

reformers fancied themselves to be reviving the age of Shakespeare and Milton. When the heart usurps the functions of the head, even a progressive development will appear to be retrograde. The same cause obscures the true nature of the movement which we have now to consider.

VII. THE LITERARY REACTION.

113. The opening of new intellectual horizons, the discovery of new instruments in the struggle with nature, the failure of the old organisation to meet the wants of a rapidly growing society, the failure of the old scholasticism and Catholicism to satisfy the intellect or the imagination, had led to the great outbreak which we call the Reformation and the Renaissance. Another crisis due to similar causes was about to take place. The revolt against the old dogmatism had not been sufficiently thorough. There was still dead social and intellectual tissue which had to be expelled. Though the old theological dogmas had become mere mummies, dead relics of their former selves, the scepticism which showed their inanity could not replace them by a new syn-thesis, or afford satisfaction to the ordinary intellect of mankind. On one side, therefore, we have a dogmatism growing ever more frigid and lifeless; and, on the other, a crude empiricism which takes fundamental questions for granted, or guides itself by the first hasty dictates of superficial observation. Corresponding to this, we have, in the imaginative sphere, frigid allegories in place of vivid symbols; mere personified abstractions for the living beings of the old mythology; and a conscious obedience to mechanical formulæ ✔ in place of the old free play of the imagination; for authority we have hollow demonstrations, and incessant arguing in place of appeals to the emotions. Simultaneously we have a vigorous, but too often prosaic, realism. The ordinary facts of everyday life are seen forcibly, but they are stripped of romantic association or philosophical significance. We do not see contemporary events as part of a vast series carrying us back to the dim past and inscrutable future; nor as standing out against a background of mystery. The divorce of

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philosophy from reality has impoverished both. Religious symbols which excite no genuine emotion, and facts which are never seen as lighted up by religious meaning, can evidently suggest no great imaginative work. The English literature, indeed, of the eighteenth century reflects the many admirable qualities of its writers, though it reflects them in an obscure mirror. Human nature does not vary, as we are sometimes given to assume, by sudden starts from one generation to another. I do not doubt that Englishmen a hundred years ago had as much imaginative power, as much good feeling, and at least as much love of truth as their descendants of to-day. I am only endeavouring to explain the conditions which limited for a time their powers of utterance, and then led them to find new modes of expression for the most perennial of human feelings. This last process took various forms. The last half of the century was marked in literature by the slow development of three distinct processes of reaction. A few hints, necessarily of the briefest and most imperfect kind, may sufficiently indicate their relation to previous modes of thought, and the peculiar nature of the English development. The sentimentalists represent, we may say, the vague feeling of discontent with the existing order

of thought and society; the romantic and the naturalistic school adopted different modes of satisfying the yearning thus excited.

114. Wesley amused himself in one of his peregrinations with Sterne's 'Sentimental Journey.' 'Sentimental!' he asks in his journal; 'what is that? It is not English. He might as well say " continental."" It would be rather difficult to answer Wesley's question with precision, after all our experience of the thing signified. Sentimentalism seems to be a name for several allied phases of thought which graduate imperceptibly into each other. It is the name of a kind of mildew which spreads over the surface of literature at this period to indicate a sickly constitution. It is the name of the mood in which we make a luxury of grief, and regard sympathetic emotion as an end rather than a means-a mood rightly despised by men of masculine nature. It is, again, the name of the disposition to substitute feeling for logic, and, therefore, 1 Journal, February 11, 1772.