Sidenote: The religious movement.]

No names so illustrious as these marked the more silent but even deeper
change in the religious temper of the country. It dates, as we have
seen, from the work of the Wesleys, but the Methodists themselves were
the least result of the Methodist revival. Its action upon the Church
broke the lethargy of the clergy; and the "Evangelical" movement, which
found representatives like Newton and Cecil within the pale of the
Establishment, made the fox-hunting parson and the absentee rector at
last impossible. In Walpole's day the English clergy were the idlest and
the most lifeless in the world. In our own time no body of religious
ministers surpasses them in piety, in philanthropic energy, or in
popular regard. But the movement was far from being limited to the
Methodists or the clergy. In the nation at large appeared a new moral
enthusiasm which, rigid and pedantic as it often seemed, was still
healthy in its social tone, and whose power showed itself in a gradual
disappearance of the profligacy which had disgraced the upper classes,
and the foulness which had infested literature ever since the
Restoration. A yet nobler result of the religious revival was the steady
attempt, which has never ceased from that day to this, to remedy the
guilt, the ignorance, the physical suffering, the social degradation of
the profligate and the poor. It was not till the Wesleyan impulse had
done its work that this philanthropic impulse began. The Sunday Schools
established by Mr. Raikes of Gloucester at the close of the century were
the beginnings of popular education. By writings and by her own personal
example Hannah More drew the sympathy of England to the poverty and
crime of the agricultural labourer. A passionate impulse of human
sympathy with the wronged and afflicted raised hospitals, endowed
charities, built churches, sent missionaries to the heathen, supported
Burke in his plea for the Hindoo, and Clarkson and Wilberforce in their
crusade against the iniquity of the slave trade.

[Sidenote: Howard.]

It is only the moral chivalry of his labours that amongst a crowd of
philanthropists draws us most to the work and character of John Howard.
The sympathy which all were feeling for the sufferings of mankind Howard
felt for the sufferings of the worst and most hapless of men. With
wonderful ardour and perseverance he devoted himself to the cause of the
debtor, the felon, and the murderer. An appointme