th and culture,
went down into the slums; brought the beauty and romance of Worship to
the poorest and the most depraved, and compelled them to come in.
Whenever such a Church as St. Alban's, Holborn, or St. Barnabas, Oxford,
was established in the slums of a populous city, it became a centre not
only of religious influence, but of social, physical, and educational
reform. Ruskin's many-coloured wisdom, long recognized in the domain of
Art, began to win its way through economic darkness, and charged
cheerfully against the dismal strongholds of Supply and Demand. _Unto
this Last_ became a handbook for Social Reformers. The teaching of
Maurice filtered, through all sorts of unsuspected channels, into
literature and politics and churchmanship. In the intellectual world,
Huxley transformed "the Survival of the Fittest," by bidding us devote
ourselves to the task of fitting as many as possible to survive. At
Oxford, the "home" not of "lost" but of victorious "causes," T. H.
Green, wielding a spiritual influence which reached farther than that of
many bishops, taught that Freedom of Contract, if it is to be anything
but a callous fraud, implies conditions in which men are really free to
contract or to refuse; and insisted that all wholesome competition
implies "adequate equipment for the competitors."

It is impossible to say exactly how all these influences intertwined and
co-operated. One man was swayed by one force; another by another; and,
after long years of subterranean working, a moment came, as it comes to
the germinating seed deep-hidden in the furrow, when it must pierce the
superincumbent mass, and show its tiny point of life above ground.[58]
The General Election of 1880, by dethroning Lord Beaconsfield and
putting Gladstone in power, had fulfilled the strictly political objects
which during the preceding three years my friends and I had been trying
to attain. So we, who entered Parliament at that Election, were set
free, at the very outset of our public career, to work for the Social
Reform which we had at heart. We earnestly desired to make the lives of
our fellow-men healthier, sweeter, brighter, and more humane; and it was
an ennobling and invigorating ambition, lifting the pursuit of politics,
out of the vulgar dust of office-seeking and wire-pulling, into the
purer air of unselfish endeavour. To some of us it was much more; for it
meant the application of the Gospel of Christ to the practical business
of mod