of Strauss. 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 a