nd
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 great beauty of personal character and piety. Yet it
was completely cut off from any living relation to the thought of the
age. There was among its representatives no spirit of theological
inquiry. There was, if anything, less probability of theological
reconstruction, from this quarter, than from the circles of the older
German pietism, with which this English evangelicalism of the time of
the later Georges had not a little in common. There had been a great
enthusiasm for humanity at the opening of the period of the French
Revolution, but the excesses and atrocities of the Revolution had
profoundly shocked the English mind. There was abroad something of the
same sense for the return to nature, and of the greatness of man, which
moved Schiller and Goethe. The exponents of it were, however, almost
exclusively the poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron. There was
nothing which combined these various elements as parts of a great whole.
Britain had stood outside the area of the Revolution, and yet had put
forth stupendous efforts, ultimately successful, to make an end of the
revolutionary era and of the Napoleonic despotism. This tended perhaps
to give to Britons some natural satisfaction in the British Constitution
and the established Church which flourished under it. Finally, while men
on the Continent were devising holy alliances and other chimeras of the
sort, England was precipitated into the earlier acute stages of the
industrial revolution in which she has led the European nations and
still leads. This fact explains a certain preoccupation of the British
mind with questions remote from theological reconstruction or religious
speculation.

THE POETS

It may now sound like a contradiction if we assert that the years from
1780 to 1830 constitute the era of the noblest English poetry since the
times of great Elizabeth. The social direction of the new theology of
the present day, with its cry against every