hteenth century was precisely the
growth of humanity. In the next generation, the eighteenth century came
to be denounced as cold, heartless, faithless, and so forth. The
established mode of writing history is partly responsible for this
perversion. Men speak as though some great man, who first called
attention to an evil, was a supernatural being who had suddenly dropped
into the world from another sphere. His condemnation of evil is
therefore taken to be a proof that the time must be evil. Any century is
bad if we assume all the good men to be exceptions. But the great man is
really also the product of his time. He is the mouthpiece of its
prevailing sentiments, and only the first to see clearly what many are
beginning to perceive obscurely. The emergence of the prophet is a proof
of the growing demand of his hearers for sound teaching. Because he is
in advance of men generally, he sees existing abuses more clearly, and
we take his evidence against his contemporaries as conclusive. But the
fact that they listened shows how widely the same sensibility to evil
was already diffused. In fact, as I think, the humane spirit of the
eighteenth century, due to the vast variety of causes which we call
social progress or evolution--not to the teaching of any individual--was
permeating the whole civilised world, and showed itself in the
philosophic movement as well as in the teaching of the religious
leaders, who took the philosophers to be their enemies. I have briefly
noticed the various philanthropic movements which were characteristic of
the period. Some of them may indicate the growth of new evils; others,
that evils which had once been regarded with indifference were now
attracting attention and exciting indignation. But even the growth of
new evils does not show general indifference so much as the incapacity
of the existing system to deal with new conditions. It may, I think, be
safely said that a growing philanthropy was characteristic of the whole
period, and in particular animated the Utilitarian movement, as I shall
have to show in detail. Modern writers have often spoken of the Wesleyan
propaganda and the contemporary 'evangelical revival' as the most
important movements of the time. They are apt to speak, in conformity
with the view just described, as though Wesley or some of his
contemporaries had originated or created the better spirit. Without
asking what was good or bad in some aspects of these movements, I fully