e
evidences of the adaptation of the new preaching to the wants of the
people. The masses, long affected by a deplorable indifference to
religious truths and pious living, heard the earnest preaching of the
Methodists with profound attention and in such large numbers that no
impartial observer could doubt the peculiar fitness of Methodism to the
existing state of society, morals, literature, and philosophy. As a
result, the number of converts multiplied. The Established Church was
aroused to activity. Dissenters began to hope for the return of the good
days of Bunyan and Baxter and Howe.

Isaac Taylor says of the new influence, that "it preserved from
extinction and reanimated the languishing nonconformity of the last
century, which just at the time of the Methodist revival, was rapidly in
course to be found nowhere but in books." But the Wesleyan movement made
little impression on the literary circles to whom Bolingbroke, Hume, and
Gibbon had communicated their gospel of nature. The poets continued to
sing, the essayists to write, and the philosophers to speculate, in a
world peculiarly their own. They shut themselves quite in from the
itinerant "helpers" of Wesley. The large class of English minds which
stood aloof from all ecclesiastical organizations, and failed to see any
higher cause of the revival than mere enthusiasm, were the persons whom
those writers still influenced. But it was plain to both the masters and
their disciples that their principles were in process of transition.
They were therefore ready for the reception of whatever plausible type
of skepticism might present itself for their acceptance.

History is the illustration of cause and effect. The fountain springs up
in one period, and generations often pass before it finds its natural
outlet. The issue of the final efforts of English Deism, of the impure
French taste, and of the works of the grosser class of literary men
living in the last century, is now manifested in that spirit which
welcomes the _Essays and Reviews_, and the criticism of Colenso. It is
not true that these and similar publications have created a
Rationalistic taste in Great Britain. The taste was already in
existence, and has been struggling for satisfaction ever since the
closing decades of the eighteenth century.

FOOTNOTES:

[129] For an excellent view of the relation of France and England in the
eighteenth century, vid. _Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1 Dec., 1861.

[130] Schl