We have forgotten, to a great extent, the amazing influence which the preaching and the practice of these leading Evangelicals exercised in England between 1820 and 1840. It is certain that the young scholars of Cambridge who surrounded Simeon from 1810 onwards were much more numerous and no less active than those who surrounded Newman and Pusey at Oxford about 1835; while in each case the disciples trained in the school of enthusiasm were soon dispersed, to spread the flame of zeal throughout the length and breadth of the Three Kingdoms. In the preface of his famous _Helps to Composition_, a work of epoch-making character, Simeon boldly proposed three tests to be applied to any species of literature. When confronted by a book, the reader should ask, "Does it uniformly tend to humble the Sinner, to exalt the Saviour, to promote holiness?" A work that lost sight of any one of these three points was to be condemned without mercy. The simplicity and freshness of the Evangelicals, their ridicule of what was called "the dignity of the pulpit," their active, breathless zeal in urging what they thought a purer faith upon all classes of society, gave them a remarkable power over generous and juvenile natures. They were wealthy, they were powerful, they stormed the high places of society, and it may without exaggeration be said that for the time being they changed the whole character of the surface of English social life. The work of the Evangelicals, in emphasizing the strong reaction against the coarseness of the Georgian era, has been greatly forgotten in England, and on the Continent has never been in the least understood. It is responsible, to deal solely with what interests us in our present inquiry, for the prudery and "hypocrisy" of which European criticism so universally accuses our Victorian literature and habits of thought. It is perhaps useless to contend against a charge so generally brought against English ideas, and this is not the place to attempt it. But, so far as Rousseau is concerned, it is necessary to point out that to a generation which revolted against lasciviousness in speech, and which believed that an indecent looseness in art and literature was a sin against God, the charm of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_ and of the _Confessions_ could not be apparent. It is of no service to talk about "hypocrisy"; English readers simply disliked books of that sort, and there must be an end of it.