But perhaps of all the able men who were busy about things theological and political, about the time of the Westminster Assembly, there was not one who thought so freely and wrote so liberally as John Goodwin, the Independent.[37] Far from feeling himself shut up, as we Independents hear that we are shut up, to the traditions of the elders, which were unquestionably strongly Calvinistic, he discerned and grasped whatever good there might be in the Arminian scheme of doctrine; while his views on public affairs, on political and religious liberty, on toleration, on the welfare and progress of states, were more in the key of modern ideas than anything else which is to be met with in the literature of those times. A man must have had a far sight and a brave heart who could write concerning the Scriptures in those days and in such an atmosphere, 'The true and proper foundation of the Christian religion is not ink and paper, not any book or books, not any writing or writings whatsoever, whether translations or originals, but that substance of matter, those glorious counsels of God concerning the salvation of the world by Jesus Christ, which are indeed represented and declared both in the translations and the originals, but are distinct from both.' Passing on to the midst of the next century, the Nonconformist evangelists of the great Methodist revival were busy in other work than that which occupied the scholars and divines of the not over-earnest or spiritual Georgian Church. But it was more distinctly church work; and it lay far nearer to the heart of the true welfare and progress of the state. The men who established a strong Christian influence over those classes of the population who in times of political ferment are truly the dangerous classes, were mainly Nonconformist. What England owed, socially and politically, to the leaders and ministers of the great Evangelical revival, when the storm of the Revolution swept through Europe, has never been calculated, and never can be. The work of the evangelists among the colliers and miners, and generally among the poorest of the poor, was a grand safeguard to us when our turn of revolutionary trial came. The chief reason why the Revolution in England ran in the main a peaceful and orderly course, while in France it was convulsive and destructive, is to be found in the nexus of the classes which the great Evangelical movement established, and in the gleam of hope which it kindled in the popular heart.