In Yorkshire, however, Puritanism made early stand, though its effects on nomenclature were not immediately visible. It was like the fire that smoulders among the underwood before it catches flame; it spreads the more rapidly afterwards. The Genevan Bible crept into the dales and farmsteads, and their own primitive life seemed to be but reflected in its pages. The patriarchs lived as graziers, and so did they. There was a good deal about sheep and kine in its chapters, and their own lives were spent among the milk-pails and wool shears. The women of the Old Testament baked cakes, and knew what good butter was. So did the dales' folk. By slow degrees Cecilia, Isabella, and Emma lapsed from their pedestal, and the little babes were turned into Sarahs, Rebeccas, and Deborahs. As the seventeenth century progressed the state of things became still more changed. There had been villages in Sussex and Kent previous to Elizabeth's death, where the Presbyterian rector, by his personal influence at the time of baptism, had turned the new generation into a Hebrew colony. The same thing occurred in Yorkshire only half a century later. As nonconformity gained ground, Guy, and Miles, and Peter, and Philip became forgotten. The lads were no sooner ushered into existence than they were transformed into duplicates of Joel, and Amos, and Obediah. The measles still ran through the family, but it was Phineas and Caleb, not Robert and Roger, that underwent the infliction. Chosen leaders of Israel passed through the critical stages of teething. As for the twelve sons of Jacob, they could all have answered to their names in the dames' schools, through their little apple-cheeked representatives, who lined the rude benches. On the village green, every prophet from Isaiah to Malachi might be seen of an evening playing leap-frog: unless, indeed, Zephaniah was stealing apples in the garth. From Yorkshire, about the close of the seventeenth century, the rage for Scripture names passed into Lancashire. Nonconformity was making progress; the new industries were already turning villages into small centres of population, and the Church of England not providing for the increase, chapels were built. If we look over the pages of the directories of West Yorkshire and East Lancashire, and strike out the surnames, we could imagine we were consulting anciently inscribed registers of Joppa or Jericho. It would seem as if Canaan and the West Riding had got inextricably mixed.