career in 1738, and the rapid growth of his following is a familiar proof on the one side of the indolence of the established authorities, and on the other of the strength of the demand for reform in classes to which he appealed. If, that is, the clergy were not up to their duties, Wesley's success shows that there was a strong sense of existing moral and social evils which only required an energetic leader to form a powerful organisation. I need not attempt to inquire into the causes of the Wesleyan and Evangelical movement, but must note one characteristic--it had not an intellectual but a sound moral origin. Wesley takes his creed for granted, and it was the creed, so far as they had one, of the masses of the nation. He is shocked by perjury, drunkenness, corruption, and so forth, but has not seriously to meet scepticism of the speculative variety. If Wesley did not, like the leader of another Oxford movement, feel bound to clear up the logical basis of his religious beliefs, he had of course to confront deism, but could set it down as a mere product of moral indifference. When Hartley, like Butler, speaks of the general unbelief of the day, he was no doubt correct within limits. In the upper social sphere the tone was sceptical. Not only Bolingbroke but such men as Chesterfield and Walpole were indifferent or contemptuous. They were prepared to go with Voltaire's development of the English rationalism. But the English sceptic of the upper classes was generally a Gallio. He had no desire to propagate his creed, still less to attack the Church, which was a valuable part of his property; it never occurred to him that scepticism might lead to a political as well as an ecclesiastical revolution. Voltaire was not intentionally destructive in politics, whatever the real effect of his teaching; but he was an avowed and bitter enemy of the Church and the orthodox creed. Hume, the great English sceptic, was not only a Tory in politics but had no desire to affect the popular belief. He could advise a clergyman to preach the ordinary doctrines, because it was paying far too great a compliment to the vulgar to be punctilious about speaking the truth to them. A similar indifference is characteristic of the whole position. The select classes were to be perfectly convinced that the accepted creed was superstitious; but they were not for that reason to attack it. To the statesman, as Gibbon was to point out, a creed is equally useful, true or false; and the English clergy, though bound to use orthodox language, were far too well in hand to be regarded as possible persecutors. Even in Scotland they made no serious attempt to suppress Hume; he had only to cover his opinions by some decent professions of belief. One symptom of the general state of mind is the dying out of the deist controversies. The one great divine, according to Brown's _Estimate_, was Warburton, the colossus, he says, who bestrides the world: and Warburton, whatever else he may have been,