Protestantism had survived into the third stage. The great Protestant Churches still flourished, but they no longer professed the Protestant religion. The Church of England was suing for recognition by the Church of Rome. The Dissenting Churches, founded by men who were more willing to endure poverty and prison than to wear a surplice, or to use a ring in the marriage ceremony, were adopting liturgies and vestments. The evangelical organizations, the Missionary Societies, the Bible Societies, the Tract Societies, were still in full activity, but they had ceased to evangelize. Like the Churches, they lived on their inheritance; they were kept going by the dead hand. Frock-coated committees were called together by well-salaried secretaries to dispose of funds too large for the shrunken field of endeavour; but, wiser than the augurs of old Rome, the secretaries never smiled. The machinery went on with well-oiled wheels, but the spirit was gone. The foundation stone of the building had been almost accidentally mined. The picks of excavators toiling at the dust-heaps beside the Tigris and Euphrates that once were Nineveh and Babylon, had turned up a handful of arrow-stamped bricks, and the Protestant Bible had become a mere human document. The whole of English society was engaged in a conspiracy to suppress the fact that the world was changing. The schools and universities went on teaching that it never changed; the pulpits proved that it could not; the newspapers were positive that it had not; yet underneath all this loud shouting of the cohorts of respectability could be heard a murmur like the whisper of Galileo before the Inquisition--_But it does move_. It was the close of the Victorian Age. It was an age which had recorded its own praises on a myriad monuments, and chanted them in thunder on the days of jubilee. It was an age which had gazed round upon its mighty works, and boasted itself like Nebuchadnezzar. Nevertheless, in this age, so glorious in its own conceit, so fruitful in many respects, one rank weed had been suffered to grow up unchecked, till it poisoned the breathing-room of the human spirit. The name of this weed was Cant. The Victorian world had been satirized unconsciously by the Victorian poet. In his “Idylls of the King” Tennyson had depicted a man without passions trying to impose his own cold virtues on men of warmer temperament, and producing first hypocrisy and deceit, and in the end a deeper corruption. The Victorian world had been like Arthur’s Court.