The religion of this age was Evangelical Christianity. The work of Wellesley and Whitefield still leavened the national life from the cottage to the throne. The Catholic conspiracy had not become formidable; the rising tide of knowledge had not yet sapped the foundations of the old beliefs. A miscellany of Hebrew literature, half savage, half sublime, bound up with the cryptic legends of the Roman catacombs, and rendered into English by the intellect of the sixteenth century, was accepted as the personal composition of the Creator, inspired, infallible, and irrevocable, from the first letter in the word _Genesis_ to the last in the word _Amen_. Salvation by faith was the watchword of the Churches; the unbeliever was assured that his best actions were but additional sins until he had gone through that spiritual experience which brought him within the pale of the redeemed. Yet this strait, remorseless creed educated women who were gracious and beautiful in their lives, and of such women Caroline, Duchess of Trent, was one. She accepted her creed, as the scientist accepts the law of cause and effect, without understanding it, but her logic was able to reconcile it with hope and charity, and with a tireless devotion to the good of all about her. They who are willing to sacrifice themselves will never want those who are willing to accept the sacrifice. In her girlhood Caroline had been a maid of honour in the Court of Queen Victoria, and she had ever since been one of that small circle whom the widowed monarch counted as her personal friends. The needs of selfish parents had forced her into an early marriage with a sickly old man whom she nursed faithfully and kindly, but whom she could not love. He died before she was thirty, leaving her with enough wealth to attract Lord Alexander Stuart, the penniless younger son of a great but impoverished house. To this man, as handsome as he was worthless, she gave her heart and her fortune, in accordance with the common law which mates the best with the worst, and he had become the father of her children before she made the discovery that he was an irreclaimable drunkard and gambler. For their own sakes she consented to part with her children, and she passed the next ten years of her life in accompanying the man to whom she believed herself bound, from Continental hotel to hotel, keeping up a hopeless struggle against the vices which were dragging him down to the grave.