To commence with the Georgian period, it is not too much to say that anything like real religion was scarcely ever at a lower ebb in England. This is not to say that there was an absolute dearth of religion. Law wrote his _Serious Call_ during that period, and there are few books of its kind which have had a greater and more lasting effect. There were others of like but lesser character than Law, but, on the whole, no one will deny that the clergy of the Established Church (Catholics were, of course, in the catacombs) and the religion which they represented were almost beneath contempt. Look, for example, at _Esmond_, the typical novel of its period. Is there a single clergyman in it who is not an object of contempt, with the sole exception of the Jesuit, who, though a good deal of the stage variety, at least gains a measure of the reader's sympathy and respect? Thackeray was not himself a Georgian, it may be urged. That of course is true, but no one that knows Thackeray and knows also Georgian literature will deny that he was saturated with it and understood the period with which his book dealt better perhaps than those who lived in it themselves. But examine the novelists of the period; what about Fielding? Parson Adams is respectable and lovable, but the general average of parson and religion is certainly about as low as it can be. Fielding was not a religious man. Possibly, but what then of Richardson? We do not find religion at a very high level there; can anything well be more degraded than the figure cut by Mr. Williams in _Pamela_, for example--the miserable curate upon whom the heroine calls for help in her distress? But apart from that, look at the whole atmosphere of the book. Why, the moral is that if you resist the immoral onslaughts of your master long enough he will give in and marry you, and you will be applauded for your successful strategy by all the countryside. Such is the book which all agreed to praise as an example of all that a book ought to be from the point of view of virtue.