It will be admitted by all conversant with the facts that religion could hardly have been at a lower ebb than it was when what is known as the Evangelical Movement came to trouble the placid, if stagnant and turbid, pool of the Established Church. Of course it did not transform the Church entirely. Read Miss Austen's novels: the most perfect pictures of life ever written. There are, I suppose, some half-dozen clergymen, pleasant and unpleasant, depicted in them, and we may be sure that they fairly well represent the typical average country parson of the period. Whatever they may otherwise be, they all agree in one point, namely in the complete absence of any such thing as a trace of spirituality. But in the early nineteenth-century Evangelicanism--specially that terrible variety Calvinism--was the dominant factor where religion really prevailed as a living influence; and it is to its influence, I firmly believe, that we may attribute the genuine detestation of religion which was so marked a feature of a part of the Victorian and most of the succeeding time. I am not, of course, forgetting the Oxford Movement, but, important as that was and is, in its earlier years it was almost entirely confined to clerical circles, exercising comparatively little influence on the laity and practically none at all on that great middle class which had been so much affected by the Wesleys, Whitefield, Scott, Newton, and the other pundits of Evangelicanism. Take the characteristic novel of the movement, if novel it should be called, Newman's _Loss and Gain_: I do not remember a single male character in it who is not in Holy Orders or on the way thereto. Hence, so far as religious influences are concerned, it is to the Evangelical Movement that we have to look. Now, though in my opinion it was the parent of many evils, there is no doubt that there was in it real fervour; intense devotion; a genuine desire to know and do God's will; a burning love for our Lord; coupled with all which were the most distorted and distorting ideas of what was and what was not sin ever conceived by any brain. Of this creed I can speak from personal knowledge, for I was brought up in it and know it from bitter experience.