Thus the great hymns of this period grew and became a religious power in the land, strangely contradicting a verdict which Cardinal Wiseman pronounced some years since, that “all Protestant devotion is dead.” While we give all honour to the fine hymns of Denmark and Germany, many of the best of which were translated with the movement, it may, with no exaggeration, be said that the hymnology of England in the eighteenth century is the finest and most complete which the history of the Church has known. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VII LAY PREACHING AND LAY PREACHERS. There came with the work of the Revival a practice, without which it is more than questionable if it would have obtained such a rapid and abiding hold upon the various populations and districts of the country; this was lay preaching. The designation must have a more inclusive interpretation than we generally apply to it; we must understand by it rather the work of those men who, in contradistinction to the great leaders of the Revival—men of scholarship, of universities, and of education—possessed none of these qualifications, or but in a more slight and undisciplined degree. They were converted men, modified by various temperaments; they one and all possessed an ardent zeal; but, in many instances, we shall find that they were as much devoted to the work of the ministry as those who had received a regular ordination. It is singular that prejudices so strong should exist against lay preaching and preachers, for the practice has surely received the sanction of the most ancient usages of the Church, as even Dr. Southey admits, in his notes to the _Life of Wesley_. Thus, in the history of the Church, this phenomenon could scarcely be regarded as new. Orders of preaching friars; “hedge-preachers,” “black, white, and grey,” with all their company; disciples of Francis, Dominic, or Ignatius, had spread over Europe during the dark and mediæval ages. Although this rousing element of Church life had not found much expression in the churches of the Reformation, yet with the impulse of the new Revival, up started these men by multitudes. The reason of this was very simple. There is a well-known little anecdote of some town missionary standing up in a broad highway preaching to a multitude. He was arrested by a Roman Catholic priest, who asked him from the edge of the crowd by what authority he dared to stand there? and who had given him the right to preach? The man had his New Testament in his hand; he rapidly turned to the last chapter of it, and said, “I find it written here, ‘Let him that heareth say, Come!’ I have heard, and I would say Come!” The anecdote represents sufficiently the rise and progress of lay preaching in the Revival. There first appeared, naturally, a simple set of men, who, in their different spheres, would, perhaps, lead and direct a