The preceding chapters have shown that the Great Revival was creating over the wild moral wastes of England a pure and spiritual atmosphere, and its movements and organisations were taking root in every direction. Voltaire, and that pedantic cluster of conceited infidels, the Bolingbrokes, Middletons, and Mandevilles, Chubbs, Woolstons, and Collinses, who prophesied that Christian faith was fast vanishing from the earth, were slightly premature. It is, indeed, interesting to notice the contrast in this period between England and the then most unhappy sister-kingdom of France: there, indeed, Christian faith did seem to be trodden underfoot of men. While a great silent, hallowed revolution was going on in one, all things were preparing for a tremendous revolution in the other. It was just about the time that the Revival was leavening English society that Lord Chesterfield summed up what he had noticed in France, in the following words: “In short, all the symptoms which I have ever met with in history previous to great changes and revolutions in government, now exist and daily increase in France.” The words were spoken several years before that terrible Revolution came, which conducted the King, the Queen, and almost all the aristocracy, respectability, and lingering piety of the nation to the scaffold. It was a wonderful compensation. A few years before, a sovereign had cast away from his nation, and from around his throne, all the social elements which could guard and give dignity to it; how natural, then, that the whole _canaille_ of the kingdom should rush upon the throne of his successor, and cast it and its occupant into the bonfire of the Reign of Terror! In Britain, from some cause, all was different. This period of the Revival has been truly called the starting-point of the modern religious history of that land; and, somehow, all things were singularly combining to give to the nation a new-born happiness, to create new facilities for mental growth and culture, and to enlarge and to fill their cup of national joy. It will be noticed that these things did not descend to the nation generally from the highest places of the land. With the exception of the sovereign, we cannot see many instances of a lively interest in the moral well-being of the people. Other exceptions there were, but they were very few. From the people themselves, and from the causes we have described, originated and spread those means which, amidst the wild agitations of revolution, as they came foaming over the Channel, and which were rather aided than repressed by the unwisdom of many of the governments and magistrates, calmed and enlightened the public mind, and secured the order of society, and the stability of the throne.