And the Revival took effect on distinct circles which certainly seemed outside of the Methodist movement, but which yet, assuredly, belonged to it; the Clapham Sect, for instance. “The Clapham Sect” is a designation originating in the facetious and satiric brain of Sydney Smith, than whom the Revival never had a more unjust, ungenerous, or ungracious critic; but the pages of the _Edinburgh Review_, in which the flippant sting of speech first appeared, years afterwards consecrated the term and made it historical in the elegant essay of Sir James Stephen. By his pen the sect, with all its leaders, acts, and consequences, are pleasantly described in the _Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography_; and surely this was as much the result of the Great Revival as the “evangelical succession” which calls forth the exercise in previous pages of the same interesting pen; it was all a natural evangelical succession, that of which we have spoken before, as enthusiasm for humanity growing out of enthusiasm for Divine truth. Men who have become fairly impressed by a sense of their own immortality and its redemption in Christ, become interested in the temporal well-being and the eternal welfare of others. It has always been so, and is so still, that men who have not a sense of man’s immortal welfare have usually cared but little about his temporal interests. Hospitals and churches, orphanages and missionary societies, usually grow out of the same spiritual root. We scarcely need ask our readers to accompany us to the pleasant little village of Clapham, and its sweet sequestered Common, then so far removed from the great metropolis; surrounded by the homes of wealthy men, merchants, statesmen, eminent preachers, all of them infected with the spirit of the Revival, and all of them noteworthy in the story of those means which were to shiver the chains of the slave, to carry light to dark heathen minds, and to hand out the Bible to English villages and far-off nations. We have been desirous of conveying the impression that those were times of a singular and almost simultaneous spiritual upheaval; it was as if, in different regions of the great lake of humanity, submerged islands suddenly appeared from beneath the waves; and it is not too much to say that all those various means which have so tended to beautify and bless the world, schemes of education, schemes for the improvement of prison discipline, schemes of missionary enterprise for the extension of Christian influence in the East Indies, the destruction of slavery in the West Indies, and the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire; Bible societies and Tract societies, and, in fact, the whole munificent machinery and organisation of our day, sprang forth from that revival of the last century. It seems now like a magnificent burst of enthusiasm; yet, ultimately it was based upon only two or three great elements of faith: the spiritual world was