England -- Fiction; Imaginary wars and battles -- Fiction
The educational authorities were certainly well advised in making
Corbett's great work the base from which the contemporary history
text-books for use in the national schools were drawn. Your modern
students, by the way, would find it hard to realize that, even at the
time of the Revival, our school-children were obliged to waste most of
the few hours a week which were devoted to historical studies, to the
wearisome memorizing of dates and genealogies connected with the Saxon
Heptarchy. As a rule they had no time left in which to learn anything
whatever of the progress of their own age, or the nineteenth-century
development of the Empire. At that time a national schoolboy destined to
earn his living as a soldier or a sailor, or a tinker or a tailor,
sometimes knew a little of the Saxon kings of England, or even a few
dates connected with the Norman Conquest, and the fact that Henry VIII.
had six wives. But he had never heard of the Reform Bill, and knew
nothing whatever of the incorporation of India, Australia, South Africa,
or Canada.
I suppose the most notable and impressive intimation received by the
British public of the fact that a great religious, moral, and social
revival had begun among them, was contained in Monday morning's
newspapers, after the first great Albert Hall services. The recognized
chief among imperialistic journals became from the beginning the organ
of the new movement. Upon that Monday morning I remember that this
journal's first leading article was devoted to the Message of the
Canadian preachers, its second to the coming of the various Colonial
delegates for the Westminster Hall Conference. For the rest, the centre
of the paper was occupied by a four-page supplement, with portraits,
describing fully, and reporting verbatim the Albert Hall services. The
opening sentences of the leading article gave the public its cue:
"There can be little doubt, we think, that yesterday's services at the
Albert Hall mark the inauguration of a national movement in morals,
which, before it has gone far, is as likely to earn the name of the
Revolution as that of Revival. A religious, moral, and social revolution
is what we anticipate as the result of the mission of the Canadian
preachers. Never before has London been so stirred to its moral and
emotional depths. In such a movement the provincial centres are not
likely to prove less susceptible than the metropolis."
As a matter of fact, I had occasion to know that Mr. James Bryanstone,
the preachers' secretary (in whose name John Crondall had carried out
the whole work of organization, while I served him as secretary and
assistant) received during that Monday no fewer than thirty-four
separate telegraphic invitations from provincial centres subsequently
visited by Stairs and Reynolds. It was, as Crondall had said: The time
was ripe, and the Canadian preachers were the mouthpiece of the hour.
Their Message filled them, and England was conscious of its need of that
Message.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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