I have since been told that this happy saying was borrowed from Sir Francis Doyle.
IX.
THE EVANGELICAL INFLUENCE.
Mr. Lecky justly remarks that "it is difficult to measure the change which must have passed over the public mind since the days when the lunatics in Bedlam were constantly spoken of as one of the sights of London; when the maintenance of the African slave-trade was a foremost object of English commercial policy; when men and even women were publicly whipped through the streets when skulls lined the top of Temple Bar and rotting corpses hung on gibbets along the Edgware Road; when persons exposed in the pillory not unfrequently died through the ill-usage of the mob; and when the procession every six weeks of condemned criminals to Tyburn was one of the great festivals of London."
Difficult, indeed, it is to measure so great a change, and it is not wholly easy to ascertain with precision its various and concurrent causes, and to attribute to each its proper potency. But we shall certainly not be wrong if, among those causes, we assign a prominent place to the Evangelical revival of religion. It would be a mistake to claim for the Evangelical movement the whole credit of our social reform and philanthropic work. Even in the darkest times of spiritual torpor and general profligacy England could show a creditable amount of practical benevolence. The public charities of London were large and excellent. The first Foundling Hospital was established in 1739; the first Magdalen Hospital in 1769. In 1795 it was estimated that the annual expenditure on charity-schools, asylums, hospitals, and similar institutions in London was £750,000.
Mr. Lecky, whose study of these social phenomena is exhaustive, imagines that the habit of unostentatious charity, which seems indigenous to England, was powerfully stimulated by the philosophy of Shaftesbury and Voltaire, by Rousseau's sentiment and Fielding's fiction. This theory may have something to say for itself, and indeed it is antecedently plausible; but I can hardly believe that purely literary influences counted for so very much in the sphere of practice. I doubt if any considerable number of Englishmen were effectively swayed by that humanitarian philosophy of France which in the actions of its maturity so awfully belied the promise of its youth. We are, I think, on surer ground when, admitting a national bias towards material benevolence, and not denying some stimulus from literature and philosophy, we assign the main credit of our social regeneration to the Evangelical revival.
The life of John Wesley, practically coterminous with the eighteenth century, witnessed both the lowest point of our moral degradation and also the earliest promise of our moral restoration. He cannot, indeed, be reckoned the founder of the Evangelical school; that title belongs rather to George Whitefield. But his influence, combined with that of his brother Charles, acting on such men as Newton and Cecil and Venn and Scott of Aston Sandford; on Selina Lady Huntingdon and Mrs. Hannah More; on Howard and Clarkson and William Wilberforce; made a deep mark on the Established Church, gave new and permanent life to English Nonconformity, and sensibly affected the character and aspect of secular society.