In all the phases of social life is this industry manifest. If the banquet hall is warmed and lighted by electricity, so, also, is it adorned with tapestries, silken and artistic, napery surpassingly smooth, and laces intricately wrought.
How like a fairy tale reads the evolution of textile progress! Conceptions, infinite in range and variety, alike pleasing to the eye and gratifying to vanity, have been spun, woven, knit, and embroidered, until, standing as we do at the dawn of another century, upon the summit of unparalleled achievements, we ask, “Can the mind conceive, the heart desire, or the hand execute more.”
THE CENTURY’S RELIGIOUS PROGRESS
By GEORGE EDWARD REED, S.T.D., LL.D.,
President Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa.
The closing years of the nineteenth century, both in Europe and the United States, are characterized by a religious life as phenomenal with respect to development and influence as those of the eighteenth were phenomenal for lethargy and decline. “Never,” says a writer in the North British Review, “has a century risen on England so void of soul and faith as that which opened with Anne (1702), and reached its misty noon beneath the second George (1732–1760),—a dewless night succeeded by a sunless dawn. The Puritans were buried and the Methodists were not born.” In this opinion, all historians and essayists concur.
Among the clergy were many whose lives were of the Dominie Sampson order, described in Scott’s “Guy Mannering”—men whose lives were the scandal and reproach of the church; who openly taught that reason is the all-sufficient guide; that the Scriptures are to be received only as they agree with the light of nature; pleading for liberty while running into the wildest licentiousness. Montesquieu, indeed, did not hesitate to charge Englishmen generally with being devoid of every genuine religious sentiment. “If,” he says, “the subject of religion is mentioned in society, it excites nothing but laughter. Not more than four or five members of the House of Commons are regular attendants at church.”
From the colleges and universities, the great doctrines of the Reformation were well-nigh banished, a refined system of ethics, having no connection with Christian motives, being substituted for the principles of a divinely revealed law.
On every side faith seemed to be dying out; indeed, would have died out but for the tremendous reformation in life and morals induced by the self-denying and heroic labors of the Wesleys and their coadjutors, to whom, more than to any beside, England owes her salvation from a relapse into barbarism,—a service which in later years won for the Wesleys a memorial in Westminster Abbey.
On the Continent, religious conditions were no better. In France the masses were yet reeling amid the excesses of the Revolution. Voltaire and Rousseau were the oracles and prophets of their times,—the popular idols of the hour. Voltaire, indeed, openly boasted that he alone would laugh Christianity out of the court of public opinion, declaring the whole system to be outgrown and powerless. Germany, given over to theological speculation, crushed beneath the weight of the Napoleonic wars, and torn by internal dissensions, gave but little hope that upon her altars the dying fire of the great Reformation would ever again flame forth as in the older and more heroic days.