"

But where the Evangelical influence reached, it brought a marked
abstention from such forms of recreation as dancing, card-playing, and
the drama. Sunday was observed with a Judaical rigour. A more frequent
attendance on public worship was accompanied by the revival of family
prayers and grace before meat. Manuals of private devotion were
multiplied. Religious literature of all kinds was published in great
quantity. A higher standard of morals was generally professed. Marriage
was gradually restored in public estimation to its proper place, not
merely as a civil bond or social festival, but as a chief solemnity of
the Christian religion.

There was no more significant sign of the times than this alteration. In
the eighteenth century some of the gravest of our social offences had
clustered round the institution of marriage, which was almost as much
dishonoured in the observance as in the breach. In the first half of
that century the irregular and clandestine weddings, celebrated without
banns or licence in the Fleet Prison, had been one of the crying
scandals of the middle and lower classes; and in the second half, the
nocturnal flittings to Gretna Green of young couples who could afford
such a Pilgrimage of Passion lowered the whole conception of marriage.
It was through the elopement of Miss Child--heiress of the opulent
banker at Temple Bar--from her father's house in Berkeley Square (now
Lord Rosebery's) that the ownership of the great banking business passed
eventually to the present Lord Jersey; and the annals of almost every
aristocratic family contain the record of similar escapades.

The Evangelical movement, not content with permeating England, sought to
expand itself all over the Empire. The Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge had been
essentially Anglican institutions; and similar societies, but less
ecclesiastical in character, now sprang up in great numbers. The London
Missionary Society was founded in 1795, the Church Missionary Society in
1799, the Religious Tract Society in the same year, and the British and
Foreign Bible Society three years later. All these were distinctly
creations of the Evangelical movement, as were also the Societies for
the Reformation of Manners and for the Better Observance of the Lord's
Day. Religious education found in the Evangelical party its most active
friends. The Sunday School Society was founded in 1785. Two ye