statesman's load. Pauperism was appalling. In a word, the
need for social regeneration both material and moral was in the spirit
of the time. Here were the hopes, vague, blind, unmeasured, formless,
that had inspired the wild clamour for the bill, the whole bill, and
nothing but the bill. The whig patricians carried away the prizes of
great office, though the work had been done by men of a very different
stamp. It was the utilitarian radicals who laid the foundations of
social improvement in a reasoned creed. With admirable ability,
perseverance, unselfishness, and public spirit, Bentham and his
disciples had regenerated political opinion, and fought the battle
against debt, pauperism, class-privilege, class-monopoly, abusive
patronage, a monstrous criminal law, and all the host of sinister
interests.[82] As in every reforming age, men approached the work from
two sides. Evangelical religion divides with rationalism the glory of
more than one humanitarian struggle. Brougham, a more potent force than
we now realise, plunged with the energy of a Titan into a thousand
projects, all taking for granted that ignorance is the disease and
useful knowledge the universal healer, all of them secular, all dealing
with man from the outside, none touching imagination or the heart.
March-of-mind became to many almost as wearisome a cry as
wisdom-of-our-ancestors had been. According to some eager innovators,
dogma and ceremony were to go, the fabrics to be turned into mechanics'
institutes, the clergy to lecture on botany and statistics. The reaction
against this dusty dominion of secularity kindled new life in rival
schools. They insisted that if society is to be improved and
civilisation saved, it can only be through improvement in the character
of man, and character is moulded and inspired by more things than are
dreamed of by societies for useful knowledge. The building up of the
inward man in all his parts, faculties, and aspirations, was seen to be,
what in every age it is, the problem of problems. This thought turned
the eyes of many--of Mr. Gladstone first among them--to the church, and
stirred an endeavour to make out of the church what Coleridge describes
as the sustaining, correcting, befriending opposite of the world, the
compensating counterforce to the inherent and inevitable defects of the
state as a state. Such was the new movement of the time between 1835 and
1845.

'It is surprising,' said Proudhon, the trenchant gen