n any _a priori_ principle that I maintain the superiority of this
age. It is, and must be upon special examination, applied to the
phenomena of this special age. The last century, in its first thirty
years, offered the spectacle of a death-like collapse in the national
energies. All great interests suffered together. The intellectual power
of the country, spite of the brilliant display in a lower element, made
by one or two men of genius, languished as a whole. The religious
feeling was torpid, and in a degree which insured the strong reaction of
some irritating galvanism, or quickening impulse such as that which was
in fact supplied by Methodism. It is not with that age that I wish to
compare the present. I compare it with the age which terminated thirty
years ago--roused, invigorated, searched as that age was through all its
sensibilities by the electric shock of the French Revolution. It is by
comparison with an age so keenly alive, penetrated by ideas stirring and
uprooting, that I would compare it; and even then the balance of gain in
well-calculated resource, fixed yet stimulating ideals, I hold to be in
our favour--and this in opposition to much argument in an adverse spirit
from many and influential quarters. Indeed, it is a remark which more
than once I have been led to make in print: that if a foreigner were to
inquire for the moral philosophy, the ethics, and even for the
metaphysics, of our English literature, the answer would be, 'Look for
them in the great body of our Divinity.' Not merely the more scholastic
works on theology, but the occasional sermons of our English divines
contain a body of richer philosophical speculation than is elsewhere to
be found; and, to say the truth, far more instructive than anything in
our Lockes, Berkeleys, or other express and professional philosophers.
Having said this by way of showing that I do not overlook their just
pretensions, let me have leave to notice a foible in these writers which
is not merely somewhat ludicrous, but even seriously injurious to
truth. One and all, through a long series of two hundred and fifty
years, think themselves called upon to tax their countrymen--each
severally in his own age--with a separate, peculiar, and unexampled
guilt of infidelity and irreligion. Each worthy man, in his turn, sees
in his own age overt signs of these offences not to be matched in any
other. Five-and-twenty periods of ten years each may be taken,
concerning each of