the
period; what about Fielding? Parson Adams is respectable and lovable,
but the general average of parson and religion is certainly about as low
as it can be. Fielding was not a religious man. Possibly, but what then
of Richardson? We do not find religion at a very high level there; can
anything well be more degraded than the figure cut by Mr. Williams in
_Pamela_, for example--the miserable curate upon whom the heroine calls
for help in her distress? But apart from that, look at the whole
atmosphere of the book. Why, the moral is that if you resist the immoral
onslaughts of your master long enough he will give in and marry you, and
you will be applauded for your successful strategy by all the
countryside. Such is the book which all agreed to praise as an example
of all that a book ought to be from the point of view of virtue.

It will be admitted by all conversant with the facts that religion could
hardly have been at a lower ebb than it was when what is known as the
Evangelical Movement came to trouble the placid, if stagnant and turbid,
pool of the Established Church. Of course it did not transform the
Church entirely. Read Miss Austen's novels: the most perfect pictures of
life ever written. There are, I suppose, some half-dozen clergymen,
pleasant and unpleasant, depicted in them, and we may be sure that they
fairly well represent the typical average country parson of the period.
Whatever they may otherwise be, they all agree in one point, namely in
the complete absence of any such thing as a trace of spirituality. But
in the early nineteenth-century Evangelicanism--specially that terrible
variety Calvinism--was the dominant factor where religion really
prevailed as a living influence; and it is to its influence, I firmly
believe, that we may attribute the genuine detestation of religion which
was so marked a feature of a part of the Victorian and most of the
succeeding time. I am not, of course, forgetting the Oxford Movement,
but, important as that was and is, in its earlier years it was almost
entirely confined to clerical circles, exercising comparatively little
influence on the laity and practically none at all on that great middle
class which had been so much affected by the Wesleys, Whitefield, Scott,
Newton, and the other pundits of Evangelicanism. Take the characteristic
novel of the movement, if novel it should be called, Newman's _Loss and
Gain_: I do not remember a single male character in it who is n