n disciples, with about as much
justification as Wicliff was held responsible for the Peasants' revolt,
or Luther for the _Bauern-krieg_. In England, though our _ancien regime_
was not altogether lovely, the social edifice was never in such a bad
way as in France; it was still capable of being repaired; and our
forefathers, very wisely, preferred to wait until that operation could
be safely performed, rather than pull it all down about their ears, in
order to build a philosophically planned house on brand-new speculative
foundations. Under these circumstances, it is not wonderful that, in
this country, practical men preferred the Gospel of Wesley and Whitfield
to that of Jean Jacques; while enough of the old leaven of Puritanism
remained to ensure the favour and support of a large number of religious
men to a revival of evangelical supernaturalism. Thus, by degrees, the
free-thinking, or the indifference, prevalent among us in the first half
of the eighteenth century, was replaced by a strong supernaturalistic
reaction, which submerged the work of the free-thinkers; and even
seemed, for a time, to have arrested the naturalistic movement of which
that work was an imperfect indication. Yet, like Lollardry, four
centuries earlier, free-thought merely took to running underground,
safe, sooner or later, to return to the surface.

My memory, unfortunately, carries me back to the fourth decade of the
nineteenth century, when the evangelical flood had a little abated and
the tops of certain mountains were soon to appear, chiefly in the
neighbourhood of Oxford; but when, nevertheless, bibliolatry was
rampant; when church and chapel alike proclaimed, as the oracles of God,
the crude assumptions of the worst informed and, in natural sequence,
the most presumptuously bigoted, of all theological schools.

In accordance with promises made on my behalf, but certainly without my
authorisation, I was very early taken to hear "sermons in the vulgar
tongue." And vulgar enough often was the tongue in which some preacher,
ignorant alike of literature, of history, of science, and even of
theology, outside that patronised by his own narrow school, poured
forth, from the safe entrenchment of the pulpit, invectives against
those who deviated from his notion of orthodoxy. From dark allusions to
"sceptics" and "infidels," I became aware of the existence of people who
trusted in carnal reason; who audaciously doubted that the world was
made in si