_Ode to Duty._

Charles Corbett's _History of the Revival_ is to my mind the most
interesting book of this century. There are passages in it which leave
me marvelling afresh each time I read them, that any writer, however
gifted, could make quite so intimate a revelation, without personal
knowledge of the inside workings of the movement he describes so
perfectly. But it is a fact that Corbett never spoke with Stairs or
Reynolds, or Crondall; neither, I think, was he personally known to any
member of the executive of _The Citizens_. Yet I know from my own
working experience of the Revival, both in connection with the
pilgrimage of the Canadian preachers and the campaign of _The Citizens_,
that Corbett's descriptions are marvellously accurate and lifelike, and
that the conclusions he draws could not have been made more correct and
luminous if they had been written by the leaders of the great joint
movement themselves.

The educational authorities were certainly well advised in making
Corbett's great work the base from which the contemporary history
text-books for use in the national schools were drawn. Your modern
students, by the way, would find it hard to realize that, even at the
time of the Revival, our school-children were obliged to waste most of
the few hours a week which were devoted to historical studies, to the
wearisome memorizing of dates and genealogies connected with the Saxon
Heptarchy. As a rule they had no time left in which to learn anything
whatever of the progress of their own age, or the nineteenth-century
development of the Empire. At that time a national schoolboy destined to
earn his living as a soldier or a sailor, or a tinker or a tailor,
sometimes knew a little of the Saxon kings of England, or even a few
dates connected with the Norman Conquest, and the fact that Henry VIII.
had six wives. But he had never heard of the Reform Bill, and knew
nothing whatever of the incorporation of India, Australia, South Africa,
or Canada.

I suppose the most notable and impressive intimation received by the
British public of the fact that a great religious, moral, and social
revival had begun among them, was contained in Monday morning's
newspapers, after the first great Albert Hall services. The recognized
chief among imperialistic journals became from the beginning the organ
of the new movement. Upon that Monday morning I remember that this
journal's first leading article was devoted to the