er presence, as hinderers of the
rational faculty, and upstart pretenders to rights which were not
theirs. 'Enthusiasm' was frowned down, and no small part of the light
and fire of religion fell with it.

Yet an age in which great questions were handled by great men could not
be either an unfruitful or an uninteresting one. It might be unfruitful,
in the sense of reaping no great harvest of results; and it might be
uninteresting, in respect of not having much to show upon the surface,
and exhibiting no great variety of active life. But much good fruit for
the future was being developed and matured; and no one, who cares to see
how the present grows out of the past, will readily allow that the
religious thought and the religious action of the eighteenth century are
deficient in interest to our times. Our debt is greater than many are
inclined to acknowledge. People see clearly that the Church of that age
was, in many respects, in an undoubtedly unsatisfactory condition,
sleepy and full of abuses, and are sometimes apt to think that the
Evangelical revival (the expression being used in its widest sense) was
the one redeeming feature of it. And as in theological and
ecclesiastical thought, in philosophy, in art, in poetry, the general
tendency has been reactionary, the students and writers of the
eighteenth century have in many respects scarcely received their due
share of appreciation. Moreover, negative results make little display.
There is not much to show for the earnest toil that has very likely been
spent in arriving at them; and a great deal of the intellectual labour
of the last century was of this kind. Reason had been more completely
emancipated at the Reformation than it was at first at all aware of. Men
who were engaged in battling against certain definite abuses, and
certain specified errors, scarcely discovered at first, nor indeed for
long afterwards, that they were in reality contending also for
principles which would affect for the future the whole groundwork of
religious conviction. They were not yet in a position to see that
henceforward authority could take only a secondary place, and that they
were installing in its room either reason or a more subtle spiritual
faculty superior even to reason in the perception of spiritual things.
It was not until near the end of the seventeenth century that the mind
began to awaken to a full perception of the freedom it had won--a
freedom far more complete in principl