and harmony which
subsists between the operations of God's providence in the material
world of nature, and in that inner spiritual world which finds its
chiefmost exposition in Revelation. Paley's 'Natural Theology,' though
not the most valuable, is by no means the least interesting of his
works, and was intended by him to stand in the same relation to natural,
as his 'Evidences' to revealed religion.

The evidence writers did a great work, not lightly to be disparaged. The
results of their labours were not of a kind to be very perceptible on
the surface, and are therefore particularly liable to be
under-estimated. There was neither show nor excitement in the gradual
process by which Christianity regained throughout the country the
confidence which for a time had been most evidently shaken. Proofs and
evidences had been often dinned into careless ears without much visible
effect, and often before weary listeners, to whom the great bulk of what
they heard was unintelligible and profitless. Very often in the hands of
well-intentioned, but uninstructed and narrow-minded men, fallacious or
thoroughly inconclusive arguments had been confidently used, to the
detriment rather than to the advantage of the cause they had at heart.
But at the very least, a certain acquiescence in the 'reasonableness of
Christianity,' and a respect for its teaching, had been secured which
could hardly be said to have been generally the case about the time when
Bishop Butler began to write. Meanwhile the revived ardour of religion
which had sprung up among Methodists and Evangelicals, and which at the
end of the century was stirring, in different forms but with the same
spirit, in the hearts of some of the most cultivated and intellectual of
our countrymen, was a greater practical witness to the living power of
Christianity than all other evidences.

In quite the early part of the period with which these chapters deal
there was, as we have seen, a considerable amount of active and hopeful
work in the Church of England. The same may be said of its closing
years. The Evangelical movement had done good even in quarters where it
had been looked upon with disfavour. A better care for the religious
education of the masses, an increased attention to Church missions, the
foundation of new religious societies, greater parochial activity,
improvement in the style of sermons, a disposition on the part of
Parliament to reform some glaring Church abuses--all s