FIRST YEARS AT MADELEY.--DIFFICULTIES AND DISCOURAGEMENTS 56
TREVECCA COLLEGE.--THE CALVINIST CONTROVERSY 95
There is reason to think that the interest felt in the Evangelical Revival of the last century, after declining for awhile, is again steadily increasing. It may be said that this quickened interest is but part of a larger intellectual movement, of a reaction, in which we have passed from undue disparagement of the eighteenth century to an exaggerated estimate of its importance and value. Nor is it likely, when eighteenth century forms of literature, philosophy, and social life are being studied with so much sympathy, that the most prominent event in its religious history would escape attention.
There is some truth in this, but it is not the whole account of the matter. The fact is, and we are continually being reminded of it, the consequences of the Revival are by no means exhausted. We are not yet at the end of its manifestations; and though some of its later forms have new and striking features of their own, their relation to the original movement is attested both by historic descent and by inward resemblances and affinities. So long as this is the case, and the Revival, or Reformation, of a century and a half ago is still amongst the living forces that influence society, the interest with which its rise and progress are regarded will continue. Active Christian spirits will seek to understand and respond to its newer developments; and others, whether in sympathy with those developments or not, will be obliged to take account of them, and assign them, as far as possible, to their true succession and order.
In addition to its direct, historical consequences, moreover, time is continually discovering or suggesting remoter and more complicated results of the Evangelical Revival, thus rendering the study of the whole question at once more difficult and more attractive. What were its real relations, if any, to the teaching of Coleridge, the points of agreement and divergence, of attraction and repulsion between it and that original and influential mind, to which so many, who in their turn have influenced the course of religious thought in England, have confessed themselves supremely indebted? What is the connexion, revealed both by resemblances and by contrasts, between the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century and the Tractarian or Anglo-Catholic movement of the nineteenth, between the Oxford of John and Charles Wesley and the Oxford of Keble and Pusey and Newman? What has the Revival contributed to the gradual but unmistakable change that has come over the theology of the Calvinistic Churches; and, again, to the progress of democracy in Church and State? As regards some at least of these questions, it is too soon to look for precise and final answers; but their relevance will be admitted, and the evidence by which they must be determined accumulates from year to year.