But where the Evangelical influence reached, it brought a marked abstention from such forms of recreation as dancing, card-playing, and the drama.  Sunday was observed with a Judaical rigour.  A more frequent attendance on public worship was accompanied by the revival of family prayers and grace before meat.  Manuals of private devotion were multiplied.  Religious literature of all kinds was published in great quantity.  A higher standard of morals was generally professed.  Marriage was gradually restored in public estimation to its proper place, not merely as a civil bond or social festival, but as a chief solemnity of the Christian religion.

There was no more significant sign of the times than this alteration.  In the eighteenth century some of the gravest of our social offences had clustered round the institution of marriage, which was almost as much dishonoured in the observance as in the breach.  In the first half of that century the irregular and clandestine weddings, celebrated without banns or licence in the Fleet Prison, had been one of the crying scandals of the middle and lower classes; and in the second half, the nocturnal flittings to Gretna Green of young couples who could afford such a Pilgrimage of Passion lowered the whole conception of marriage.  It was through the elopement of Miss Child—­heiress of the opulent banker at Temple Bar—­from her father’s house in Berkeley Square (now Lord Rosebery’s) that the ownership of the great banking business passed eventually to the present Lord Jersey; and the annals of almost every aristocratic family contain the record of similar escapades.

The Evangelical movement, not content with permeating England, sought to expand itself all over the Empire.  The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge had been essentially Anglican institutions; and similar societies, but less ecclesiastical in character, now sprang up in great numbers.  The London Missionary Society was founded in 1795, the Church Missionary Society in 1799, the Religious Tract Society in the same year, and the British and Foreign Bible Society three years later.  All these were distinctly creations of the Evangelical movement, as were also the Societies for the Reformation of Manners and for the Better Observance of the Lord’s Day.  Religious education found in the Evangelical party its most active friends.  The Sunday School Society was founded in 1785.  Two years later it was educating two hundred thousand children.  Its most earnest champions were Rowland Hill and Mrs. Hannah More; but it is worthy of note that this excellent lady, justly honoured as a pioneer of elementary education, confined her curriculum to the Bible and the Catechism, and “such coarse works as may fit the children for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor.”