Before the decided course of Christian happiness had time again to culminate in madness, fortunately for Cowper, Newton left Olney for St. Mary Woolnoth.  He was driven away at last by a quarrel with his barbarous parishioners, the cause of which did him credit.  A fire broke out at Olney, and burnt a good many of its straw-thatched cottages.  Newton ascribed the extinction of the fire rather to prayer than water, but he took the lead in practical measures of relief, and tried to remove the earthly cause of such visitations by putting an end to bonfires and illuminations on the 5th of November.  Threatened with the loss of their Guy Fawkes, the barbarians rose upon him, and he had a narrow escape from their violence.  We are reminded of the case of Cotton Mather, who, after being a leader in witch-burning, nearly sacrificed his life in combatting the fanaticism which opposed itself to the introduction of inoculation.  Let it always be remembered that besides its theological side, the Revival had its philanthropic and moral side; that it abolished the slave trade, and at last slavery; that it waged war, and effective war, under the standard of the gospel, upon masses of vice and brutality, which had been totally neglected by the torpor of the Establishment; that among large classes of the people it was the great civilizing agency of the time.

Newton was succeeded as curate of Olney by his disciple, and a man of somewhat the same cast of mind and character, Thomas Scott the writer of the Commentary on the Bible and The Force of Truth.  To Scott Cowper seems not to have greatly taken.  He complains that, as a preacher, he is always scolding the congregation.  Perhaps Newton had foreseen that it would be so, for he specially commended the spiritual son whom he was leaving, to the care of the Rev. William Bull, of the neighbouring town of Newport Pagnell, a dissenting minister, but a member of a spiritual connexion which did not stop at the line of demarcation between Nonconformity and the Establishment.  To Bull Cowper did greatly take, he extols him as “a Dissenter, but a liberal one,” a man of letters and of genius, master of a fine imagination—­or, rather, not master of it—­and addresses him as Carissime Taurorum.  It is rather singular that Newton should have given himself such a successor.  Bull was a great smoker, and had made himself a cozy and secluded nook in his garden for the enjoyment of his pipe.  He was probably something of a spiritual as well as of a physical Quietist, for he set Cowper to translate the poetry of the great exponent of Quietism, Madame Guyon.  The theme of all the pieces which Cowper has translated is the same—­Divine Love and the raptures of the heart that enjoys it—­the blissful union of the drop with the Ocean—­the Evangelical Nirvana.  If this line of thought was not altogether healthy, or conducive to the vigorous performance of practical duty, it was at all events better than the dark fancy of Reprobation.  In his admiration of Madame Guyon, her translator showed his affinity, and that of Protestants of the same school, to Fenelon and the Evangelical element which has lurked in the Roman Catholic church since the days of Thomas a Kempis.