There was soon, however, to be a quickening of the dry bones.  The spirit of the time—­the zeit-geist—­began to move in the Church.  It was the spirit of investigation, of scientific inquiry, of rigorous test.  The older preachers and religious authorities still droned about the duty of defending the faith “once for all” delivered to the saints.  In spite of their protests, the younger men would go down into the crypt of the Church, and examine the foundations of the building.  They could not be kept back by authoritative assurances that the stones were sound, and were well and truly laid.  The hysterical protests against the irreverence of examination fell on deaf ears.  The answer was the simple insistance on investigation.  The very reluctance to permit it was an indication that it would not bear investigation.

At the opening of the century, this idea, expressed in varying forms, was rapidly becoming prevalent.  The citadel of the Church was assaulted, by some with ferocity, and by others with scorn and contempt.  The defence was on the old lines of denunciation of the wickedness of the assailants, of vituperative epithets, and of the assumption of special and divine illumination.  The issue of the conflict would not have been doubtful, had it been continued with these tactics.  The Church would have been relegated to the limbo of superstition and the hide-bound pedantry of ecclesiasticism, if new defenders on new principles had not entered the lists.  Reinforcement came from a band of philosophic thinkers of whom Wordsworth and Coleridge were the pioneers.  The influence of both these men was underestimated at the time.  They appeared weak and ineffective, but the ideas to which they gave expression, entered the minds of stronger men, who applied them with more vigorous force.  The Church, Coleridge declared, as Carlyle interprets him, was not dead, but tragically, asleep only.  It might be aroused and might again become useful, if only the right paths were opened.  Coleridge could not open the paths, he could but vaguely show the depth and volume of the forces pent up in the Church; but he insisted that they were there, that eternal truth was in Christianity, and that out of it must come the light and life of the world.  As his little band of hearers listened to him, they saw the first faint gleams of the light which was to illumine the world and make the darkness and degradation of the materialistic philosophy an impossibility to the devout mind.  Thus he stood at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as Erasmus stood at the beginning of the sixteenth, perceiving and proclaiming the existence of truths which others were to apply to the needs of the time.