has become absolutely necessary to examine the foundations of its teaching, at any risk of temporary disturbance to the faith of individuals.  The advantage ultimately gained was twofold.  It was not only that the vital doctrines of Christian faith had been scrutinised both by friends and enemies, and were felt to have stood the proof.  But also defenders of received doctrine learnt, almost insensibly, very much from its opponents.  They became aware—­or if not they, at all events their successors became aware—­that orthodoxy must, in some respects, modify the stringency of its conclusions; that there was need, in other instances, of disentangling Christian verities from the scholastic refinements which had gradually grown up around them; and that there were many questions which might safely be left open to debate without in any way impairing the real defences of Christianity.  A sixteenth or seventeenth-century theologian regarded most religious questions from a standing point widely different in general character from that of his equal in piety and learning in the eighteenth century.  The circumstances and tone of thought which gave rise to the Deistic and its attendant controversies mark with tolerable definiteness the chief period of transition.

The Evangelical revival, both that which is chiefly connected with the name of the Wesleys and of Whitefield, and that which was carried on more exclusively within the Church of England, closely corresponded in many of its details to what had often occurred before in the history of the Christian Church.  But it had also a special connection with the controversies which preceded it.  When minds had become tranquillised through the subsidence of discussions which had threatened to overthrow their faith, they were the more prepared to listen with attention and respect to the stirring calls of the Evangelical preacher.  The very sense of weariness, now that long controversy had at last come to its termination, tended to give a more entirely practical form to the new religious movement.  And although many of its leaders were men who had not come to their prime till the Deistical controversy was almost over, and who would probably have viewed the strife, if it had still been raging, with scarcely any other feeling than one of alarmed concern, this was at all events not the case with John Wesley.  There are tolerably clear signs that it had materially modified the character of his opinions.  The train of thought which produced the younger Dodwell’s ’Christianity not Founded upon Argument’—­a book of which people scarcely knew, when it appeared, whether it was a serious blow to the Deist cause, or a formidable assistance to it—­considerably influenced Wesley’s mind, as it also did that of William Law and his followers.  He entirely repudiated the mysticism which at one time had begun to attract him; but, like the German pietists, who were in some sense the religious complement of Rationalism, he never ceased to be comparatively indifferent to