The evidence writers did a great work, not lightly to be disparaged.  The results of their labours were not of a kind to be very perceptible on the surface, and are therefore particularly liable to be under-estimated.  There was neither show nor excitement in the gradual process by which Christianity regained throughout the country the confidence which for a time had been most evidently shaken.  Proofs and evidences had been often dinned into careless ears without much visible effect, and often before weary listeners, to whom the great bulk of what they heard was unintelligible and profitless.  Very often in the hands of well-intentioned, but uninstructed and narrow-minded men, fallacious or thoroughly inconclusive arguments had been confidently used, to the detriment rather than to the advantage of the cause they had at heart.  But at the very least, a certain acquiescence in the ’reasonableness of Christianity,’ and a respect for its teaching, had been secured which could hardly be said to have been generally the case about the time when Bishop Butler began to write.  Meanwhile the revived ardour of religion which had sprung up among Methodists and Evangelicals, and which at the end of the century was stirring, in different forms but with the same spirit, in the hearts of some of the most cultivated and intellectual of our countrymen, was a greater practical witness to the living power of Christianity than all other evidences.

In quite the early part of the period with which these chapters deal there was, as we have seen, a considerable amount of active and hopeful work in the Church of England.  The same may be said of its closing years.  The Evangelical movement had done good even in quarters where it had been looked upon with disfavour.  A better care for the religious education of the masses, an increased attention to Church missions, the foundation of new religious societies, greater parochial activity, improvement in the style of sermons, a disposition on the part of Parliament to reform some glaring Church abuses—­all showed that a stir and movement had begun, which might be slow to make any great advance, but which was at all events promising for the future.  Agitation against slavery had been in great part a result of quickened Christian feeling, and, in a still greater degree, a promoting cause of it.  And when the French Revolution broke out, it quickly appeared how resolutely bent the vast majority of the people were to hold all the more firmly to their Christianity and their Church.  Some of the influences which in the early part of the century had done so much to counteract the religious promise of the time, were no longer, or no longer in the same degree, actively at work.  There was cause, therefore, for confident hope that the good work which had begun might go on increasing.  How far this was the case, and what agencies contributed to hinder or advance religious life in the Church of England and elsewhere, belongs to the history of a time yet nearer to our own.