Moreover—­and this appears to us a fair experimental proof that our old-fashioned belief in A Spirit of God, which acts upon the spirit of man, is a true belief—­moreover, I say:  It is a patent fact, that wherever and whenever there has been a revival of the Christian religion; whenever, that is, amid whatsoever confusions and errors, men have begun to feel the need of the Holy Spirit of God, and to pray for that Spirit, a moral revival has accompanied the religious one.  Men and women have not only become better themselves; and that often suddenly and in very truth miraculously better:  but the yearning has awoke in them to make others better likewise.  The grace of God, as they have called it, has made them gracious to their fellow-creatures; and duty, honour, love, self-sacrifice, call it by what name we will, has said to them, with a still small voice more potent than all the thunders of the law:  Go, and seek and save that which is lost.

In no case has this instinctive tendency to practical benevolence been more striking, than in the case of that great religious revival throughout England at the beginning of this century, which issued in the rise of the Evangelical school:  a school rightly so called, because its members did try to obey the precepts of the Gospel, according to their understanding of them, in spirit and in truth.

The doctrines which they held are a matter not for us, but for God and their own souls.  The deeds which they did are matter for us, and for all England; for they have left their mark on the length and breadth of the land.  They were inspired—­cultivated, highborn, and wealthy folk many of them—­with a strange new instinct that God had bidden them to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to visit the prisoner and the sick, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and to preach good tidings to the meek.  A strange new instinct:  and from what cause, save from the same cause as that which Isaiah assigned to his own like deeds?—­Because “The Spirit of the Lord was upon him.”

Yes, if those gracious men, those gracious women, did not shew forth the Spirit and grace of God with power, then there is either no Spirit of God, no grace of God; or those who deny to them the name of saints forget the words of Him Who said:  By their fruits ye shall know them; of Him Who said, too:  That the unpardonable sin, the sin which shewed complete moral perversion, the sin against the Holy Spirit of God, was to attribute good deeds to bad motives, and say:  He casteth out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils.

Yes, that old Evangelical School may now have passed its prime.  It may now be verging toward old age; and other schools, younger and stronger, with broader and clearer knowledge of dogma, of history, civil and ecclesiastical, of the value of ceremonial, of the needs of the human intellect and emotions, may have passed it in a noble rivalry, and snatched, as it were, from the hands of the old Evangelical School the lamp of truth, to bear it further forward in the race.  But God forbid that the spiritual children should be ungrateful to their spiritual parents, though God may have taught them things which their parents did not know.