And they were our spiritual parents, those old Evangelicals.  No just and well-informed man who has passed middle age, but must confess, that to them we owe whatsoever vital religion exists at this moment in any school or party of the Church of England; that to them we owe the germs at least, and in many cases the full organization and the final success, of a hundred schemes of practical benevolence and practical justice, without which this country, in its haste to grow rich at all risks and by all means, might have plunged itself ere now into anarchy and revolution.  And he must confess, too, if he is one who has seen much of his fellow-creatures and their characters, that that school numbered among its disciples—­and, thank God, they are not all yet gone home to their rest—­some of the loveliest human souls, whose converse has chastened and ennobled his own soul.  Ah, well—­

   The old order changeth, giving place to the new;
   And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
   Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

And new methods and new institutions have arisen, and will yet arise, for seeking and saving that which is lost.  God’s blessing on them all, to whatsoever party, church, or sect they may belong!  Whosoever cast out devils in Christ’s name, Christ has forbidden us to forbid them, whether they follow us or not.  But yet shall we not still honour and love the old Evangelical School, and many an Institution which it has left behind, as heirlooms to some of us, at least, from our mothers, or from women to whom we owed, in long past years, our earliest influences for good, our earliest examples of a practical Christian life, our earliest proofs that there was indeed a Spirit of God, a gracious Spirit, Who gave grace to the hearts, the deeds, the very looks and voices of those in whom He dwelt; Institutions, which are too likely some of them to die, simply from the loss of old friends?

The loss of old friends.  Yes, so it is always in this world.  The old earnest hearts go home one by one to their rest; and the young earnest hearts—­and who shall blame them?—­go elsewhere; and try new fashions of doing good, which are more graceful and more agreeable to them.  For the religious world, like all other forms of the world, has its fashions; and of them too stands true the saying of the apostle:  That this world and the fashion thereof pass away.  Many a good work, which once was somewhat fashionable in its way, has become somewhat unfashionable, and something else is fashionable in its place; and five-and-twenty years hence something else will have become fashionable; and our children will look back on our ways of doing good with pity, if not with contempt, as narrow and unenlightened, just as we are too apt to look back on our fathers’ ways.  And all the while, what can they teach worth teaching, what can we teach worth teaching, save what our fathers and mothers taught, what the Spirit of God taught them, and has taught to all who would listen since the foundation of the world, “shewing man what was good:”  and what was that—­“What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”