And in many ways they were amongst the most powerful influences over the thought of the young of the last generation.  In the early fifties we were not so fastidious in the matter of style and composition as we have now become.  Furious eloquence and somewhat melodramatic incongruities did not shock us so much, if we found them to come from a really glowing imagination and from genuine inspiration, albeit somewhat unpruned and ill-ordered.  Now Kingsley “let himself go,” in the way of Byron, Disraeli, Bulwer, and Dickens, who not seldom poured out their conceptions in what we now hold to be spasmodic form.  It is possible that the genteeler taste of our age may prevent the young of to-day from caring for Alton Locke.  But I can assure them that five-and-forty years ago that book had a great effect and came home to the heart of many.  And the effect was permanent and creative.  We may see to-day in England widespread results of that potent social movement which was called Christian Socialism, a movement of which Kingsley was neither the founder nor the chief leader, but of which his early books were the main popular exponents, and to which they gave a definiteness and a key which the movement itself sadly lacked.

I was not of an age to take part in that movement, but in after years at the Working Men’s College, which grew out of it, I gained a personal knowledge of what was one of the most striking movements of our time.  Nowadays, when leading statesmen assure us “we are all Socialists now,” when the demands of the old “Chartists” are Liberal common form, when trades-unionism, co-operation, and state-aided benefits are largely supported by politicians, churchmen, journals, and writers, it is difficult for us now to conceive the bitter opposition which assailed the small band of reformers who, five-and-forty years ago, spoke up for these reforms.  Of that small band, who stood alone amongst the literary, academic, and ecclesiastical class, Charles Kingsley was the most outspoken, the most eloquent, and assuredly the most effective.  I do not say the wisest, the most consistent, or the most staunch; nor need we here discuss the strength or the weakness of the Christian Socialist reform.  When we remember how widely this vague initiative has spread and developed, when we read again Alton Locke and Yeast, and note how much has been practically done in forty years to redress or mitigate the abuses against which these books uttered the first burning protest, we may form some estimate of all that the present generation of Englishmen owes to Charles Kingsley and his friends.