20 PROLOGUE 1 



justification as Wicliff was held responsible for the 

 Peasants' revolt, or Luther for the Bauern-krieg. 

 In England, though our antien regime was not 

 altogether lovely, the social edifice was never in 

 such a bad way as in France ; it was still capable 

 of being repaired ; and our forefathers, very wisely, 

 preferred to wait until that operation could be 

 safely performed, rather than pull it all down 

 about their ears, in order to build a philosophically 

 planned house on brand-new speculative founda- 

 tions. Under these circumstances, it is not 

 wonderful that, in this country, practical men 

 preferred the gospel of Wesley and Whitfield to 

 that of Jean Jacques; while enough of the old 

 leaven of Puritanism remained to ensure the 

 favour and support of a large number of religious 

 men to a revival of evangelical supernaturalisin. 

 Thus, by degrees, the free -think ing, or the indif- 

 ference, prevalent among us in the first half of the 

 eighteenth century, was replaced by a strong 

 supernaturalistic reaction, which submerged the 

 work of the free-thinkers ; and even seemed, for 

 a time, to have arrested the naturalistic movement 

 of which that work was an imperfect indication. 

 Yet, like Lollardry, four centuries earlier, free- 

 thought merely took to running underground, 

 safe, sooner or later, to return to the surface. 



My memory, unfortunately, carries me back to the 

 fourth decade of the nineteenth century, when the 



