THE OLD EVANGELICAL PARTY. 333 



having complete faith in truth, had no fear that there 

 might turn out to be heresy in science. He belonged 

 to the great old Evangelical school, and was perhaps its 

 last representative to whom the title great can be 

 accorded. Whatever that school may have become, it 

 is a fact of history that no religious school of recent 

 times has been so great a power among men. It can 

 lay claim to Cowper ; and Cowper is acknowledged to 

 have been one of the quickeners of English poetry from 

 formal correctness and frosty elegance into the freshness 

 and luxuriance of its recent period. It was before its 

 fervid inspirations that the thin, plausible, infinitely 

 clever and witty scepticism of the eighteenth century 

 gave way. To it, directly or indirectly, that missionary 

 movement of recent times, which seems destined to exert 

 a mighty influence on the history of the world, owed its 

 origin. It made itself felt in politics in the form of an 

 intense, indefatigable, sympathetic humanity, and passed, 

 in the same spirit, into all modern philanthropic enter- 

 prise. It showed its vitality and strength in Scotland by 

 bringing about what David Hume would certainly have 

 pronounced an impossibility in the nature of things, the 

 relinquishment, by a large body of clergy, of the privi- 

 leges and pay of a State-Church. Its express contribu- 

 tions, of a high class, to English literature, have not 

 been numerous. The works of Hugh Miller are, on 

 the whole, its most important literary performances. 

 But its indirect influences on English literature have 

 been remarkable. To it, without question, is due that 

 lofty and earnest spirit which has rendered much of the 

 doubt of the present century more religious than much 

 of the faith of the last. All Macaulay's critics have 

 taken note of those touches of old Hebrew grandeur 

 which sublime his noblest passages, nor has the observa- 



