32 THEOPHOBIA AND NEMESIS 



Pamela, for example the miserable curate upon 

 whom the heroine calls for help in her distress ? 

 But apart from that, look at the whole atmosphere 

 of the book. Why, the moral is that if you resist 

 the immoral onslaughts of your master long 

 enough he will give in and marry you, and you 

 will be applauded for your successful strategy by 

 all the countryside. Such is the book which all 

 agreed to praise as an example of all that a book 

 ought to be from the point of view of virtue. 



It will be admitted by all conversant with the 

 facts that religion could hardly have been at a 

 lower ebb than it was when what is known as the 

 Evangelical Movement came to trouble the placid, 

 if stagnant and turbid, pool of the Established 

 Church. Of course it did not transform the 

 Church entirely. Read Miss Austen's novels : 

 the most perfect pictures of life ever written. 

 There are, I suppose, some half-dozen clergymen, 

 pleasant and unpleasant, depicted in them, and 

 we may be sure that they fairly well represent 

 the typical average country parson of the period. 

 Whatever they may otherwise be, they all agree 

 in one point, namely in the complete absence of 

 any such thing as a trace of spirituality. But in 

 the early nineteenth-century Evangelicanism 

 specially that terrible variety Calvinism was the 

 dominant factor where religion really prevailed 

 as a living influence ; and it is to its influence, I 

 firmly believe, that we may attribute the genuine 

 detestation of religion which was so marked a 

 feature of a part of the Victorian and most of 

 the succeeding time. I am not, of course, for- 



