moral improbability over religion. She thus undermined and essentially weakened one of the most active irritants to scepticism. Thus, too, she was able to count a much larger roll of Christian belief, and much more of Church attendance, than there had been in the comparatively meagre response of the past, all its sectarian and Sabbatarian zeal notwithstanding.
Reed was specially strong for common-sense in religion.—Author, chap. i.
Turning next from this quiet even-tenour religious life of the great body of our society of that time, let us now view, in their more energetic aspects, the many, but in a comparative sense with the world's enlarged population, the numerically small surrounding sects. Ever aggressive as all of these were, alike upon the main body of quiet respectable society, and upon each other, the aggression was ever most vigorous where the doctrine was most extreme and the membership most limited. Truth, as they each explained this striking feature of their respective cases, lay deep in a well, and it was ever fewer and fewer who followed the descent to its most rigorous depths. These small outflanking bodies, then, all skirmished incessantly with the great mass of steady and quiet society, which, in their view, had been lulled to destroying sleep by devices of the evil one. But withal they still more vigorously turned upon one another.
Let us glance for a moment at some of their con-
