The best evidence of the truth of the Gospel is admittedly its
unequalled power of lifting up humanity to higher and yet higher
levels. In many and mighty instances of that power our age is not
barren. And in despite of the foes without and within that have
wrought her woe--of the Pharisaism that is a mask for fraud, of the
mammon-worship cloaked as respectability, of scepticism lightly
mocking, of the bolder enmity of the blasphemer--we cannot
contemplate the story of Christianity throughout our epoch, even in
these islands and this empire, without seeing that the advance of the
Faith is real and constant, the advance of the rising tide, and that
her seeming defeats are but the deceptive reflux of the ever-mounting
waves.
CHAPTER X.
PROGRESS OF THE EMPIRE FROM 1887 TO 1897.
[Illustration: Duke of Connaught.]
Resuming our pen after an interval of ten years, we have thought it
well, not only to carry on our story of the Sovereign and her realm
to the latest attainable point, but also to give some account of the
advance made and the work accomplished by the Methodist Church,
which, youngest of the greater Nonconformist denominations, has acted
more powerfully than any other among them on the religious and social
life, not only of the United Kingdom and the Empire, but of the
world.
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