It was the Christian Socialist revivalists in the generation of Westcott, Scott Holland and Gore, during the 1870s and 1880s, and their successors in the 1920s, and especially Temple, who established F. D. Maurice as the great progenitor of their ideals. The attribution has endured to the present time, despite Alec Vidler's careful correctives. Maurice's Christian Socialism, Vidler wrote in 1948, was ‘no more than an incidental aspect of his thought’. It covered, he added on a later occasion, ‘only a small segment of his interests’. How Maurice came to be involved in the first place is clear: a disposition to favour social action derived from his inherent interest in the current affairs of his day – to which there were references throughout the whole body of his writings – and from some of his theological presuppositions. ‘It is the great struggle of every time to realize the union of the spiritual and eternal with the manifestations of it in time’, Maurice wrote to Mrs Williams Wynn in the August of 1855. At a certain moment, and in the peculiarly heightened context of the radical atmosphere of the ‘Hungry Forties’, he thought he found one of those manifestations attainable in the ideals of Co-operative Socialism. In 1848 he felt the time had come to act. But the prospect closed up again, and by 1854 Maurice had abandoned the vision and expended his energies, instead, in the work of popular adult education. While the enthusiasm for co-operative enterprises had lasted, however, it had demonstrated with helpful clarity a feature of Maurice's general thought which was expressed in the grander strategies of his theology.