The general conclusions of this study are straightforward. There was no large-scale eighteenth-century evangelical revival which saved the soul of the British nation through the miraculous gift of the Spirit. What did happen was confined largely to the middle sectors of the population. There was no Church of the Industrial Revolution. The actual religious movements had two components. Primary religion, as I have defined it, found new outlets, at first inside and then outside the Church of England. From these developments there developed fresh institutions, which had more influence in the nineteenth century in subtly altered forms than they did in the eighteenth. Second, political Protestantism, which had been hardpressed by the Counter-Reformation in the seventeenth century when France was in the ascendant, recovered institutionally, militarily and (in the longer run) intellectually. In Europe, Prussia started its tragic march towards the rank of great power; Holland and the Baltic states retained their independence, and Britain expanded vigorously into the East and North America. The decisive event, however, was the emergence of the United States with a powerful Protestant culture, the direct ancestor of the modern Religious Right. (If Providence intended that, Providence succeeded.)

In Britain it has to be recognised that anti-Catholicism was more than just a crude mob reaction or irrational set of prejudices. Behind it, by the eighteenth century, lay more than two centuries of political, economic and military conflict, as well as intense differences in the understanding of the nature of human existence.