Romanticism becomes a spiritual dispensation, an individual or coterie struggle to come to terms with the eclipse of shared Christian doctrines. Reclaiming visionary Romanticism as a spiritual exercise did not yield agreement on the extent to which an apocalypse transferred to consciousness or to nature actually sustained Christian faith. English literary Romanticism as a discrete aesthetic project worked out across two generations by a visionary company of male poets has given way to an interest in the many other voices that found expression in the Romantic period. As the older Dissenting congregations tended just to hold their numbers or even to decline during the Romantic period, growth and expansive activism was achieved elsewhere, in a more emotional register and often at the lower end of the social scale, with the rise of Evangelical piety. Before there was 'Romanticism' there were a host of contemporary sectarian literary designations, conceived in antagonism and sustained in debate.