phy of Milton and Locke, of Jeremy Taylor, Hoadley, Warburton, Montesquieu. The angry disputations of convocation were silenced. The church was at peace; and the state had ceased to distrust either Roman Catholics or nonconformists. Never since the Reformation, had any monarch succeeded to the throne, at a period so free from religious discords and embarrassments. In former reigns, high churchmen had been tainted with Jacobite sympathies: now all parties vied in attachment and loyalty. Once more the church was wholly with the king; and added all her weight to the influence of the crown. Many English Catholics, crushed by persecution and losing hopes of the restoration of their own faith, had gradually conformed to a church, already beginning to boast a certain antiquity, enshrined in the ancient temples of their forefathers, respecting their traditions, allied to the state, and enjoying the power, wealth, fashion, and popularity of a national establishment. Some of this body had been implicated in both the Jacobite rebellions; but their numbers had ceased to be formidable; and they were now universally well-disposed and loyal.1 The dissenters had been uniformly attached to the House of Hanover; and, having ceased to be oppressed, quietly prospered, without offence to the church. The old nonconformist bodies, the offspring of the Reformation and the Act of Uniformity, so far from making progress, had declined in numbers and activity, since the time of William III.2 There had been little religious zeal, either within or without the church. It was an age of spiritual indifference and leth

1 In 1767, there appeared to have been no more than 67,916; and, in 1780, 69,376. They had 200 chapels. - Census, 1851: Report on Religious Worship, ci. In 1696, out of 2,599,786 freeholders in England and Wales, there had been 13,856 Catholics. - Ibid., c. Dalrymple, book i. part ii. App.; Butler's Historical Mem. of the Catholics, iii. 162.

2 Calamy's Life & Times, ii. 529; Lord Mahon's Hist., ii. 372; Bogue and Bennett's Hist., iii. 314-334. In 1696, it appeared that 108,676 freeholders in England and Wales were nonconformists (Census Report, 1851, c.); but as dissent chiefly prevailed in the towns, this return must have fallen very far short of the total numbers.

1

argy. With many noble exceptions, the clergy had been inert and apathetic. A benefice was regarded as an estate, to which was attached the performance of certain ecclesiastical duties. These once performed,—the service read, the weekly sermon preached, the child christened, the parishioner buried, and the parson differed little from the squire. He was generally charitable, kindly, moral; and well educated-according to the standard of the age-in all but theology.2 But his spiritual calling sat lightly upon him. Zealous for church and king, and honestly hating dissenters, he was unconscious of a mission to spread the knowledge of the gospel among the people, to solve their doubts, to satisfy their spiritual longings, and to attach their religious sympathies to the church. The nonconformist ministers, comfortably established among their flocks and enjoying their modest temporalities, shared the spiritual ease of churchmen. They were ruffled by no sectarian zeal or restless spirit of encroachment. Many even conformed to the Church of England. The age was not congenial to religious excitement and enthusiasm; a lull had succeeded to storms and agitations.

But this religious calm had lately been disturbed by WesWesley and ley and Whitefield, the apostles of modern dissent. Whitefield. These eminent men were both brought up as faithful disciples of the church, and admitted to holy orders. Not impelled to their extraordinary mission by any repugnance

1 Bishop Gibson's Pastoral Letters, 2d Ed., 1728, p. 2; Butler's Advertisement to Analogy of Revealed Religion, 1736; Archbishop Secker's Eight Charges, 1738, p. 4; Southey's Life of Wesley, i. 324, &c.

"Those

2 Bishop Burnet thus speaks of candidates for ordination: who have read some few books, yet never seem to have read the scriptures." "The case is not much better in many, who, having got into orders, come for instruction, and cannot make it appear that they have read the scriptures, or any one good book, since they were ordained." Pastoral Care, 3d Ed., 1713: Preface.

8 "A remiss, unthinking course of life, with little or no application to study, and the bare performing of that, which, if not done, would draw censures when complained of, without even pursuing the pastoral care in any suitable degree, is but too common, as well as too evident." — Ibid. See also Intr. to last volume of Burnet's Hist.

to her doctrines and discipline, they went forth to rouse the people from their religious apathy, and awaken them to a sense of sin. They penetrated the haunts of ignorance and vice; and braved ridicule, insults, and violence. They preached in the open air to multitudes who had scarcely heard of the gospel. On the hill-side, by ruins, on the seashore, they appealed to the imagination as well as to the devotional sentiments of their hearers. They devoted their lives to the spiritual instruction of the middle and lower classes preached to them everywhere: prayed with them: read the scriptures in public and private; and addressed them with familiar speech and homely illustration.1 Wesley, still in communion with the church and holding her in love and reverence, became the founder of a new sect.2 He preached to reclaim men from sin: he addressed the neglected heathens of society, whom the church knew not: he labored as a missionary, not as a sectarian. Schism grew out of his pious zeal: but his followers, like their revered founder, have seldom raised their voices, in the spirit of schismatics, against their parent church. Whitefield, for a time the fellow-laborer of Wesley, surpassed that great man as a preacher; and moved the feelings and devotion of his hearers with the inspiration of a prophet; but, less gifted

1 "I design plain truth for plain people; therefore, of set purpose I abstain from all nice and philosophical speculations, from all perplexed and intricate reasonings; and, as far as possible, from even the show of learning, unless in sometimes citing the original scriptures. I labor to avoid all words which are not easy to be understood,—all which are not used in common life, - and in particular those kinds of technical terms that so frequently occur in bodies of divinity." Wesley's Pref. to Sermons, 1746.In another place Wesley wrote:-"I dare no more write in a fine style, than wear a fine coat." - Pref. to 2d Ser. of Sermons, 1788.

2 Rev. J. Wesley's Works, i. 185; ii. 515; vii. 422, 423; viii. 111, 254,

269, 311; Southey's Life of Wesley, ch. xii., xx., &c.

3 Wesley's Works, viii. 205, 321; Centenary of Wesleyan Methodism, 183; Lord Mahon's Hist., ii. 365, 366. Wesley himself said: :-"We are not seceders; nor do we bear any resemblance to them:" and after his sect had spread itself over the land, he continually preached in the churches of the establishment.

with powers of organization and government, he left fewer monuments of his labors, as the founder of a religious sect.1 Holding to the doctrine of absolute predestination, he became the leader of the Calvinistic Methodists and Lady Huntingdon's connection.2 The Methodists were regarded by churchmen as fanatical enthusiasts rather than dissenters; while their close relations with the church repelled the favor of other sects. They suffered ridicule, but enjoyed toleration; and, laboring in a new field, attracted multitudes to their communion.

dissent.

8

The revival of the religious spirit by the Methodists gradRevival of ually stimulated the older sects of nonconformists. Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, awakened by Wesley and Whitefield to a sense of the spiritual wants of the people, strove, with all their energies, to meet them. And large numbers, whose spiritual care had hitherto been neglected alike by the church and by nonconformists, were steadily swelling the ranks of dissent. The church caught the same spirit more slowly.

She was not alive to the causes which were undermining her influence, and invading her proper domain, the religious teaching of the people, until chapels and meeting-houses had been erected in half the parishes of England.*

Church of

Scotland.

The church of Scotland, which in former reigns had often been at issue with the civil power, had now fallen under the rule of the moderate party, and was as tractable as the church of England herself. She had ever been faithful to the Revolution settlement, by which her own privileges were assured; and, when free from persecution,

1 Dr. Adam Clarke's Works, xiii. 257; Southey's Life of Wesley, ch. xxi.

2 Wesley's Works, iii. 84; Philip's Life of Whitefield, 195, &c.; Southey's Life of Wesley, ch. xxv.; Life of Countess of Huntingdon, 8vo. 1840. 8 Southey's Life of Wesley, ch. xxix.; Watson's Observations on Southey's Life, 138; Lord Mahon's Chapter on Methodism, Hist., ii. 354; Brook's Hist. of Relig. Lib., ii. 326-333.

4 See infra, p. 419.

had cast off much of her former puritanism. Her spirit had been tempered by learning, cultivation, society, and the gentle influences of the South, until she had become a stanch ally of the crown and aristocracy.1

Church of

Gradual

In Ireland, the Protestant church had made no progress since the days of Elizabeth. The mass of the population were still Catholics. The clergy of Ireland. the state church, indifferent and supine, read the English liturgy in empty churches, while their parishioners attended mass in the Catholic chapels. Irish benefices afforded convenient patronage to the crown and the great families. The Irish church was a good rallying point for Protestant ascendency; but instead of fulfilling the mission of a national establishment, it provoked religious animosity and civil dissensions. For the present, however, Protestant rule was absolute; and the subjection of the Catholics undisturbed.2 Such being the state of the church and other religious bodies, the gradual relaxation of the penal code was, at length, to be commenced. This code, the relaxation of growth of more than two centuries, was wholly code cominconsistent with the policy of a free state. Liberty of thought and discussion was allowed to be a constitutional right but freedom of conscience was interdicted. Religious unity was still assumed, while dissent was notorious. Conformity with the state church was held to be a duty, the neglect of which was punishable with penalties and disabilities. Freedom of worship and civil rights were denied to all but members of the church. This policy, originating in the doctrines of a church pretending to infallibility, and admitted to our laws in the plenitude of civil and ecclesiastical power, grew up amid rebellions and civil wars, in which religion became the badge of contending parties. Re

1 Cunningham's Church Hist. of Scotland, ii. 491, 578, &c.

the penal

menced.

2 Bishop Berkeley's Works, ii. 381; Wesley's Works, x. 209, &c.; Mant's Hist. of the Church of Ireland, ii. 288-294, 421-429, &c.; Lord Mahon's Hist., ii. 374.