among the highest circles. If we ask what was the state of the lower classes, we find such notices as these in a contemporary historian. '1729-30. Luxury created necessities, and these drove the lower ranks into the most abandoned wickedness. It was unsafe to travel or walk in the streets.' '1731. Profligacy among the people continued to an amazing degree.' These extracts, taken almost at hap-hazard from the pages of a contemporary, are confirmed by abundance of testimony from all quarters. The middle classes were confessedly better than those either above or below them.2 Nevertheless, there are not wanting indications that the standard of morality was not high among them. For example, it is the middle class rather than those above or below them who set the fashion of popular amusement. What, then, was the character of the amusements of the period? The stage, if it was a little improved since the wild days of the Restoration, was yet so bad that even a lax moralist like Lord Hervey was obliged to own in 1737, 'The present great licentiousness of the stage did call for some restraint and regulation."3 Such brutal pastimes as cock-fighting and bull-baiting were everywhere popular. Drunkenness was then, as now, a national vice, but it was less disreputable among the middle classes than it happily is at present. What was the state of literature? Notwithstanding the improvement which such writers as Addison and Steele had effected it was still very impure. Let us take the evidence of the kindly and wellinformed Sir Walter Scott. 'We should do great injustice to the present day by comparing our manners with those of the reign of George I. The writings even of the most esteemed poets of that period contain passages which now would be accounted to deserve the pillory. Nor was the tone of con

1 Similar complaints are uttered regarding 1737-8-9. H. Walpole writes of 1751 :-'The vices of the lower people were increased to a degree of robbery and murder beyond example.'—Memoirs of the Reign of King George II., vol. i. ch. ii.

P. 44.

2

e.g. Archbishop Wake, in his letter to Courayer in 1726, writes :- Iniquity in practice, God knows, abounds, chiefly in the two extremes, the highest and the lowest. The middle sort are serious and religious.' See also Robinson Crusoe, ch. i.

3 Lord Hervey's Memoirs, ii. 341, in reference to the Bill to put all players under the direction of the Lord Chamberlain.

1 See, inter alia, the description of a small squire of the reign of George II. in Grose's Olio, 1792.

versation more pure than that of composition; for the taint of Charles II.'s reign continued to infect society until the present reign [George III.], when, if not more moral, we are at least more decent.'1 What was the state of the law? The criminal law was simply barbarous. Any theft of more than 40s. was punishable by death. Objects of horror, such as the heads of the rebel chiefs fixed on Temple Bar in 1746, were exposed in the vain hope that they might act as a 'terriculum.' Prisons teemed with cruel abuses. The Roman Catholics were still suffering most unjustly, and if the laws had been rigorously enforced they would have suffered more cruelly still. A more tolerant spirit was happily gaining ground in the hearts of the nation, but so far as the laws were concerned there were few if any traces of it. The Act of 1779, for the relief of Dissenters, is affirmed to be the first statute in the direction of enlarged toleration which had been passed for ninety years.' It was about the middle of the century when irreligion and immorality reached their climax. In 1753, Sir J. Barnard said publicly, 'At present it really seems to be the fashion for a man to declare himself of no religion.' In the same year Secker declared that immorality and irreligion were grown almost beyond ecclesiastical power.

6

4

The question, then, arises, 'How far were the clergy responsible for this sad state of affairs?' As a body, they were distinctly superior to their contemporaries. It is a remarkable fact that when the clergy were as a rule very unpopular, during the reign of the Georges I. and II., and when, therefore, any evil reports against them would be eagerly caught up and circulated, we find singularly few charges of gross immorality brought against them. Excessive love of

preferment, and culpable inactivity in performing the duties of their office, are the worst accusations that are brought against them as a body. Even men like Lord Hervey, and Horace

1 Quoted in Andrews, 18th century.

2 See Chapter LXX. of Lord Mahon's History.

3 Skeats' History of the Free Churches of England, p. 465.

↳ Parliamentary History, vol. xiv. p. 1389.

5 In Bishop Fleetwood's Charge at Ely, August 7, 1716, no less than three folio pages are filled with accounts of the abuse of the clergy and the way in which the clergy should meet it. Secker's, Butler's, and Horsley's Charges all touch on

the same subject.

2

Walpole, and Lord Chesterfield rarely bring, and still more rarely substantiate, any charges against them on this head. Speaking of the shortcomings of the clergy in the early part of the century, Bishop Burnet, who does not spare his order, carefully guards against the supposition that he accuses them of leading immoral lives. 'When,' he writes, 'I say, live better, I mean not only to live without scandal, which I have found the greatest part of them to do, but to lead exemplary lives.' Some years later, Bentley could boldly assert of 'the whole clergy of England' that they were 'the light and glory of Christianity,' an assertion which he would scarcely have dared to make had they been sunk into such a slough of iniquity as they are sometimes represented to have been. Writing to Courayer in 1726, Archbishop Wake laments the infidelity and iniquity which abounded, but is of opinion that ' no care is wanting in our clergy to defend the Christian faith.' 3 John Wesley, while decrying the notion that the unworthiness of the minister vitiates the worth of his ministry, admits that 'in the present century the behaviour of the clergy in general is greatly altered for the better,' although he thinks them deficient both in piety and knowledge. Or if clerical testimony be suspected of partiality, we have abundance of lay evidence all tending to the same conclusion. Smollett, a contemporary, declares that in the reign of George II. 'the clergy were generally pious and exemplary.' When a Presbyterian clergyman talked before Dr. Johnson of fat bishops and drowsy deans, he replied, ‘Sir, you know no more of our Church than a Hottentot.' 5 Schlosser, who was no friend to the clergy, declares that they were disgusted with and preached against that contempt for morality which was shown by the Court and Ministers of George I. One of the most impartial historians of our own day and country, in dwelling upon the immoralities of the age and upon the

1 See the conclusion of Burnet's History of His own Times.

4

2 Remarks on Collins' Discourse of Freethinking, by Phileleutherus Lipsiensis,

xxiii.

3 Quoted in Mrs. Thomson's Memoirs of Lady Sundon and the Court and Times of George II.

4 Smollett's Continuation of Hume, v. 375.

5 Boswell's Life.

6

History of the Eighteenth Century, vol. iii. ch. iii. § 1.

clerical shortcomings, adds that 'the lives of the clergy were, as a rule, pure.' 1

It is necessary to bring into prominence such testimony as this because there has been a tendency to insinuate what has never been proved--that the clergy were, as a body, living immoral lives. At the same time, it is not desired to palliate their real defects. It is admitted that a more active and earnest performance of their proper duties might have done much more than was done by the clergy to stem the torrent of iniquity.

She

Yet after all it is doubtful whether the clergy, even if they had been far more energetic and spiritually-minded than they were, could have effected such a reformation as was needed.2 For there was a long train of causes at work dating back for more than a century, which tended not only to demoralise the nation, but also to cut it off from many influences for good which under happier circumstances the Church might have exercised. The turbulent and unsettled condition of both Church and State in the seventeenth century was bearing its fruit in the eighteenth. As in the life of an individual, so also in the life of a nation, there are certain crises which are terribly perilous to the character. In the eighteenth century England as a nation was going through such a crisis. was passing from the old order to the new. The early part of the century was a period of many controversies-the Deistic controversy, the Non-Juring controversy, the Bangorian controversy, the Trinitarian controversy, the various ethical controversies, and all these following close upon the Puritan controversy and the Papal controversy, both of which had shaken the Constitution to its very foundation. How was it possible that a country could pass through such stormy scenes without having its faith unsettled, and the basis of its morals weakened? How could some help asking, What is truth? where is it to be found among all these conflicting elements? The Revolution itself, beneficial as its ultimate results were, 'Lord Mahon, ch. lxx.

2 Bishop Butler, in his Charge to the Clergy of Durham in 1751, complains very justly: It is cruel usage we often meet with, in being censured for not doing what we cannot do, without, what we cannot have, the concurrence of our cenDoubtless very much reproach which now lights upon the clergy would be found to fall elsewhere if due allowance were made for things of this kind.'

surers.

was in its immediate effects attended with evil. England submitted to be governed by foreigners, but she had to sacrifice much and stoop low before she could submit to the necessity. All the romantic halo which had hung about royalty was rudely swept away. Queen Anne was the last sovereign of these realms round whom still lingered something of the 'divinity that doth hedge a king.' Under the Georges loyalty assumed a different form from that which it had taken before. The sentiment which had attached their subjects to the Tudors and the Stuarts was exchanged for a colder and less enthusiastic feeling; mere policy took the place of chivalry.

Nor was it only in her outward affairs that the nation was passing through a great and fundamental change. In her inner and spiritual life she was also in a period of transition. The problem which was started in the early part of the sixteenth century had never yet been fairly worked out. The nation had been for more than a century and a half so busy in dealing with the pressing questions of the hour that it had never yet had time to face the far deeper questions which lay behind these questions which concerned not the different modes of Christianity, but the very essence of Christianity itself. The matters which had so violently agitated the country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were now virtually settled. The Church was now at last 'established.' But other questions arose. It was not now asked, 'Is this or that mode of Church government most Scriptural?' 'Is this or that form of worship most in accordance with the mind of Christ?' but, 'What is this Scripture to which all appeal?' 'Who is this Christ whom all own as Master?' This is really what is meant, so far as religion is concerned, when it is said that the eighteenth century was the age of reason—alike in the good and in the bad sense of that term. The defenders of Christianity, no less than its assailants, had to prove, above all things, the reasonableness of their position. The discussion was inevitable, and in the end productive of good, but while it was going on it could not fail to be to many minds harmful. Reason and faith, though not really antagonistic, are often in seeming antagonism. Many might well ask, Can we no longer rest upon a simple, child