Any degree of intolerance short of that full extent which the Papal Church exercises where it has the power, acts upon the opinions which it is intended to suppress like pruning upon vigorous plants; they grow the stronger for it. By this sort of intolerance the Dissenters were vexed and strengthened from the time of the Restoration till the Revolution. There ensued an interval then during which the Dissenters went with the Government in their political wishes and feelings. This continued, with the exception of the few latter years of Queen Anne's reign, from the time when the Toleration Act was past, to the commencement of the troubles in America; during that interval the asperity of sectarian feeling was mitigated, and the Dissenters can scarcely be said to have existed as a party in the state. They consisted of the Quakers, who stood as much aloof from the other sects as from the Church, and of the Three Denominations, as the Presbyterians, the Independents and the Baptists, called themselves collectively; . . and these were more engaged in controversy among themselves than with the Establishment. The Baptists split into two bodies, calling themselves General and Particular, that is to say, the one allowed of latitudinarian, the other professed Calvinistic opinions. The Presbyterians, whose sect had been the most numerous, lapsed into Arianism first, then into Socinianism, till few of the original description were left. The Independents underwent no change; and all, in the natural course of things, gave more proselytes to the Church than they drew from it. SIR THOMAS MORE. You have spoken of that period as, on the whole, the happiest in English history, having been least disquieted by political and religious troubles. MONTESINOS. But, as I then observed, it was a time of great degeneracy in very many important points. The manners of high life were not indeed so absolutely profligate as in the infamous days of Charles II., but there was a greater degree of general coarseness. Drunkenness had become as much a national vice among the gentry, as it was among the Germans. The learning which the universities imparted was still sound and orthodox,..but there was little of it; and, considering them as schools of morals, the course of life there was better adapted to graduate young men in the brutalizing habits of the society wherewith they were soon to mingle, than to qualify them for reforming it. The Church, therefore, was ill supplied with ministers; its higher preferments were bestowed with more reference to political connexions than to individual desert: and there never was less religious feeling, either within the Establishment or without, than when Wesley blew his trumpet and awakened those who slept. His followers soon divided upon the old question of fatalism; a considerable number of the Calvinistic branch, having no leader after Whitefield's death, and no such constitution to keep them together as Wesley had framed for the subjects of his spiritual dominion, joined one or other body of the old Dissenters, and most frequently the Independents, to whom they brought a great accession of zeal and strength. Methodism, even under Wesley, had weaned them from the Church, and Whitefield had always been more in sympathy with the Puritans, than with the Establishment in which he was ordained. The orthodox Dissenters were thus recruited, not by any exertions of their own, but by gathering in those whom the Methodists had drawn away from the Church, and had not been able to retain. And in this manner they are continually recruited at this time. SIR THOMAS MORE. But when converts were made in populous parts of the land, such as large towns and manufacturing districts, where the greater number must always be found, they would be, not members won over from the Church, but sheep whom the pastors had never folded,.. stragglers gathered in from the waste: the overflow of the people, for whose increase no moral and religious provision had been made by a supine and timid hierarchy and a reckless government. MONTESINOS. Persons of that description, and they are still, to the reproach of government, very numerous, are of the lowest class; and that class continues with the Methodists, for a cause which I will presently explain. The Dissenters obtained in this manner members of a different description, raised among the middle order of tradesmen, and the lower order of those who live, as it is called, upon their own means. These, when the pulse of their enthusiasm had fallen, became disgusted with the extravagancies of the society which they had joined, and not less justly impatient of its inquisitive discipline: and if a serious sense of religion survived the fever which had spent itself, they chose rather to pass over to the Dissenters than return to the Church which they had forsaken; partly to escape the reproach of unsteadiness and inconsistency; partly because a serious tone of manners, the remains of the puritanical character, was preserved among the sectarians; and partly, also, from a clear view of their own worldly interest,.. a sort of clear-sightedness, which, if it be frequently opposed to the spirit of religion, is always compatible with the profession of it. "That godliness is gain, we all confess; By the same rule, then, gain is godliness. soul !' And ease at once your scruples and your teeth." The Reigning Vice, p. 112. I transcribe, also, an explanatory note from this clever little |