The Young People's Wesley.
CHAPTER I.
BORN IN TROUBLOUS TIMES.
During the latter part of the seventeenth and the first part of the eighteenth century England was the theater of stirring events. War was sounding its clarion notes through the land. Marlborough had achieved a series of brilliant victories on the Continent, which had filled and fired the national heart with the spirit of military glory.
The English, at that time, had an instinctive horror of popery and power. James II, cruel, arbitrary, and oppressive, had been hurled from the throne as a plotting papal tyrant, and his grandson, Charles Edward, known as the Pretender, was making every possible effort to regain the throne and to subject the people to absolute despotism. To add to their dismay, the fleets of France and Spain were hovering along the English coast, ready, at any favorable moment, to pounce upon her. The means of public communication by railroad and telegraph were unknown. There were few mails, and reliable information could not be readily or safely obtained. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that strange and exaggerated reports should have kept the public mind in a state of great excitement and general consternation.
It was also, pre-eminently, an infidel age. Disrespect for the Bible and the Christian religion prevailed among all classes. Hobbes, with his scorpion tongue; Toland, with his papal-poisoned heart; Tindal, with his infidel dagger concealed under a cloak of mingled popery and Protestantism; Collins, with a heart full of deadly hate for Christianity; Chubb, with his deistical insidiousness; and Shaftesbury, with his platonic skepticism, hurled by wit and sarcasm—these, with their corrupt associates, made that the infidel age of the world. Christianity was everywhere held up to public reprobation and scorn.
It is true that Steele, Addison, Berkeley, Samuel Clarke, and Johnson exposed the follies and sins of the times, but the character of these efforts was generally more humorous and sarcastic than serious. Occasionally they gave a sober rebuke of the religion of the day. Berkeley attacked, with his keen logic and finished style, the skeptical opinions which prevailed. Most of his articles were on the subject of "Free Thinking." Johnson, the great moralist, stood up, it is said, "a great giant to battle, with both hands against all error in religion, whether in high places or low."
These men, and Young, with his vast religious pretentiousness, are said to have walked in the garments of literary and social chastity; but Swift, greater intellectually than any of them, and a high church dignitary to boot, would have disgraced the license of the "Merry Monarch's" court and outdone it in profanity. Even Dryden made the literature of Charles II's age infamous for all time.
"Licentiousness was the open and shameless profession of the higher classes in the days of Charles, and in the time of Anne it still festered under the surface. Gambling was an almost universal practice among men and women alike. Lords and ladies were skilled in knavery; disgrace was not in cheating, but in being cheated. Both sexes were given to profanity and drunkenness. Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, could swear more bravely than her husband could fight. The wages of the poor were spent in guzzling beer, in wakes and fairs, badger-baiting and cockfighting."[A] And yet the reign of Anne claims to have been the golden age of English literature. It did show a polish on the surface, but within it was "full of corruption and dead men's bones."